The first two days of the event, I bought 16 gold worth of envelopes from Phaedra (32 gold total). After selling trophies to the vendor, I got about 29 gold back. So, that gets me a 3 gold loss. There are a few rare drops that sell for more to the vendor or to players, but I doubt they are rare enough to offset the cost.
I know there is a cool looking dragon mini that you somehow get if you have a Chinese version of the game. Maybe that is supposed to be the payoff for Phaedra.
My question is this: What is the payoff for a non-Chinese version of the game? I’ll keep buying envelopes if there is one, but if there isn’t one, I would like to know so I can stop throwing away gold.
Regarding wasting badges, if you hang out in EoTM, they fall in your lap. I currently have 16,689 badges of honor, mostly from EoTM. That’s not that remarkable. Many people have a great deal more than I do.
Also, for WvW achievments, EoTM is more forgiving that regular WvW.
Overall I like the system better as I normally only get 10 out of the 12 daily AP anyhow. I will however miss the 100 AP I got from doing all 10 monthly’s.
3247 hours played across 724 days. No precursor. And I have been dumping stuff into the mystic forge.
I for one am very cautious when it comes to new classes and races. Games that rush such things tend to mess up in a big way. Eventually it would get rebalanced, but that could take months. Do you really want to experience months of having your rear end handed to you by a new class in PvP or WvW?
New races is very doable since there is very little practical difference between the races in GW2. It’s mostly about role playing and cosmetic differences.
As other posters have said, the new areas that slowly enter the game via the living story will eventually add up to an expansion. And, by incorporating them piecemeal, if ANet does mess up, they only mess up a little part of the game versus introducing several large zones at once with an enormous set of bugs and playability shortcomings. Right now you cannot travel directly from Drytop to the the Silverwastes, but I suspect that when this living story is done, that new passageways will be dug, new skritt burrows may be put in place, etc. and it will all be one big zone, possibly even larger than most zones on account of the enormous jumping puzzle area just introduced.
I would like to see the underwater guys with the wings (Largo?) introduced as a player race. The bird men, the quaggans, hylek, jotuns, dwarves (where did they go?) and even skritt or grawl might make player races in the future. I imagine that if new player races are introduced, it will be as a part of a living story saga and not just a “Now you can play quaggans!”
This is an incredibly forced analogy that doesn’t seem to have a point.
Brandy or water? I bet I know which one the original poster prefers.
I have a pet peeve regarding topic titles in these forums. I don’t like to have to open up a post to figure out what the subject of the post is. I also don’t like it when the title pulls me in only to discover that it has little relevance to the content of the post.
Once I read a posting in one of the GW2 forums (I don’t even remember what it was about) that had a title that implied that the ANet apocalypse was at hand and that the streets would soon flow red with the blood of the unbelievers. Okay, I may have exaggerated a bit with that description. When I opened said post, there was one little trivial thing the poster did not like about some recent GW2 developments. A misleading title got me to waste time reading something I had zero interest in! This is not Yahoo news!
Vague titles like “Can Someone Please Help” or “Does Anyone Else Have This Problem?” I just ignore. There’s a good chance I could help the poster, but I’m not going to waste my time diving into a poorly described topic.
I realize that the title window is small. Maybe you think you need a title like, “I hate how difficult it is to navigate jumping puzzles with my Charr character because of his size and animations.” So, instead of condensing that down to something like, “Charr Problems With JP’s” you write, “ANet hates Charr!” or “GW2 is Doomed!” and we are supposed to open your topic to figure out what you are talking about.
Has one of your postings vanished into obscurity with little or no response? Maybe the reason isn’t poor content, but a poor choice of title.
Regarding following the elixirs, that works most of the time, BUT I have explored many areas off the beaten path looking for badges and there are some elixirs that are NOT on the way to the end of the jumping puzzle so don’t assume that because you see a speed elixir station that you are doing it right.
I have 30/30 badges, although I had to consult Dulfy to get them. Badges #7 and #30 on their guide are extremely difficult (#7 especially) because you fall over and over and over and have to restart from the beginning. Best way to do those is with a team of two mesmers. One stays in place while the other goes a short distance, then the one that stayed in place gets a port to the one that went forward a short distance. If you try it solo with a mesmer you might get half way through and then your “safety portal” fails because you die in the fall. Of course, if you don’t have a mesmer . . . you should probably consider not getting all 30 badges. Why? Badge #7 took me 6 hours. Four of those hours were wasted trying it solo. It took two more hours with me on my mesmer teamed up with another mesmer using the system I just described. I would not even attempt #7 or #30 without a mesmer character now that I know how difficult they are.
There is also a “secret cat room” in the borderlands jumping puzzles in WvW.
I feel kind of cheated because I invested in the “infinite continue coin”.
I don’t mind seeing the occasional miniature, but when I am in a group of 30 people in WvW and the lag gets bad, and I have every single graphics option turned all the way down, I still see miniatures. I can’t help but think they might be contributing to graphics related lag. (I realize lag may not be the technically proper term for this.)
Is there any setting that prevents me from seeing other people’s miniatures?
Norn are (to me) obviously heavily influenced by historical and mythological Norse/Viking culture.
I found a website recently that seems very historically accurate that deals with Viking weaponry and fighting techniques and other aspects of Viking life. The website has many interesting combat related stories from various Norse sagas.
Specifically the sections I liked the most were http://www.hurstwic.com/history/articles/manufacturing/text/arms.htm and http://www.hurstwic.com/history/text/history.htm
What about the poor guy that has one gem less than whatever the cheapest item is on the TP that he wants to buy?
For example, if the guy has 199 gems already and he wants to buy an item that costs 200 gems. Instead of buying JUST ONE MORE GEM, he has to buy 200 more gems. That 199 gems will sit in his account forever until one day the gem store has an item he wants that costs say 100 gems. Now he spends 100 of his 199 gems and is stuck with 99 gems he can’t spend until maybe one day an item appears in the store that he wants for 50 gems. He spends 50 of his 99 gems, but now is stuck with 49 gems he can’t spend.
Is ANet going to come out with items that sell for 1 gem or 5 gems so people can spend their gem “change” as it were?
This is not good.
At today’s pricing, 199 gems is about 25 gold (doing this from memory while I wait for the patch so I may be a bit off). For many of us 25 gold may be chump change, but for the player that buys one gold worth of gems every other day or so because that’s all he can afford, it’s a lot of money.
Unless this “simplified system” comes with cheaper gems, then it doesn’t aid the players at all.
I was very much looking forward to unlocking all the radiant and all the hellfire armor. I am still looking forward to unlocking hellfire, but whomever designed the radiant armor dropped the ball. It’s just generic armor with a little bit of “radiant” tossed in. The radiant gloves glow with just a few non-glowing accents. The same is true of the shoulder pieces. They are excellent in terms of coloration. I expected this to be true for all the pieces, ESPECIALLY the chest piece which ties it all together. Instead we get a chest piece that is 60% NOT radiant and 40% SOMEWHAT radiant.
I WANT MY SUIT OF RADIANT ARMOR TO WAKE UP THE NEIGHBORS WHEN I WALK DOWN THE STREET AT NIGHT. I do NOT want “subtle hints” of radiance.
If I just wanted white armor, I would buy a white dye and use it on my armor. I want RADIANCE, not white.
I envisioned turning my character into a gleaming white semi-angelic paladin-type character. Combined with a chaos skinned weapon it would have looked awesome.
At least hellfire doesn’t suck. That’s a positive way to look at it.
I’m going with the idea of a place very similar to GW1 guild halls. That is you can access your guild hall from anywhere in the game. When you leave, you go back to wherever you were before unless it is WvW or somewhere else outside of PvE in which case you go to Lion’s Arch.
I like the idea of an airy, open sky, mists sort of environment.
Guild halls would have all kinds of optional upgrades which could be built with influence just like any other guild enhancement. That could be anything from architectural enhancements such as extra rooms, or features such as black lion trading post vendors, various merchants, etc. The sky is the limit as you could even put in karma vendors, means of accessing daily activities like sanctum sprint, etc.
Other ideas:
Mini-games inside the guild hall. Simple stuff like sudoku or maybe some 8-bit games.
Hall of Portraits. Clickable portraits (or statues) that show the character name, guild rank, and an equipment menu “photo” of one of the guild member’s favorite characters. The guild member can edit their photo at any time by taking a snapshot of their current appearance on the character of their choice Clicking would give you access to things that the player might wish their guildmates to know such as their account name, what classes they have at level 80, personal quotes, and real life info if they like. Sadly, real life photos should probably not be permitted as pictures inappropriate for younger players might get put up there.
By gathering together in a guild hall, if enough members show up (30?), it might open up a menu to create a guild-only instance of some kind, such as a version of a zone where a guild mission might occur. There would be a time limit on this instance equivalent to the maximum duration of the guild mission plus a few minutes of wiggle room.
Additional guild vault type storage might be available in a guild hall. For example, in my guild, the 50 slot vault which many members can use is kind of small for that purpose. The larger vaults are reserved for more expensive items and to protect items from potentially disgruntled guild members or griefers in the guild.
Portals to various locations, such as cities, fractals, WvW zones, etc.
Someone mentioned nodes. Various nodes, such as can be acquired for home instance would be nice.
Crafting stations.
Bank access.
Guild bank access – duh! (that one should be a no-brainer)
Various rooms/wings could be matched with these features. For example, if you wanted to purchase a leatherworking station for your guild hall, you might have to build a crafting wing first. Then, you would be free to build any or all of the various crafting stations. If you wanted a hall of portraits/statues, you might have to build a “guild museum”. Regular bank and guild bank access might require building a “Treasure Room” (dungeon style room accessible by stairs from the main room). A “guild bazaar” might be needed for TP access, as well as standard merchants, certain karma merchants, etc.
If done right, this could be a huge sink for guild influence, gold, etc. and put in a whole new line of progression/advancement to keep players in the game. An option to use gems for some of these things could also provide cash flow for ANet, BUT other methods that don’t require real life cash should remain VERY viable. Connecting this to gems without a very reasonable alternative in terms of influence and/or gold would be a huge public relations disaster for the game.
There should be a title for maxing luck.
I just can’t think of a cool one that isn’t at least mildly offensive.
Maybe “Soldier of Fortune?” It’s kind of weak, but it might work.
I’d like to see even more condensed versions of luck via artificer crafting. 200 luck seems like it would be enough, but I routinely build stacks of 100 to 200 of these. Maybe a 2000 luck essence would suffice.
Or, as we already have legendary (500 luck) essences, why not add them to the mix? Five 200 luck essences yields two 500 luck essences.
Or create a gemstore item called a “Luck Condenser”. Click on it and it asks you yes/no if you want to condense all your luck into a ball of “luck condensate” or whatever that contains all the luck that was in your inventory at the time.
I suspect bugs 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 are because the game has trouble handling lag. Whether it’s your internet or server based, things get a little out of synch and the server doesn’t know what to do or the correct order in which to do things. One solution is for the server to “trust” what your computer tells it more. The downside of this is that it makes certain types of cheating easier to do.
Bug #4 is just stupid and needs to be fixed.
They may have fixed bug #7.
No comments on the other bugs as of now.
Nodes that are or were fairly unique, like the Krait Obelisk (technically not a node), candy corn, quartz, and clockwork nodes are very much worth having. Spending 800 gems to buy a node of stuff I would not stop to harvest in the open world is a waste of money in my opinion. If it was ancient wood or orichalcum, I might consider it.
This type of node is mostly for the collectors, the person that has to have that permanent pass to some place that’s not that much better than Lion’s Arch or the person that has to have entire sets of minis.
I’m sure the downed skill of smoke bomb is a great skill and all, but so far it has been almost useless to me. It occurs to me that I may just be using it wrong. The problem is that it only seems to last a fraction of a second. That’s good for interrupting a WvW finishing move, but that just buys you a second or so at the cost of not raising your health while you use it. NPC’s just stand over your invisible body for that fraction of a second and then proceed to kill you when you become visible again.
The only way I’ve successfully used it is to teleport and then go invisible instantly. Sometimes this breaks aggro.
Any ideas?
I was crying about my character having no shoes, . . . until I read about this character that has no feet.
In any game, as players progress, they become more skillful at playing their characters, which means that they can survive situations that would kill less skillful players, which means that they can get away with more of a “glass cannon” build.
The downside of a glass cannon build is, of course, that you are more fragile in combat. However, if player skill compensates for this, then why go any other way? So, it’s almost inevitable that skilled players will gravitate towards such gear, driving up the price. It’s not because “berserker is overpowered”. It’s because players get better with time and practice. If you nerf berserker gear, then whatever the next highest DPS gear is will become the new berserker gear. If you nerf that, then whatever is currently third in DPS will become the new berserker gear, and so on.
This is true in PvE. In WvW, on the flip side, players get better and better at killing other players, so the glass cannon build becomes more difficult to pull off successfully.
I made a new discovery. I did an experiment. I bid for 250 of the item at 1 silver, 7 copper (new highest bid on the item), bought one instantly, and then sold it to myself. I got the item just fine. Then, I cancelled my bid for 1 silver, 7 copper each, making the 1 silver 6 copper bid the max bid. This time when I sold the item I did not get it even though the only bids for that amount were made by me. Just so we are clear, there were only 250 bids at 1 silver 6 copper, which were the bids made by me. That means it did not go to another player.
Also, I’ve noticed that this particular item moved very fast before this issue. That is, if I bid for 250 of them then I might have 20 or 30 of them by the next day if I did not get outbid. Since this issue arose, even when I bid 1 silver, 7 copper, I only got the item when I sold one to myself. It makes me wonder if this is connected to the item. Perhaps the item no longer drops and some tag on it has changed. It might be that the original version no longer drops, but a basically identical item with a different name drops in its place. If removing it from the loot tables also removes it from some other table, that might explain the problem. Of course it would not explain why the problem occurred with one bid, but not the next.
It may be unrelated, but I know that personal story rewards are fixed with regards to level. That is, if you wait until level 80 to work on personal story, you will end up with a bunch of low level, crappy rewards you can’t possibly use. Is it possible that you got the item from completing part of your personal story as opposed to a drop in Cursed Shore?
Uh, I think the ANet employee is incorrect in their explanation of why you don’t get credit. This lack of credit for kills occurs EVERYWHERE in WvW, not just near spawn points. It’s been in the game for months. I’ve noticed because I am very much into doing my daily achievements. I also noticed that when my guildmates, (who are not berzerker thieves for the most part like myself get way more loot bags off the enemy than I do), even though I tag way more enemy than they do. I do MUCH more damage overall than the majority of my guildmates. They’ll talk about getting 30 loot bags off an enemy zerg we stomped while I only get 8 or so. It’s very disheartening and has made me lose much of my interest in WvW.
This has not always been the case. Up until a few months ago, if I tagged someone for 2000 points of damage, I got credit for the kill.
I think the reason is that some types of attacks get you credit for “tags” better than others. For example, if I do an area attack and hit 5 enemy players for 2000 points of damage each (10,000 damage total) versus a melee warrior who hits 3 players with melee for 3000 damage each (9000 damage total), he may get credit for all 3 if those enemies die while I may not get credit for any even if all of the enemy I hit die as well.
Dagger storm, which is one of the thief’s elite skills that can only be used every 90 seconds (typically once per encounter with the enemy) may not give credit for many kills even if I tag 20 enemy. Area effect skills like choking gas or cluster bomb seem not to count very much either. This may be because a minimum amount of damage is required per enemy to count.
The end result of this is that if you play a class or build that can survive close range melee against an enemy zerg (such as most warriors), you will get way more xp, loot, and kill credit versus squishier classes or builds even if you do significantly less damage overall. I don’t want to play a warrior. It’s not a class I particularly enjoy playing. Guardians are fun, but way too slow by my standards. I leveled a guardian to 80, gave him full exotic gear, and just could not get past the lack of mobility in WvW. Kudos to those that enjoy these classes. I don’t think it’s fair that I get penalized for playing a thief.
One way to mitigate this is to make sure you are always in a group as it drops the damage threshold for getting credit. Does that make any sense whatsoever? Is there any logical reason for it? No. It’s stupid. But it does help somewhat.
On a side note, because of the megaserver feature, we now have enormous crowds at world boss fights. That’s great, but it has an unintended side effect. As a berzerker thief, I never had a problem getting credit for kills. Now, with world bosses getting burned down so much faster, I try to make sure on certain fights that I am always in a group. Ulgoth and the 3 champs that spawn before him are prime examples of this issue. I’ve unloaded on these champs and on Ulgoth and done over 100k damage to Ulgoth and about 50k damage to the champs without getting credit for the kills. I know those numbers aren’t big, but you have to understand that they melt pretty fast, so we are talking maybe 30 seconds to kill each champ and 60 seconds to kill Ulgoth. Even in a group, I sometimes don’t get credit for a champion. The avatars that spawn before the jungle wurm are another example of this problem. I can do a ton of damage to them, way more than most players, and still not get credit if I am not in a group. It’s very annoying to the player that likes independence.
I notice this a lot. I didn’t check if I was getting xp, but I definitely don’t get credit for half or more of my WvW tags of enemy players (when it comes to daily achievements for example).
I think maybe certain types of attacks don’t count. For example, condition damage does not count I think. AoE’s may not count either (such as cluster bomb from thief or dagger storm). That last one is really annoying as I can tag many, many people in an enemy zerg for significant amounts of damage, but I only get credit for a few of them. Meanwhile my warrior and guardian friends who can survive in the heart of an enemy zerg long enough to melee many of the enemy get tons of credit. I think this unfairly penalizes people for playing the “squishier” classes.
Another type of attack that may not count for kills is the “ricochet” style of attack. Many attacks hit a first enemy and then bounce to a second or even a third. I don’t think any but the first hit count for kills and xp in WvW.
This penalty for not playing a heavy armor class has been in the game for months. I forget what the patch was, but it is very annoying as I like competing for WvW kills with my guildmates and now I cannot. I spend much less time in regular WvW as a result and WvW has been my main reason for playing GW2.
I believe that this is not a bug, but a deliberate (but really stupid) feature designed to address a perceived unfairness in the other direction – namely that ranged and area attacks favor more tagging. But, melee attacks are inherently area effect attacks, even if it is a small area. And they are area attacks that move with the player, unlike most area effect attacks and they have little or no cool down or cost compared to most area attacks. Just spamming the “1” key gives melee an unlimited non-stop area attack that follows them around. With my thief, cluster bomb and choking gas use up my initiative so that I have to stop using them for a while from time to time. Dagger storm has a 90 second cool down.
Would it be fair to make melee attacks while invulnerable not count for warriors? I bet they’d scream bloody murder if that happened and I would not blame them one bit.
It’s very annoying, but I believe this “bug” is actually “working as intended”.
It could also be construed to mean that you cure a single condition on yourself and a single condition on some of your allies. I think this is the case, because when I use it in a crowd of players who just got hit by an area condition, I sometimes get the daily condition remover achievement very quickly even if I only have one condition on me.
I thought for the longest time it would remove more than one condition off of you if you had allies nearby. I could have sworn it did this, but recent testing indicates that it does not.
With my thief I have noticed that although pistol and shortbow supposedly have the same range, I can shoot farther with the shortbow because of arcing. I can also hit targets with the bow that would be obstructed with the pistol. This is not to say that the bow is unfairly overpowered. Rather the pistol is kitten as a long range weapon. I still use pistol, but mostly for close range effects like blinding powder as it is too unreliable at a distance compared to the bow.
I think a couple of recent buffs of pistol effects such as the ricochet trait might have been an attempt to address this issue, but they have not solved it for me.
All this being said, this is not a bug, but an intentional feature.
This bug has been in the game almost since day one and the reason is well known. Auda gets into fights with hostile NPC’s, moves from her original location, and does not go back just right, ending up in non-merchant mode. One work around is to get NPC’s to kill her, then sometimes when you rez her she snaps out of it and goes back to the right spot.
I ordered 250 of a certain weapon for salvage. I bid 1 silver, 6 copper per item. My order was accepted. I looked up the item within 60 seconds of placing the order and there was my order listed as the highest bid. However, when I looked under “my transactions”, it wasn’t there.
I tried exiting the TP and then coming back. I tried zoning out and back in. I tried leaving the game entirely (not just logging out) and then restarting. It still doesn’t show under my transactions. Once before when this happened, exiting the game completely and coming back fixed it, but not this time.
I then tried just ordering 1 of the items at the same price because it occurred to me that perhaps there was a cap on how many transactions can be seen in “My Transactions”. This one showed up immediately under “My Transactions”, so if there is a cap, I did not hit it.
I don’t know if it took my money or not. I do many transactions a day like this, often doing about 1 every 30 to 60 seconds over a period of several minutes and I don’t stop after each transaction to check and see if it gets documented under “My Transactions”. If it takes my money, but it doesn’t show up in my transactions, I could have losing bids that never cancel, never get filled, but take my money into a limbo from which it cannot be recovered. What happens when the price goes up to 1 silver 20 copper? Normally I would cancel my losing bid of 1 silver and 6 copper and get my money back but with this bug I cannot. I’m a small time TP user compared to some people. If this bug affects big time TP users, they could have 100’s of gold floating around the TP that they can’t get back because they can’t see their order to cancel it.
On the one hand, ANet may make more money because some people that farm keys or buy things produced by key farmers will choose to part with cash instead of gold to buy gems to buy keys. However, I think that people that are willing to put in 20 to 30 minutes of game time to save a few bucks are too frugal to do this. They will either forget about chests or use gold, not real life cash.
On the other hand ANet may lose money because in my opinion the main reason people choose the deluxe version of the game (more expensive) over the regular version is for the bank golem that is so well suited to key farming. Without that incentive, why pay extra? Prior to this nerf, I wished I had bought the deluxe version instead, but now I am glad I did not.
I made one key run. It took over an hour. I could have made that shorter by buying crafting supplies to level the character, but I’m not going that route.
I was hit by this bug while in EoTM. I assumed it meant they had nerfed EoTM experience. My WvW experience in EoTM went up at the normal rate. My PvE xp went up at a snail’s pace. I left EoTM to go to PvE and made some discoveries. Although it is a somewhat slow way to level, world exploration, (specifically discovering waypoints) and completing events appeared to give normal xp and that is the method I used to break through to level 30. Note that you do not get xp for the WP that automatically appears when you use a particular zone entrance for the first time.
Alternative titles for acquiring the tool collection: “Tool Fool” or “Futility of Utility”.
The upgrade extractor costs 250 gems, which at today’s exchange rate means 31 gold. Think about that for a second. You use the extractor as an alternative to either salvaging the item with a black lion salvage chest (if the upgrade is worth more than the item) or just adding another upgrade over the first (if the item is worth more than the upgrade). At what point does 31 gold save you money?
For those having problems understanding this, let’s suppose you have a 1000 gold legendary and you want a different upgrade, but you don’t want to destroy the upgrade. The most expensive upgrade in the game that I have seen was about 14 gold. So, by spending 31 gold to extract this item unharmed, you save 14 gold at a net loss of 18 gold (31 minus 14). Wow.
Or consider the other situation. You have a 14 gold upgrade inside of a 2 gold exotic item. You can spend 31 gold and get 14 gold plus 2 gold = 16 gold for a loss of only 15 gold versus using a black lion salvage kit and only being out the cost of the 2 gold item.
In order for this item to make sense, the cost of the upgrade would have to be 31 gold or higher.
Why on earth would anyone be stupid enough to buy one of these silly, overpriced things? Does A-Net even think when they assign prices or do they just look at the graphics of the item and say, “I bet people would pay 31 gold for something that looks like that. It’s so cool!”
The cynical side of me says that the A-Net solution will be to create a new collection achievement that includes this item and rewards you with 3 achievement points, the title of “COMPLETE TOOL master” and gives you a stack of crude salvage kits. Your friends will be so envious.
You have to exit TP and come back into TP and yes it is a bug, but your order did go through if you didn’t fumble your clicking.
I am relieved to hear that Healix. Just now after a few hours of my orders being filled, I went to empty it again. Again it said 100 items. With a sinking feeling I counted them and sure enough there were only 100 items. I emptied it. For a brief instant it said 98 items, then it settled on 56 items, which I emptied. I didn’t count this time, but it looked like about 56, in my inventory, so I am sure it was. My concern after doing this was that perhaps 56 items which I had winning bids on suddenly became mine, not because I already had them bought minutes or hours earlier, but because now there was suddenly room enough for my winning bids, they came in almost instantly. That was my fear.
I should note that I have 80 to 100 empty spots in my bags normally, so I can get most of one “load” from the TP in one go. I assume when you (Healix) emptied out your window after a year that the multiple emptyings were into a similarly large bag inventory and that we are talking 100’s or1,000’s of items. However, in all fairness, this could be a recent change that occurred since you (Healix) removed that vast horde of items.
I sincerely hope that for whatever reason the TP just stops counting at 100 (which is kind of weird).
“the money isnt in alts.
the money is in the new players.”
Actually, the money is in both of these things. New players certainly bring money in, but players who are emotionally invested in the game and are willing to buy gems are also a major source of income for the game. In the long run, the willingness of established players to keep forking over more money matters more than new players. Presumably as the game ages, the influx of new players will decrease to the point that GW3 will become necessary. But, long after this point, if players who are thoroughly invested in the game keep pouring money into the gem market, the game will stay afloat long after it is considered obsolete.
To this end, it is important to design the game in such a way that it encourages players to consider themselves invested in the game, such that if they quit, they “lose” their imaginary investment. One way for players to become invested is for them to create multiple characters and raise them to high level. If the game is designed in such a way as to discourage this, players end up only having one main character, and there is less for them to walk away from when they fall in love with some other game.
That being said, the impact of these changes is fairly trivial, although it is rather annoying to make experienced players put on training wheels and a diaper. At least put in an option in the options menu for experienced players to restore full functionality to their new characters.
It may just be a coincidence that the number of items for me to pick up was exactly 100. I expected it to be much larger. I’ll stop taking items out of my inbox to see if the total can go past 100. I just hate the thought that my bids might be the winning bids, but fail to go through because inbox is full at a low number like 100.
With the new feature pack, I was delighted to see for the first time the option to move from the instance I was in to a more populated instance so that GW2 could begin to close down the instance I was playing. I copied and pasted the description of what happens below from a GW2 information release:
“If you choose to volunteer to move to a new map, you’ll even get a reward in the form of a new effect, the Volunteer’s Blessing, which increases movement speed by 15%, karma gain by 5%, and experience from kills by 10% for 10 minutes. "
Here are the problems with this:
I play almost exclusively level 80 characters and I have over 2000 unused skill points, so the XP bonus is meaningless.
I have 25% bonus movement on all the time. I could tell no difference after moving, so either I only went up to max of 30% and the difference was too trivial to notice or I did not speed up at all as I was already past 15%.
At 4.5 million karma, karma bonuses are meaningless.
Here’s what I lost: 25 stacks of bloodlust which I was going to use in what I thought would be a difficult battle. The champ turned out to be kind of wussy, but it could have made the difference between victory and defeat had he been a bit tougher.
The point I am trying to make is that it only takes one person who won’t leave to keep an instance open. I know I won’t be taking advantage of this feature in the future unless I have some need for a more populated instance. I’ll be that person who wastes ANet’s computer resources, not out of malice towards ANet or to make a point, but simply because it’s in my best interest to stay where I am. Considering how much Superior Sigils of Bloodlust cost at the TP, I assume they are a very popular item and that there are many thousands of players who like keeping those stacks. Addressing this issue might help prevent people from keeping instances open with only 4 or 5 people in them or even just a single player.
I’ve got standing orders for many items. Unfortunately most of these items are not stackable. If they were all to be filled at once, it would be well over 10,000 items that would turn up at the Black Lion Trading Post for me.
Just recently (since the new feature update), when I went to retrieve the items that I bought while I was away from the house, I found that I had the suspiciously round number of 100 items. I didn’t bother scrolling through the list, but I estimate that after I emptied out the items, I had taken approximately that many items.
Is 100 items the max you can have in your “inbox” in the TP? If so, that kind of sucks as it puts a severe bottleneck on my purchases.
I really do not like the idea of having to log into the game every few hours to keep my inbox from filling up. I’m just not going to do that.
Today I was checking into orbs (as in Coral Orbs, Ruby Orbs, etc) on the auction house.
I found that the lowest price that Chrysocola Orbs are selling at is currently exactly 2 silver. I also noticed that there is an order for 217 of them at 1 copper each. At that time this was the ONLY order for these orbs. Since then other orders were placed. I thought I’d save a little money and order a few at 1 or 2 copper, but the auction house insisted that the minimum value I could order at was 1 silver, 99 copper. The reason given was that I could not go under the vendor price.
So, my question is that if I can’t order these for 1 copper, how did someone else order them for 1 copper? Is someone out there consistently buying stuff for 1 copper and then selling them for 2 silver, which means they get back 2,000 times as much as they spend? I don’t mind people making a profit, but that’s ridiculous and on the surface at least it looks like cheating of some kind.
The only thing I can think of is that perhaps these orders were placed a long time ago when perhaps the rule about vendor prices did not exist (if there ever was such a time). Other than that, it pretty much has to be cheating.
You seem to know what you are talking about and you may very well be correct that it is server side lag. However, I have mistaken hardware/software issues for server side lag before myself. What I would do if I were you is bookmark a video on YouTube or some other place, go to WvW, join a big zerg, and then wait until you come across another big zerg. These are prime conditions for lag. When the lag is at its worst, alt-tab out and bring up the video. If it’s all A-Net’s fault due to their server lagging, then your computer should have no problem playing the video in highest definition. If there is lag with the video, it could be your connection or it could be something else like the Windows 7 computer browser issue that plagues many GW2 players. I even had what I thought was lag one time but was actually intermittent hard drive failures signally the imminent death of my hard drive.
I had similar problems. I got a new graphics card and it helped a little bit. I read on the internet that GW2 uses system RAM even when it would make more sense to use graphics card RAM and for that reason it’s important to have as much system RAM as possible. I noticed that when GW2 was running that my system reported roughly 2 GB of RAM in use, give or take.
I upgraded my system RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB. I would have gone to 16 GB, (the theoretical max for my motherboard and operating system), but some sources advised against going past 8 GB with my setup. It made a HUGE difference. I had been running with all my graphics settings at their bare minimum. I’ve sense turned several graphics settings to their maximum. With current settings, in a WvW zerg vs an opposing zerg, my system uses roughly 4 GB out of the 8 GB. It’s very smooth, but all the details are kind of distracting. I may turn down some settings for WvW for that reason.
The following website has some possible fixes.
http://rsco.enjin.com/forum/m/18556576/viewthread/12895839-heles-kitchen-client-connection-fixes
The last one, regarding the “computer browser” service was probably the problem I had as I got disconnected from everything, not just GW2.
Small groups are meant to dash in, take out a small, weak target like a camp or perhaps even an unguarded tower that has not been upgraded, then get the heck out of Dodge. It is a given that from time to time small groups will run into big groups and get annihilated. Get used to dying, even in zergs. It’s just part of WvW. If you are clever and alert, you won’t die very often in small groups, but even if you are clever and alert it’s going to happen from time to time.
I’m a little over level 300 (bronze soldier). That’s fairly average for my guild, maybe a little above average.
For that matter, why can’t you move siege? I mean the arrow carts are CARTS for crying out loud!
That being said, while it makes sense in terms of realism, I think it would not work well in terms of satisfying game play.
I play a thief, but oddly enough, I’ve never cared for a stealth build. Since my crit build got a slight nerf, and stealth got a boost in that it is much harder to fight against, I feel like Anet is trying to force all thieves into a stealth mold. I really don’t want to do it, because I don’t like the play style, but it looks like it’s going that way.
The main problem versus stealth thieves is that it’s hard for many classes or at least for many builds of many classes to break their stealth or stun them long enough to get a kill. With my build, I can often beat a stealth thief in the sense that I can outdamage and outlast him, but I don’t actually win because he either gives up and runs away or waits until I think the fight is all over to pounce again. Actually getting a 1v1 kill on a stealth thief almost never happens for me because of this.
I realize that there are weapons/skills/traits that I could go for that would make me more effective against stealth thieves, but I don’t think the game should revolve around designing your character to deal with one specific type of player in WvW.
Also, with regards to siege skills, find out what skills are under-represented by your guild/allies. That way when your commander calls for someone with a 4 or 5 in that skill, you can be one of the two or three that has that skill instead of one of the 20 or so that has the other skill.
Have at least one common defensive and one common or uncommon offensive siege skill. I realize that technically all siege can be used both ways, but typically AC’s and Ballistas are used for defense and rams and catas and sometimes trebs are used for offense. I’ve used all of them both ways, but I am referring to more common usage here. The reason I say have a common defensive skill, is that if you are relying on your trebuchet skill for defense, most of the time the place you run to defend won’t have a trebuchet, but it likely has arrow carts and possibly ballistas.