Guild Wars 2

Blaine Tog.8304:

MadRabbit.3179:

Maybe economic conditions have shifted, but I dumped my bank and completed The Legend within the first week of the expansion being out and the total bill was about 650 gold.

It shifted rapidly. Spiritwood Planks alone have almost doubled in price since HoT hit thanks to the increased demand from both Ascended Armor crafting (spurred on by raids) and precursor crafting. As for The Legend itself: https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/29180-The-Legend

Highest Buy Order on TP: 867
Lowest Sell Order on TP: 1019
Cost to craft: 1413

So… why does your “cost to craft” not have a buy order/sell order split?

Because ascended materials are one of the most overpriced items in the game if you don’t mind processing them yourself once per day…

This was good fun to read… and to ponder working from .

insanemaniac.2456:

I’m under the impression that this Nike isnt the braggart you think youre referring to.

Hey now, I’ve always found Nike EU to be a useful source of information relating to his passion (dungeons)… when properly handled .

And obviously he has tremendously good taste in screen names!

Gav.1425:

What if I told you….

…they want you to play the characters to level their elite specs.

Then you’d be some sort of weird laggy echo.

Tony.8659:

I wish they would show what Legendary Armor looks like :/ The hell is taking so long! Don’t want to start raiding without seeing what I’m working for…

That_shaman data-mined it quite a while back.

I kinda want the light boots precursor and the medium coat precursor (not a trench coat — HALLELUJAH!), but honestly I dislike the look of the finish Legendary Armor. It’s like someone took nice armor and vomited spikes and squiggles on it until you couldn’t actually see it anymore.

This may help

Substance E.4852:

You grossly underestimate the cancerous bias toward rangers in WvW.

It’s probably more likely I just ignore it… since they literally CANNOT make me go away. And I carry 15 supply so in some regards I’m already pulling more than my own weight.

And if they get obnoxious about it, my report button works a well as anybody’s.

Jana.6831:

Archon already explained one part of it: The Rally mechanism – the moment you die everyone you hit and is downed rallies – that can be really bad and I as a thief with my daggerstorm am a really good potential rallybot.

Hahahaa. Ok, I’ll keep that one in mind when my Condi-tank thief is eyeing her daggorstorm .

But the situation was different: Bay, catas, we were ~15, I was killed by AoE on the wall and the other guys tried to rez me and died one by one.

And that would be exactly what I meant about single point of error. I realize your body laying there all supine might be nearly irresistible, but they’re the ones that made a poor judgment call.

I miss out on this. I have 5 thieves but am only playing my main

Well, maybe I’ll have to formally draw up my proposal for Unlocking Especs on alts that share a class with a fully unlocked main .

All 22 pages? Wow!

Jana.6831:

A single player can kill a whole zerg. I did so once (no one was mad at me though)

Walk me through that would you? Because I’m hard pressed to believe there’s a single point of failure in the process…

I guess you don’t know too much about wvw, do you?

I wouldn’t say that was true, thought I play there less now than I used to. I’m kinda on enforced light duty at the moment due to an ongoing issue with my ISP (stupid pulsing lag).

Your chest probably come from EotM or capping camps for dailies. That’s not meant offensive, btw.

None taken. We also serve who keep the home borderland tidy and clean . (And take all of the enemy camps while the zones are empty .)

If you’d know me you’d know that I can hop onto any character and play it just fine in PvE – I dn’t need to do full map completion or jump around in Maguuma to be useful in PvE – for wvw that’s a different scenario. But I’d miss out on what I love to do (usually wvw and my main) to get the elites for my alts which I might only want to use once in a fractal, because the class is better suited for group play (like eles and sometimes even ranger).

If you’re that good (and I’m not disputing it) then what’s the problem running a low performing class temporarily to access a high performing Espec? Because what’s being put forward repeatedly is we need to go back to the old unbound system to make it easier for people to be tunnel-visioning jerks.

ArchonWing.9480:

My point was that it is simply harder to level an arbitrary character, when it comes to WvW and PvE. And regardless of your opinion, there are certain classes that get requested more.

Well, then its sad my opinion is it’s idiocy to discriminate against Rangers if you ever want to have Druids, because you don’t get Druids without Ranger players. And these changes are in the direction of enforcing that.

And need I not repeat this thing about “not actually playing the character” topic in my first point.

((shrug)) It’s clear the overall model they want to have — access to an elite spec comes from playing that specific character. I’ve got 4 level 80 guards, and as much as I might like having unlocking DH once apply to all of them, PvE or WvW it doesn’t. Neither aspect of play is being put upon more than the other. I think you’ll need a significantly better lever if you aim to move them off of that position.

Jana.6831:

This is not really how it works. In wvw, especially in a zerg, you want group support – a ranger (and other classes) bring few. I have only once witnessed that a class (actually two) was booted out of the public zerg -but that usually isn’t neccessary as most wvw players understand that they need to bring as much support as possible.

How the hell do you kick someone out of a zerg? And worse, what kind of shortsighted brain-lock is going on kicking a Ranger you know is working on the Druid you want?!? That’s textbook cutting off your nose to spite your face. You KNOW he’s gotta go through the process and you crap on him for doing it? Brilliant!!

Maybe if you try to see it from that point of view you understand why this change wasn’t really nice towards wvw players – and actually I’d rather have no proofs of heroics than now 3 stacks of them for which I have no use for.

My Reaper has a pile of them too. I still don’t get the justification that playing more of my Reaper should unlock a full Tempest for me. Any more than running around on my fully unlocked Dragonhunter in HoT picking up the remaining hero challenges should be building points towards my Scrapper.

ArchonWing.9480:

• Laziness is a red herring because account bound or soulbound does not reduce the total amount of hero points required. If you have 8 characters, you’ll need 2000 hero points total regardless of what you do. Furthermore, due to how WvW works, you can’t just bring any alt onto the battlefield in any given time. It is irresponsible because unlike in open world, you double downing can greatly ruin a fight thanks to the rally mechanic. One good example is someone that wants to bring a druid in a big fight; a lot of commanders aren’t going to really appreciate you running with them as base ranger for long periods of time. If someone had wanted notaries to unlock a HP account wide, now that would be greed.

I’m not really sure how good I’d consider a commander who doesn’t understand the need to invest in his troops. The base Ranger may not be a Druid, but they’re not incapable of healing if that’s what you’re desperate for in your squad and they’re certainly better than telling the player not to play at all while they’re working on their elite spec. It’s not like a raid where every person you bring is a slot that cannot be filled by anyone else.

I don’t disagree that WvW is under rewarded, but that doesn’t validate it being uniquely rewarded, allowing characters to jump directly to their elite spec without playing as that character. And unlike hero challenges, the tokens aren’t currently capped, which may put WvW players way, way, WAY out front when a new round of Especs drop. (And if it doesn’t due to some brand new switcheroo screw-over I’ll be right there with you screaming “FOUL!”)

Once upon a time GW2 had a developer looking out for character art bugs. The stickied thread for these reports was commented on and regularly closed and refreshed as reports were complied and submitted.

It wasn’t a lot of feedback, but it was a good way of reassuring us these details were being paid attention to and the corresponding patch notes when they got fixed were always welcome.

This monthly thread has now been languishing for 2 years as the place where well documented visual issues about our characters go to die.

Please get a new curator for the thread(s) and bring back the monthly updates.

Thank you.

Runewolf.8456:

I don’t really have a problem with the proofs being soulbound except for the fact that even with the E-spec unlocked my character still gets them dropped from the chest… if a-net wants to keep dumping these on us after the respective character has it’s E-spec done, either let us give them to other toons or give us another use for them.

So in your mind there’s only going to ever be one Elite spec for each class? Interesting.

Artanis.4963:

Nike.2631:

I can think of roughly 1.6 MILLION thing’s I’d want the art department working on ahead of more toys for the 1/10th of the one percent.

Probably 2 million things if I gave it a half-hour of light pondering.

This is the informal fallacy of relative privation, where one minimizes or dismisses an argument by citing that other, more important issues exist.

I might agree… if this were not in fact a case of DIRECTLY drawing on the limited resource in question. It is NOT a fallacy that all weapons skins come from the same limited pool of man hours from the singular art department or untrue that those hours are also used by the other activities I mention.

I didn’t say ‘no new legendary skins because I want more bug fixing’. That would have been silly .

And more than anything I’m not trying to tell ANet not to do it… they know better. I’m trying to soften the blow that this request is very unlikely to happen. largely because of the scheduling conflicts it so cheerfully generates.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Matt is awesome, I agree. And Evan is marvelous, too.

Hopefully someone can fit Matt and Evan with a forums ‘suit and tie’ so they can follow up here with the enthusiasm they’ve show so far .

Out of curiosity, how are these “need an event to fail” blockers getting approved after the enormous hullabaloo around similar failure-triggers being such an issue in the skills unlocking process? It seems like that sort of iterative learning would be part of a checklist or something before content can be signed off for the push to Live.

This isn’t even close to ‘a long thread’ yet. I can cheerfully point you to 50 or 60+ page threads they’ve cheerfully ignored.

If anything the length tells you they’re not interested. They react MUCH sooner to things that concern them.

UnbentMars.9126:

Ever heard the saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar? It’s accurate in regards to interacting with people too.

I have a variety of tools in my belt. Sometimes to shape wood you need sandpaper.

I’m trying not to fall out of my chair laughing right now.

We’ve moved up from players cut-&-pasting from reddit to Gaile cut-&-pasting from reddit. I’m not even gonna speculate. It would be too cruel.

You want a list of proposals I’ve made that’ve been added to this game? It’s not short.

I speak Dev very well. I’m also pretty decent at articulating to and for players.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Forum posting is a voluntary option for developers.

You know, Gaile, I think that’s the EXACT problem right there.

Your organization has no formal commitment to keeping in touch.

You should really consider the RoI of requiring at least one post a week from some of the departments and setting aside some official work time for doing so.

ANet is simply are not sitting so pretty in playerbase perception right now that holing-up inside the Fortress of Solitude is a better use of every workweek hour than helping people understand what’s going on.

Right now the art department is completely sequestered — the monthly visual bug-hunting thread hasn’t been updated in YEARS. Story is silent when they absolutely should be rallying support for their efforts and shaking hands and seeing who the new arc went over. Class balance is always a tempestuous topic and it needs a face (I offered to be a class balance forum rep but ((shrug))). Actually on that topic the forum reps don’t seem like they’re being particularly well armed with info to share either. You built a whole new conduit for information flow and its… I dunno. Do you want to call it a success?

Why are we even having this discussion? It’s an established fact that Roy’s Golden-Class-of-Choice is exempt from down-tuning for at least 8 moths after any problem is clearly identified and has warped the hell out of the playspace. Worked for Warriors and it applies just as much here.

We can pick the discussion up again in July .

Neural.1824:

Nike.2631:

…snipped…

While a bit brash, your statements are dead on accurate.

Gaile knows I tend to wax poetic in the throes of passion .

She’ll never say it, but she’s gotta be furious a simple “Hi, I work at Anet and here’s what I do” post that should be core, prime content for these boards popped up on reddit and pretty much made a laughingstock of her domain. And I’m not saying the poster screwed up — the entire culture that lead him to doing that is at fault. There’s like three layers of management above the individual Developer who need a stern talking too.

Like I said: Next week. Meetings. Lots of them.

Gav.1425:

Nike.2631:

I can think of roughly 1.6 MILLION thing’s I’d want the art department working on ahead of more toys for the 1/10th of the one percent.

Probably 2 million things if I gave it a half-hour of light pondering.

Like what?

Armor skins. Maybe some with an ice theme?

New mob types. Same department.

More craftable weapons skins.

More character appearance options. (hair, tats, faces)

Legendaries ARE the end game.

To me legendaries are the g’dam-I-‘m-bored-let’s-sink-a-bajillion-mats-out-of the-game content, not the end game.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

It’s rather an artificial separation when you think about it.

Let’s say someone has 5 level 80s, but they are all the same profession. Someone else has 5 level 80s, but each is a different profession. The first person can get his done fast while the second has to get it all done one by one. What makes having more than one of the same profession deserve special treatment rather than having an equal number of different professions?

I would say one of them is facing the challenges with a new skill set and toolbox each time and the other is enduring raw drudgery.

Folks may find it interesting to know that both Marvel Heroes 2015 and Wildstar have systems where you get currency for combative play on a strictly time-gated basis. In both cases this award is delivered in currency directly analogous to gems in this game – the currency you buy in that game with real world money.

In GW2 terms sometimes when you kill a mob you get one gem, then the award goes on an internal cooldown (8 minutes for MH2015, not sure but some number quite similar for WS). After the cooldown is up you have about a 40% chance per critter kill of getting a gem, until you do and the timer starts over. Time spent in a hub does count towards this cooldown, so if you stop to sell loot/do maintenance you frequently get a gem in the first encounter or two after going back out into the field.

I want to make clear, that in my experience this system is not exciting. There is no sense of accomplishment and each gem isn’t loot… It’s the audible ticking of a clock reminding you you’ve been playing a while. But it does uniquely reward getting out of the hubs/cities and mashing buttons as neither game allows you to buy that currency with regular coin.

I don’t particularly have it in for the TP players (other than feeling that there should be a little more variability in the system to make some strategies a little less obvious/reliable). But there is perhaps room to make the adventuring lifestyle feel more well regarded by the world/game/Devs than just having a ton of map-locked currencies in the new zones.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Nike — no one’s telling people they need to put on a suit and a tie before they post. Devs post when, where, and as they desire, with a very general and reasonable guideline, which Mike O’Brien shared with forum members a long while ago: “We don’t talk speculatively about future development.”

Then consider the possibility that guideline is strangling your business, because this particular thread was loaded with GOOD updates about “yeah, there’s some issues with the collections but we’re fixing them” which is evidently too much forecasting to be permitted here. I sincerely get the need for some chaperoning, but it’s simultaneously gone awry here and backfired entirely there if your people feel they have to go out of house to communicate.

So please don’t believe anyone’s being told to muzzle it. Devs post and respond when they’re able to do so, and if they’re anything like me, they delight in that interaction with our players.

Then why are they delighting in the interaction off-site while flagged as official ANet staffers while your own forums have become a wasteland? Look at your Dev tracker since HoT launch and particularly the last two weeks. It’s just YOU and the guy who holds classes on the API (who has tons of adoring fans BTW because he’s very helpful and responsive). The balance team has (much as I predicted) vanished under a rock after proving they could be out here working hand in hand with the fans while still brining your expansion to fruition. Colin is off tilting at windmills or whatever while leaving his front lawn to gather weeds.

There is a problem here. You know it and it’s your bailiwick. Go figure out why the Reddit dev tracker is the star studded cavalcade of news while your own boards are a graveyard haunted only by angry spirits.

Then FIX IT.

I can think of roughly 1.6 MILLION thing’s I’d want the art department working on ahead of more toys for the 1/10th of the one percent.

Probably 2 million things if I gave it a half-hour of light pondering.

Don’t be dense. The embargo-like atmosphere is a reference to a long period of silence that’s taken hold in the forums, not to a single post/poster (cause he’s been jabbering away like a magpie over on the thread he created).

Compare the dev tracker here to the dev tracker on Redit. The comparison is painful.

Gaile… you know we don’t actually need a neatly sanitized press conference. We need your people in here interacting with the natives, frankly as often as you can entice them to. It’s fine if they have to bring a chaperone but you have to be aware of what the embargo-like atmosphere you’ve allowed to build up is doing to this space… namely poisoning it.

Then their community team folks are idiots for allowing their requirements to be so casually sidestepped by a staffer going off-site while STILL WEARING OFFICIAL ANET BADGES.

Man, there’s gonna be some meetings next week…

‘Cause no one would ever demand other’s reveal the results of those meters as a prerequisite for an activity…

I’ve seen parser used to very good effect within a stable, sensible, regular group. But out in the wilds it’s pretty much a tool for pure evil.

Showing them how? Be forgiving of the resounding silence? Show approval for failure? Ball’s been on their side of the net for a while now, and they keep expending their energy to rile people up here even worse with demonstrable examples on neglect for their own forums instead of improving the situation.

Behellagh.1468:

You can also vote down the “noise” in reddit. Here a thread can get overwhelmed by ragers rather than constructive, polite disagreement.

Right… Because they have so much less control over the moderation here than on reddit.

Because that makes it all better.

Or not.

And lo and behold, STILL no post here.

Angus.5961:

They’re probably not allowed to post on the official forums, not without going through PR and legal and who knows what else.

It explains the consistent pattern we are seeing.

That might explain the pattern we’re seeing IF they didn’t have official tags/recognition on redit. But they do, and Colin (who answers to very few) is pretty much leading the charge on off-site posting off updates and insights.

((shrug)) I have no input on what location we have. It’s just something that’s there for the rank and file. But thanks for giving the officers something to do/discuss.

Only if you want to equate HoT to the workplace …

Wouldn’t be my first choice in analogies.

This is just about the definition of needing to ‘get outside your comfort zone’ then, because this kind of lack of awareness about ‘the mood in the room’ in putting out helpful information not on your own company site borders on self-sabotage.

Colin is setting a terrible example and the troops are following suit.

Well here’s hoping he learns to ‘be comfortable’ using his company’s own website for discussing his work.

Nay.

Honestly I don’t like the team size. It boils down to too many 1v1s and I find those fiercely boring.

Arlee.7038:

Colly.4073:

They haven’t posted anything here since the release of HoT despite the plethora of issues. I haven’t checked but I’m betting they are posting in the spvp forum.

I think it’s a disgusting way to treat the customers who just shelled out to buy your product!

That’s how Anet rolls these days.

If you just click on the Dev Tracker you’ll see your statement is absolutely false. They may not be posting about what you want them to post but they have been posting.

Have you clicked on the Dev tracker? It’s been a barren wasteland when talking about the future. All that has moved off-site that last month or so.

Finally roused myself to go back into the HoT maps and finish unlocking Reaper and I have to say the Greatsword skills are tremendous fun. Been running with minions and axe + focus and its just a burly ‘get in there and crush them while laughing maniacally’ experience clearing camps in WvW.

At some point I may even try out shouts .

Labjax.2465:

Keep up, I’m talking about peoples’ reactions, which obviously don’t care what the original intention was. They care about how they would like it to function. This isn’t rocket science. Please don’t be obtuse.

How about YOU ‘keep up’ and stop acting like this is some unique incident in the history of MMO gaming. A coder goofs, players get unintended advantage, they fix it, players kvetch, they DO NOT CHANGE IT BACK TO SCREWED UP. The course of events here — including players that were benefiting from the mistake stamping their feet — is as predictable as the sunrise and the phases of the moon.

But really, lets take this up again in a month and see where we stand. My money is on this topic never once drawing so much as a red name post, much less them reverting it in any way.

As long as there are player races that cloaks won’t work on (hunch-cats) don’t expect to see this being a priority for them.

Jana.6831:

Nike.2631:

You want an elite spec? Play. The. Character.

Wvw is a competitive mode – there’s few players who can play all their characters well enough to sustain in a competitive mode (I’m one of them) = it is very likely that someone will only play one or two characters in wvw because they are the ones they know best.

Not to be blunt, but so what? If you want to make a daredevil for WvW you need to spend some time on a Thief, which makes perfect sense since more than 80% of your tools to build that daredevil are still shared with the parent profession.

There’s 13 or 15 hero points in wvw, there’s no loot, no xp for masteries, no nothing. So we’re basically forced out of wvw.

I’m fairly certain XP earned in WvW is applied to core Tyria masteries, but haven’t sat down and really tracked it — I just know I’ve had masteries I’m not even training on complete themselves and WvW is the most likely culprit.

My characters will have 100% vanilla map completion and I’m pretty sure that will be it as I’m not feeling like doing all the new jumping puzzle maps 13 times.

What are you talking about? If you have full map completion you only need another 40 Hero points to max an elite spec… that’s about 16 WvW levels and you can get that in a couple hours of knocking over supply camps, much less any ‘serious’ WvW activities.

Labjax.2465:

It doesn’t matter what they were intended to be.

You think? Because the fact they changed it says otherwise.

No worries. If anything I’m amazed these threads go on as long as the do…

Most of what’s getting thrown around here isn’t about game design, because games intrinsically offer better and worse paths to accomplish a goal. It’s more discussing how to put better fluffy padding on the inside of a skinner box where outcome is entirely divorced from technique × effort. Time is all that matters in a skinner box. And while I appreciate that MMOs secretly want to be skinner boxes, I prefer for it to be less obvious .

I don’t badger them, I just don’t respond. I commented on it once months ago, they ignored me, it became mutual. And you sure as heck don’t get to declare “it hasn’t been an issue for years” when it’s obviously an issue even now. Personally I kind of like knowing other people find it as offensive as I do.

Astralporing.1957:

Nike.2631:

The Trading Post is economic PvP. There are minds on the other end of every transaction. Make an effort not to get fleeced. It’s good practice for everyone.

Yeah, it’s PvP, but unlike WvW or sPvP this one is forced – an equivalent to open world PvP in a game where most players are strictly pve ones. This is the main reason why it’s so succesful.

I can’t say I agree that its “forced”. Its convenient but what exactly can you not do given enough time and personal harvesting/farming? There’s a couple of festival items it gives you a second chance at if you failed to hunt it down yourself during the limited window, but beyond that?