Guild Wars 2

Upham.6137:

Back then, when they added “Daily reviver” there were a lot of people complaining about AFKing for a few minutes only to come back and see other players drawing aggro to them on purpose. It wasn’t because they were apparently botting.
I’ve had people acting like bots while I was watching them and they /say “hey I’m just farming”. It’s not that hard.

They wouldn’t have followed me around if they were just trying to get their daily revives.

The point is why does the game have to advertise my location to any random stranger that wants to track me and give me no control over it? What benefit does it have that would offset all the bad things folks could do with that information?

It doesn’t matter that there are various “it’s not a big deal” justifications for players using that feature to annoy other players. What is the benefit of allowing folks that you haven’t added as friends to see your location? I don’t care about status, just location.

Upham.6137:

And if they can see where your character is, and which character you are playing what’s the worst thing they can do? Unless you are doing something you shouldn’t (exploiting/scamming/botting) there should be no reason to worry about it.

That’s terrible reasoning. A player can want to avoid being around certain other players without necessarily being “up to something”. I could think of several ways that a few people that could make someone else’s game experience really unpleasant if they followed them around, especially with the proximity aggro mechanic.

Aside from that, the idea that you shouldn’t value your privacy because there’s no harm being done to you unless you’re doing something wrong is just repugnant in my opinion.

I went AFK on my ranger back in the days where rangers with bears were the botter’s class of choice. Yes, a had a brown bear because I liked the condition removal for that build. I came back to find players who apparently had decided that I was a bot, trying to drop trains of mobs on me. It didn’t work because I keep my pet on passive and park my character a few feet off the ground when I AFK, and yet they persisted in following me around for a while trying to dish out some vigilante “justice”.

If they hadn’t been able to see where I was, they wouldn’t have been able to find me and annoy me when I switched areas. Did they harm me in any tangible way? Not unless you count ruining a few hours of my relaxation time and causing me to switch to another character I really wasn’t in the mood to play.

Is there any upside to non-consensual friending showing a player’s location in game that offsets the downsides? I don’t mind the “online” status so much because I can see someone I might have played with previously messaging me to see if I’d be interested in another dungeon run or whatever, but do they really need my location?

Sanguinem.4932:

Thanks all for your responses, I suppose the fact I am trying too hard to level up quickly to get into the good bit has meant that I avoid the good part of the game. Thanks all for your suggestions.

GW2 was the first game where I outleveled my husband – he’s more mission oriented than I am in terms of leveling up, and I like to wander around, harvest, and check off all the areas of the map, and basically putter around.

A few things that aren’t obvious:

• The longer a mob has been in the world, the more XP it is worth, so keep moving around and don’t hesitate to go after mobs even if they don’t aggro you.
• You get XP for harvesting, and everyone gets their own harvesting nodes (you can’t “steal” a node from someone else), so harvest everything you see.
• Dynamic events are worth detouring for – don’t get too focused on clearing the hearts. Often dynamic events will spawn that will give you credit for the heart at the same time you’re completing the event.
• Food and potions give you bonus XP and don’t cost a lot. It’s not all that significant at the higher levels, but at the lower levels they can make a big difference.
• Talk to named NPCs you see – sometimes it will start a dynamic event, but it almost always gives you a little flavor of what’s going on in the area
• If you don’t like the area you’re in, head to Lion’s Arch through a portal in your home city and try out one of the other races starting areas. The exploration bonus can push you over the edge to move on to the higher level areas.

These and a lot more tips are in a sticky in the Players Helping Players forum – the thread is a little long, but definitely worth looking over.

Tallis.5607:

A gem card of 25$ will buy you the same as 25$ in the store.
So, the tax is already included, plain and simple.

No, gem cards are explicitly excluded from sales tax by most states as are other gift cards. If you buy gems directly, they fall under a different section of the tax code and sales tax has to be collected for most states. It defies common sense, but that’s what happens when politicians start making rules to cover every possible little thing.

I read somewhere once that we are still paying a tax on our phone service that was originally instituted to pay for the war of 1812. Think it’s time for tax reform yet?

Actually it was a tariff, and it doesn’t exist any more according to what I can find on-line. No sense in spreading that around anymore.

Arrelaine.5692:

Exactly, EU has their taxes built in. You know what you’re paying, tax and all. Right now on the gem store, it still shows $10. It doesn’t show you what you’d be paying in tax, if at all. Which is my point. If they’re going to be charging taxes, the pricing needs to reflect that. In-game, there’s no ‘fine print’ about taxes at all.

When you shop at a physical store in the US, do the price tags on the shelves include tax?

I honestly don’t understand why folks are getting tied it knots over this. I know that I pay 8.25% sales tax on pretty much everything except food. And there’s no fine print needed – you should know whether you owe tax to your locality or not. If you’re ticked off about the tax rate, you should contact your state representative and senators and your city council and complain to them. Or move. That’s what I did I’d live just about anywhere else before I’d live in New York state again.

I would rather have a fixed price regardless of what state and city I’m in (some cities including the one I live in have tax in addition to the state tax) and have the variable amount added later so it’s obvious. Also local sales tax can be deducted from your federal taxes, so it’s nice to have it itemized out.

I don’t find it that difficult to calculate approximately 8% of the bill in my head and add it on – it’s not any more difficult than calculating a tip.

Himei.5379:

Sometimes it’s company that charges it. I know that Gamestop charge taxes on a Gem card when I buy it from them but Bestbuy doesnt at all. It’s not consistent enough, when it comes to Online, probably a different rule scheme.

If you’re getting charged sales tax on a gift card, it is most likely a mistake based on what I found poking around the Internet.

JustTrogdor.7892:

I’m not into lore but as a heads up if you want to do jumping puzzles I highly suggest avoiding huge Norn.

My main is a Norn female ranger and I wholeheartedly agree that you don’t want to do a lot of jumping puzzles with them. One of the puzzles in Lion’s Arch flipped my camera around so much due to collisions that I was motion sick after finishing it and had to log off. My Asura Engineer is my go-to girl for jumping puzzles now.

Other than that it is a matter of taste. My suggestions:

• Take a look at the Human racial skills and Norn racial skills and see which appeal to you more or fit better into the type of build you like to play.
• Spend some time customizing Norns and Humans before creating one to see if you can get a look you like. My husband could not get a male human that he was willing to play.
• Make a test character and listen to the voices. The Norn females have a pretty deep voice – it might bug you, it might not.
• Take a look around some of the armor galleries on dulfy.net The Norn male shoulders have a really different scale from the human shoulders – you might like it, or you might hate it.

Inspired.6730:

It’s not the gift card, it’s the “tangible” personal property part that determines taxability in many states. While software is widely considered tangible and thus would be taxed, subscriptions for example are not and thus aren’t taxed unless covered by another tax law. I don’t see why they’re classifying gems as tangible.

Well I quoted the Texas code to show how stupidly complicated it is. The taxable item clauses go out of their way to say that digital items are still taxable (there’s a whole list of services that are/aren’t taxable also), there’s a clause that only talks about gift cards and how they’re not taxable (unless they’re a pre-paid telephone card), and so on.

My point is that ANet has nothing to do with any of this – their lawyers dug through all this crap for all the states and figured out what they had to do to comply with the law. There’s nothing shady or wrong about that – the folks you should be miffed at are the politicians who came up with this mess. I’m sure that ANet would rather not have to deal with collecting tax.

Aviate.9457:

Oh well. Won’t be getting anymore of my money that’s for sure. Makes no sense to me why I can walk into Gamestop or purchase ONLINE at Amazon.com and not be taxed for it, yet trying to do it directly charges me a tax. Good Game, ANet.

It’s not ANet’s fault that the tax laws are ridiculously complicated and make no sense. Take it up with whoever it was you sent to your state legislature.

Teege.4623:

So did a new law just go into place or do they want more money?

Who do you mean by “they”? ANet doesn’t get to keep the tax it collects. The company has to forward it on to the state government. It probably costs them money to collect that tax, keep track of it, and forward it on to the appropriate place with the appropriate forms filled out.

clint.5681:

Nothing you can do when people/mods take what you said out of context or think there is some hidden evil meaning behind what you said and give you an infraction. Also when people disagree and spam report you. Im not saying thats the only way to get infractions because I know ive said plenty of things that i knew the mods wouldnt agree with, so now im here lol.

I get where you’re coming from – I had a poster edit their post to make my response look bad once the context was changed. I quote a lot more posts these days I just sucked it up because it really was partly my fault – that post wasn’t exactly my best work lol. Sometimes it’s not what you’re saying but how you say it.

Folks can’t spam report you. Posts can only get reported once – I know because I have clicked the report flag on many a post that is under review. I don’t know if that is true about reporting folks through their profile. You always have to include an explanation of why you’re reporting what you’re reporting though and my impression is that the moderators do some investigation to see if the report is merited.

I can’t deny that sometimes folks get infracted for gray area stuff where maybe a different moderator would have made a different judgement call, but the punishments only impact the forums, and they’re temporary unless you went way across the line.

If folks were getting banned from the game I would expect a little more consistency and rigor, but for the forums, a little on the overly strict side keeps things from getting out of hand, even though some folks get inconvenienced (perhaps unfairly) every once in a while.

rhapsody.3615:

I work in a store that sells a variety of those game cards, for gw2, wow, facebook, Xbox, Nintendo, ps, and many others. Those cards are never taxed.

So I have this compulsion to try to figure out stuff that doesn’t make sense to me, and my digging around lead me to these tidbits…

Tax Policy News

Store Gift Cards and Gift Certificates
No sales tax is due on the sale of a gift card. The actual sale of gift cards is not subject to Texas sales, use or mixed beverage taxes since the card represents an intangible – the “right” to a future purchase. Instead, tax is calculated when a card is redeemed.

But then there are these definitions in the tax code

Tax code

Sec. 151.009. “TANGIBLE PERSONAL PROPERTY” “Tangible personal property” means personal property that can be seen, weighed, measured, felt, or touched or that is perceptible to the senses in any other manner, and, for the purposes of this chapter, the term includes a computer program and a telephone prepaid calling card.

Sec. 151.010. TAXABLE ITEM. “Taxable item” means tangible personal property and taxable services. Except as otherwise provided by this chapter, the sale or use of a taxable item in electronic form instead of on physical media does not alter the item’s tax status.

It looks to me like the law carved out a special tax exempt status for gift cards (other than pre-paid phone cards) that doesn’t apply when buying gems directly. Of course I’m not a lawyer, I just like to play one on the Internet :P

Any politician that promises me that there will be fewer laws when they leave office than when they entered will have my vote, no matter what other crazy ideas they might have.

Jeydra.4386:

Well they’re not harassing me directly, they’re just monitoring what I’m doing and then posting their observations on the forums. Apparently the first stalker was concerned he can’t monitor me throughout the 24 hours in a day, so he enlisted some buddies to help out. I reported the first stalker to ANet support and got the response above.

Are you sure it’s ban worthy to continue to follow someone even though that someone specifically asks you not to follow him / her?

Are they posting on these forums? Report them here too. It sounds like the only reason they’re doing it is because they know it bugs you. In my opinion, the best way to deal with such puerile behavior is to aggressively ignore it and they’ll either escalate to the point where ANet will be willing to step in or they’ll get bored and annoy someone else.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not minimizing how much that kind of behavior can affect your enjoyment of the game, but the more you react the more you “reward” the behavior. I’m a firm supporter of the idea that any type of friending mechanism that allows someone to see your details in the game should be consensual.

Teege.4623:

Some time will have to go by to see if these new approaches will work. It seems to be easier than trying to get their support staff on the same page when it comes to handling problems.. Since they always have the upper hand with the ability to claim “interpretation”, they can bend any rule any way they see fit and you’ll simply never win.

I’m currently fighting a few battles with the forum/customer support (some of the worse I’ve ever encountered) and it seems if you don’t praise you get infracted.

That hasn’t been my experience at all. On the contrary, I believe the aggressive moderation to be instrumental in making these forums one of the better game forums I’ve participated on. On the admittedly few occasions that I’ve contacted the moderators to appeal an infraction, they’ve been very reasonable. I’ve never had enough infraction points pile up to be punished though.

I prefer the rules be written to allow the folks enforcing the rules to use their best judgement, because there will never be a rule that covers every possible permutation of every situation. That can work in our favor in situations where we might have broken the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it, and likewise the folks won’t be able to get around the spirit of the law by adhering to the letter of it.

I really don’t find it that difficult to avoid getting infracted. Don’t call people names. Don’t be vulgar. Keep on topic. Be civil when you disagree with someone.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

We are powerless to stop the birth of these threads from people who don’t visit or read our trade forums.

I agree. All we can do is help them find the discussion that is already here. You never know, some might read through it and come up with a fresh perspective. I’m battling my cynical tendencies with small acts of optimism : )

Behellagh.1468:

But it’s not law yet (3rd time’s the charm?).

Also the USSC tossed the New York vs Amazon 3rd party’s tax case back to the circuit court Monday without comment.

I hadn’t heard it got tossed back – that’s good news. I doubt they’re going to let it go though.

Behellagh.1468:

Okay, different states, different tax laws (gift cards, internet/mail order purchases). However if ANet is charging sales tax when it doesn’t have to, something smells.

Just because a company doesn’t collect it doesn’t mean it isn’t owed. There are 45 states that have a use tax law that requires you to file forms to pay your state sales tax on out of state purchases. It’s basically unenforceable for small purchases, so the Senate passed a bill (The Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013) that requires companies to collect sales tax even for states where they have no business presence. I don’t think it’s made it through the House yet though and govtrack.us gives it a 28% chance of being enacted.

I think a lot of on-line retailers just set up their systems to collect the sales tax regardless because it’s easier than only collecting it for certain states, and that way they’re prepared for when they have to collect it by law. Too many states are too strapped for cash for them to let folks get away with not paying their taxes, even if it means forcing companies who have no vested interest in that state to bear the burden of enforcing their tax laws.

Cumandante.6805:

So that if you did 100% of the dungeon path, you would get a bit more rewards than you get at the moment, but if you just skipped most of it, you would get a substantially smaller reward.

But you do get more rewards for killing those mobs already. I’ve had some killer drops off of the mobs that most folks skip in their rush to the end. Granted, sometimes the dice gods aren’t smiling on me, but if you’re on a solid team that an kill stuff quickly there’s no point to doing anything tricky to avoid fights. I don’t pug dungeons though and I imagine it’s difficult to find folks who aren’t just there to rush to the end if you are.

I don’t know if anything more can be done to incentivize speed running pugs to kill more “trash” mobs without making farming the mobs more attractive than finishing the dungeon.

It’s strange. If I try to order a gem card from Amazon, they want to charge me tax, and I’ve always been charged tax on the cash shop proxy currency purchases regardless of the game (but I live in Texas, and NCSoft and EA have offices here). I’ll have to go see if I buy from a local brick and mortar if I get charged tax on a gem card. I’m even charged tax on subscription fees for games, so I guess I never expected not to be taxed.

I live in a state with no income tax, so I really can’t begrudge them the sales tax. I do grumble a bit about my property taxes though

Undeadkemea.4865:

I personally think 100 gems for 5 gold is a fine place, what do you guys think about that?
Also what do you guys think about the current conversion ratio?

Lots of thoughts have been posted about the exchange rate, how it works, and how folks feel about it. Here are a few sample threads:

Gems too expensive

Gold/Gem exchange rate is making me sad

Gem Price Inflation – how much is too much?

Currency Exchange Inflation

1g = 28 Gems, an Overview of the Gem Market

I know the search feature of the forums can be finicky, so I just went to Duck Duck Go and searched with these terms (will work on Google too):

site:forum-en.guildwars2.com “Black Lion Trading Co” gems exchange expensive gold

I bought a digital software code from Amazon and was charged tax, so I don’t think there’s a distinction between physical and digital goods. Also there is quite a bit of legalese explaining that Gems aren’t currency due to regulatory issues, so I don’t think they fall under gift card terms. Thank your government heroes for creating a system where common sense is no substitute for a law degree.

First of all can we refrain from defaming 300 million people simply because they were born in a particular part of the world? I know it’s the cool thing to do these days, but it adds nothing to the argument.

If I follow the logic here, if it costs you nothing but time you’re an entitled tool for complaining. Every feature of the game is free under those terms. You have no right to complain about the drop rate of anything. You have no right to complain about having to spend time managing your bids in the TP. You’re not entitled to get a good price on the market, go out and find the items you want. It’s just your time.

It is poor form in my opinion to try to quash the feedback of other players by labelling it as not legitimate and attacking their character for having an opinion. Kittening uncivilized.

It’s a game and they are expressing something that is frustrating them. Would it be better if they just silently left without giving ANet any hints about why? As long as it’s constructive they should be able to complain without getting ridiculed.

mtpelion.4562:

Buying gems with gold is an optional feature that ArenaNet has GRACIOUSLY provided to us. To ever complain about it is incredibly poor form.

I disagree. Buying gems with gold has been a feature of the game since its inception and may have influenced some folks decision to buy the game. How do you distinguish features that are graciously provided, and therefore shouldn’t be complained about, and features that are ok to complain about?

I personally don’t have much of an issue with the exchange rate, but I don’t begrudge the folks that do the opportunity to give their feedback on it if they do it constructively.

TooBz.3065:

Pandemoniac.4739:

And I managed to get through a whole response without tossing in a snarky comment about any other poster.

Sorry. Mia Culpa.

There is a tendency on this forum (especially this sub-forum) to nitpick someone’s argument to death without ever addressing the substance. (snip)

I jumped the gun and assumed that’s what you are doing. Which of course, makes me a kitten. I apologize.

No apologies necessary. I had a cranky moment which I’m not proud of. I know inflation is a touchy subject in this forum and I could have done better by leaving the quoted sentence out completely. I’d hate to have to start wearing a big scarlet H for being a snarky hypocrite : )

TooBz.3065:

Pandemoniac.4739:

Mahonriancur.9462:

Are there any plans to curve the inflation? Why or Why not? If so, how?

If it gets out of hand it could damage the game quite a bit.

Who says there is any inflation to curb? The exchange rate going up does not necessarily equate to inflation.

What he’s saying is that “inflation” is the wrong term. People on the forums love to disregard your question if you phrase it improperly, it’s easier than thinking.

Actually I was trying to gently nudge to see if inflation was just a poor word choice, not disregard. If I was disregarding I wouldn’t have posted at all.

Using the term inflation improperly is a tactic to make the complaint that the price of some item is too high seem more serious or weighty than it actually is. I think his follow-up statement explains that he did in fact want to use the word inflation, and I don’t see much point in digging up that dead horse and beating it again.

And I managed to get through a whole response without tossing in a snarky comment about any other poster. I am actually quite thoughtful about what I post (most of the time, no-one’s perfect).

The follow-up comment I referred to above.

Mahonriancur.9462:

There is inflation with the price of gems. Monetary values have decreased and the gold is not worth as much as it used to be while the prices of items increases and the value of gems increase. It is this issue that I refer to in the game. It is becoming too expensive to buy anything on the market due to this inflation.

Inflation has ruined many games and I do not want to see it ruin this game.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Coffee shops do not offer Wifi to draw people in. It’s part of the experience they offer. I’m not sure if you’re like me at all, but when I go to Starbucks, I go because 1) coffee is good, 2) people are good, and 3) it’s cool and hip to hang out. The free Wifi they offer is a bonus, not a primary draw. And no, I’m not a Hipster. My wife on the other hand…

I tend toward non-linear thinking, so I’ll try to circle this around and connect it back to my original thought before I completely derail things I have to explore the weeds a little bit before I build the road – it drives some of my co-workers nuts, but I find a lot of cool stuff in the weeds.

Free WiFi is a feature that keeps some people in the store longer, which keeps the store full and bustling. It’s part of what makes the environment a cool place to hang out as much as the comfy chairs and curated music. Yes, if the coffee wasn’t good folks wouldn’t go, but different features appeal to different folks, which makes it a pleasant place to hang out for a larger group of folks, which makes the environment more attractive overall.

This connects back to my point about the folks that don’t spend cash on gems still being important to GW2.

1. The ability to convert gold to gems is an attractive feature to a lot of folks especially in a game with no subscription fees.
2. GW2 would be less fun for most folks if it had fewer active players
3. The folks that use gold to buy gems instead of cash are a significant portion of the active player population
4. If the folks farming for gold can’t buy something they want after a reasonable amount of effort, many of them will go play something more rewarding.
5. If enough of those players hit their frustration wall and quit, the population will drop and the folks that do spend cash on the game will find it harder to sell/buy on the market, find groups for dungeons, world events will go unfinished, etc. etc.
6. The game will be less fun even for the folks that never bought gems with gold, and they will start to drift away.

I’m not saying this is what is happening, or that this is what will happen. It’s something that could happen if buying gems with gold gets too frustrating for enough folks. Will it ever reach that level? I don’t know what that level is exactly, so I can’t say.

If the players that only buy gems with gold all decided to not play for a couple days, I’m fairly sure you would notice their absence.

Mahonriancur.9462:

Are there any plans to curve the inflation? Why or Why not? If so, how?

If it gets out of hand it could damage the game quite a bit.

Who says there is any inflation to curb? The exchange rate going up does not necessarily equate to inflation.

Behellagh.1468:

Yoroiookami’s comment was since they can’t afford go by Gems with Gold anymore due to the price then they’ll show ANet by not buying any items from the Gem Shop anymore if they don’t fix the Gold to Gem rate. That’s not a threat if you never bought Gems with cash. While your presence in game (note they didn’t say they would stop playing) is a benefit to ANet because more players in an MMO, more likely another player will stay because they have people to play with/against, it doesn’t pay the bills.

Now Nexon’s quarterly reports they do list what percentage of active players in their FTP games buy something from the cash shop every month and that number is around 10% and Nexon’s annual income is around $1 BILLION (/pinkie) dollars. I image our percentage of cash shop participation has to be higher since there’s a higher barrier to join thus a lower number of players to start with but as long as enough players are buying gems with cash, those that aren’t are simply window dressing for those who do.

(emphasis is mine)

I think we all agree that an empty feeling MMO with long queues in LFG or PvP is going to cause customers to drift away. “Free” players are not window dressing, they are the population that keeps that 10% around to spend their money. Look at the turn around of SWTOR when they moved to a hybrid model. Even with the draconian limitations on non-subscribers, there are tons of free players and when they weren’t there to keep the flashpoint queues and PvP queues and market moving along at a quick pace, there wasn’t as many subscribers to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

I think that the combination of an unfavorable exchange rate and time-limited gem store offerings could frustrate a lot of folks and cause them to look for something else to play. I have burnt myself out on games going after a carrot that I didn’t really HAVE to go after but was dangled so temptingly that I spent some time “working” toward it before I realized I had gotten to the point where logging in was a chore instead of fun. It’s hard to attract folks back after they hit that wall (I will probably never play WoW again, even if it offers a free to play option), so in my opinion, it’s worth taking a long hard look at things that folks are complaining about and see if something needs adjusting.

I’m not advocating mucking about with the gold to gem rate, but I do think there is an issue here and it could eventually impact the game by driving away those folks that you think are “window dressing”. The solution to some folks’ frustration might not have anything at all to do with the exchange rate. The solution might be to add really cool account bound stuff that can only be bought with gold and don’t hide it behind RNG. Yes, there will always be folks that complain loudly and repeatedly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all loudly often repeated complaints should be dismissed out of hand.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Just wanted to correct you. Coffee shops don’t offer free Wifi to draw people in. Customers will come in regardless, because they want the coffee. The free Wifi is a convenience for customers who decide to hang out. Why do I say this? Because nearly all coffee shops offer free Wifi.

Drawing folks in is different from differentiating. Almost all coffee shops offer free WiFi because it is profitable to do so. It probably affects sales on several fronts, but making the shop a place to hang out is an important aspect.

Restaurants seat folks by the windows first so the folks walking by see a bustling business and will be more interested than if they walked by an empty looking restaurant. Shops go out of their way have full shelves because things sell better than empty looking shelves. A good portion of my time in my younger days was spent “fronting” shelves, where you pull product forward and make a wall so customers don’t see the empty space in the depth of the shelf. They wouldn’t have paid me to do it if it didn’t make a difference. Not everyone is affected by those tactics of course, but enough that it makes it worthwhile to spend real money making sure that potential customers get the appearance of thriving, fully stocked businesses.

How many times have you seen complaints that the game was “empty and dying” because a certain area on a certain server was under-populated? It’s human nature to assume that if there are lots of people in a place, that place must be a desirable place to be. Why do you think some clubs keep a queue outside even though there’s plenty of room for those folks to go inside?

Behellagh.1468:

My comment to Yoro was to say threatening to stop doing something which doesn’t affect their income isn’t a threat. That’s like saying you’re going to stop leaching the wifi at the coffee shop while sitting in your car. Doesn’t really matter to the coffee shop since you aren’t buying anything anyways.

Well the impact is indirect. Coffee shops don’t offer free WiFi out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it to draw folks in and increase the number of folks in and around their shop, which makes it more attractive to certain potential customers.

I agree that just not buying gems with gold would have no impact, but if that was one of the features that drew you to the game and now it’s untenable for you, you might play a lot less or not at all. If population drops significantly, ANet will notice.

Players are the lifeblood of MMOs, even if only a small percentage of them shell out cash.

Oghier.7419:

I did not get that email. I definitely buy gems, so I should be the target audience

Maybe the target audience is those who don’t buy gems to give them that extra nudge to buy a few? The end of the fiscal year is coming up. Folks already buying gems will probably be drawn in by the sales.

I’ve bought gems in the past (but not recently) and got an e-mail saying I had been awarded a token amount of gems (not enough to buy anything cool without buying a few more) . Looks to me like they’re making a big marketing push to finish out the year on a high note.

Yoroiookami.3485:

Behellagh.1468:

Yoroiookami.3485:

And here we are, few months later – 100 gems for 8 gold. This is getting a bit ridiculous…it’s not really encouraging me to buy gems for real money, but rather not buy anything at all.

If you only bought gems with gold then in ANet’s eyes your no different than someone who never bought gems either with gold or cash. They don’t make money when you buy something with gems, only when you buy those gems with cash.

I can understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t think company this big will have issues paying their employees just because they will lower a bit the price of gems for gold.

Being able to buy gems with gold is a feature that attracts folks to play the game. Folks that haven’t ever spent real money on gems are still supporting the game – they paid for the box copy, and MMOs need plenty of active players to be successful, so I don’t see the folks that don’t spend money in the gem store as somehow supporting ANet less than the folks that do, although it might be more difficult to measure their contribution to the bottom line.

The gold to gem conversion rate got to where it is because players are still buying gems with gold even at the current price – it wouldn’t go up otherwise. Yes it sucks that you can’t accrue gold fast enough to buy limited time items if you haven’t been saving up gems, but that’s the trade-off. Time for money. If you don’t believe the exchange rate of your time is worth what you get in return, whether that is having fun playing, or getting enough items and gold to buy things in the gem store, why continue to participate in a bad deal?

The underlying problem isn’t that the price of turning gold into gems is too high, it’s that not enough folks are turning gems into gold. The exchange is unbalanced and in my opinion the answer isn’t to lower the cost of gems in gold directly, it is to raise the amount of gold that you get from converting gems into gold. Because the gem price in real money doesn’t float, I think the algorithm had to make some assumptions about what the differential in desirability would be and in my opinion, I think the assumption missed the mark a little.

Look at how expensive a precursor is in real money even with the exchange rate being highly favorable to the folks converting gems into gold. Let’s say the rate is currently 6.5 G for $1.25. At around 40G that means that an Abyss dye is about $7.50. If Dawn is about 590 G, that’s about $113. I’d rather just earn the gold in game and spend my money on items in the gem store directly. The things I can buy for money in the gem store are far more attractive to me than the items I would need gold to buy, especially when I can play the game and potentially get any of those items dropped while I’m enjoying myself.

Gold is not nearly as valuable as gems, and the exchange rate reflects that.

serialkicker.5274

And where are those plenty reasons? I can only see one, repeated over and over again, just in slightly different words – trolling/harrasing, for which we came to conclusion that no one can predict what would happen if dueling would be implemented and trolling would most likely not be such a big problem as you claim it would be, especially if proper system for accepting/declining would be put in.
But i guess you simply have chosen to ignore those ideas?

“We” did not come to that conclusion, you did. The folks that are opposed to open world duelling know exactly how big a problem it will be because other games have open world duelling and we’ve experienced it.

Spam challenging isn’t that big a deal – there are UI solutions for that – but folks dueling the bank, or in the middle of the dynamic event, or any other area where most of the folks are there for a different purpose is, and there is nothing that the folks that are annoyed by it can do to avoid it without having to leave the area and do something other than they wanted to do.

There is no compelling reason why duelling won’t work as well in a designated area and having a designated area opens up the possibility of making the duels more interesting and meaningful. The main reason I can see for being against designated duelling areas is because you want to troll folks that don’t want to duel, or otherwise annoy folks doing PvE content.

Fror.2163:

Pandemoniac.4739:

Why should they hide upcoming sales? I see exactly the same thing in the RSS feed as I do on the web site. I don’t understand the issue.

When you look at the website, you see only the sales for today.

Ah that was my mistake – I opened the article from my RSS feed. I need more coffee

Edit I think that now that it’s in the open for some folks, they should just update the web page. I guess they could rearrange the sale days, but I think that would leave a bad taste for a lot of folks.

Scrambles.2604:

He who sacrifices liberty for security deserves neither :P Not the best application of the quote but i believe it’s still apt. The point of trolls is to ruin everything, so if you let features get restricted based on the behavior of a tiny percentage of trouble makers you let the trolls win.

And that small anti-social percentage of the population is why we can have unrestricted freedom. We can’t drive as fast as we feel like, we can’t walk around nude in public because it make some folks really uncomfortable, et. al. If we choose to live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association, we can’t paint our houses that bright purple color we really love. We put up with that restriction because at least we won’t have to look at our neighbor’s house painted in that neon green color we really hate.

I believe in maximizing freedom, but I also recognize that there is a balance to strike so that everyone’s freedom is maximized at the cost of each individual in a community not having complete freedom. If you want complete freedom, you have to live away from society.

Scrambles.2604:

Just because someone has trolled you with duel requests once, twice, or a dozen times, is not a great reason to ban open world dueling for everyone for all of eternity.

I’ve shown respect for your point of view and you keep saying that my point of view is silly and painting me with the “over-sensitive” brush. My skin is actually pretty thick – it has to be as a woman that has been an Engineer for coming up on three decades now and a gamer longer than that. What I don’t tolerate very well is being annoyed when I’m trying to enjoy a few hours away from work, whether it is by other players or by the game mechanics.

I don’t play MMOs that require me to return to quest givers anymore, because it annoys me. I could ignore the dailies and cut down my annoyance, but why would I? It’s a game and I’m not having fun, so why play? Likewise, I could ignore the annoyance of the small percentage of duel trolls, but why wouldn’t I speak up and express that it annoys me so I potentially don’t have to? Will I rage quit over open world duelling? No, of course not, but I’m not going to suck it up it silence if I have a chance to influence the direction of the game toward a less annoying experience for me.

Scrambles.2604:

I’m still impressed you guys manage to get trolled so often in the same games i’ve played and not been trolled in. Maybe i just have a thicker skin then i realize :P

I like hybrid builds and taking the least popular classes/weapons/skills and making them work. It makes me look like an easy target for folks that think DPS is the only way to win, so I get challenged a lot by burst damage twinkers who think I’m going to be a quick and easy kill.

One of the best PvP experiences I ever had was repeatedly trouncing a granite tank in one of the City of Heroes PvP zones with my empathy defender. Lol he was so angry and kept coming back for more and I obliged him. For folks that aren’t familiar with COH – empathy defenders were supposed to be healers and stand around supporting other folks while they DPSed and granite tanks were supposed to be impossible to kill because of their insane defenses. For me PvP is all about the meta-game and countering the flavor of the month. It entertains me to teach the folks with the cookie cutter uber builds that being predictable is a huge liability when competing against real humans.

Fror.2163:

We’re currently in a sale period and the feed shows all the foreseen sales until next Monday.

You might want to hide that information from us.

Why should they hide upcoming sales? I see exactly the same thing in the RSS feed as I do on the web site. I don’t understand the issue.

Astral Projections.7320:

This also isn’t a bug but rather a suggestion. Wrong forum and not read by the staff people who take notes of suggestions.

Maybe the Suggestions forum, if you want to make a suggestion.

Suggestion isn’t in the title, but this is the forum that the folks responsible for the website and forums read. I think it’s better to put suggestions about the forum and websites here instead of mixing them in with the game suggestions.

I do think that “Subscribe” not working is a bug…. there’s an option to e-mail replies in our forum profiles, and it doesn’t work (or at least I can’t get it to work). I have to use RSS to keep track of threads.

Scrambles.2604:

So while players may generally gravitate towards dueling in one area, the difference is simply being given the freedom to do so. I think being given that freedom is a huge deal.

Like i said in my post above, most of the disagreement comes from the our own perceptions of the actual impact dueling will have on other people’s games. I think that impact is minimal and just overblown on these forums.

I have played other games with dueling, as well (WoW, SWTOR, DCU), and most duels occur in areas that players tend to gravitate towards, and not really as much out in the open world, yet they are still free to do so if they want. Which is why i maintain that dueling in the open world will not significantly impact your game or impede your ability to play if you choose not to duel.

At this point, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. We accept restrictions on our individual freedom every day so our community as a whole can have a better quality of life, so I don’t find the freedom to choose argument that compelling. You keep telling me open world duelling doesn’t impact me, and I keep telling you it does. If you can’t accept that something that doesn’t bother you could really bug someone else, we can’t make any forward progress and we’ll have to shake hands and part ways.

I’m not arguing my perception of what will happen with open world duelling – I’m arguing from my experience. Your experience is different from mine, because you are actually interested in duelling. My experience is getting pestered by some hyperactive player hopping in circles around me and spam challenging me as fast as I can decline as I’m trying to go about my business and folks insisting on duelling in the most populated areas of the world, which I can’t blame them for because it’s the best way to find opponents, but which is incredibly annoying to me, even though you might not find it to be a big deal.

dimachaerus.4962:

Seriously, this food is the most overpowered thing in the game. It’s what makes wvw and pve unbalanced.
For zergs and group fights in wvw the -40% condi duration is just way too good for everyone to have and makes condi cleanse almost redundant.

For solo roaming the +40% condi duration is so useful, every condi build uses it.

A lot of people complain condis are OP in solo roaming, and that condis get cleansed way too fast in zerg fights. solution? start with the removal of these +condi duration foods and see how it goes.

I think somethings wrong when entire builds are built around these foods….

thoughts?

My thought is that I change my build/gear/character for how I plan to play. If I’m solo roaming, I make sure that I have conditional removal and stun breakers. If I’ve got some friends to roam with, we co-ordinate, just like drinking a potion of Nightmare Slaying might make sense if you’re going into Twilight Arbor.

I don’t think simplifying the meta game would make GW2 more interesting. In my opinion, if one build/character is the only choice for every situation, that’s bad and boring game design.

Scrambles.2604:

I’m not trying to be inconsiderate to the anti-duel crowd. I just don’t think compromises should be made for something that wont effect you if you don’t want it to.

For example, i have never cared for the super adventure box. I understand other people enjoy it, but it’s simply not for me.

I’m not anti-duel, I’m just against open world duelling. You keep saying it won’t affect us, and we keep saying it will. It’s not like most of us have never played a game with open world duelling. We know exactly how it plays out based on experience. You as an individual might not be inconsiderate, but you can’t speak for the entire population.

Scrambles.2604:

Now imagine if i cried on the forums, “why do they waste their time developing SAB?? why do i have to listen to people discussing the SAB in chat? why do i have to see people carrying around silly SAB skins with their annoying sounds? Why am i getting mail about the SAB!? SAB is detrimental to my gameplay!!”

But in reality, i just choose not to do it, and accept that their are people out their that do enjoy it. And their enjoyment of the SAB doesn’t effect my gameplay if i don’t participate in it.

I’m not arguing against development time being spent on duelling. I actually think it would be a really cool feature if ANet invested more time into it than adding /duel. SAB isn’t a very good comparison, because it’s limited to a specific area, and folks can’t spam you with invitations to join SAB.

On one hand the open world duellers are saying – “oh we’ll just duel in out of the way areas and you’ll never be impacted” and on the other hand they’re saying “I want to be able to duel anyone anywhere at any time”, so I remain unconvinced that limiting duelling to specific areas isn’t a good compromise.

Just like you believe that open world duelling isn’t that inconvenient for the folks that don’t want to deal with it, I believe that easily accessible, limited areas aren’t that much of an inconvenience to the folks that want to duel. As a matter of fact, I see a lot of advantages to giving duellers a location (or several) to gravitate to so they can find other like-minded folks to test themselves against. Actually what’s happened in every game that I’ve played with open world duelling is that there was an unofficial area where most folks would gather to duel. What’s the problem with making it official?

Scrambles.2604:

the problem with arena duels – technical issues (“load screens”)

the problem with open world duels – personal issues (“i don’t want to see people duel”)

Having a defined area for duels doesn’t mean you have to go through a loading screen whenever you want to duel. If you’re just killing time, there’s always costume brawl.

I find the attitude that if other folks are bothered by something it’s their personal problem and they should just suck it up so I can do whatever I feel like doing really depressing and anti-social. If it was one person that was annoyed, it might be their problem, but there are a significant number of folks that don’t want to deal with open world duelling. Why not compromise a little and have some consideration for other folks? Can’t we all just get along? :P

Besides, the more I think about it having a duelling arena might actually make me interested in giving it a try. I do like PvP, I just find duelling pointless. It might be more interesting if the competitors could each ante up something, sort like racing for pink slips. Or if there were leaderboards. It might even be fun to just be an audience and do a little betting with an NPC bookmaker with odds based on a win/loss record.

In my opinion, making it a mini-game with achievements would be more likely to interest folks in PvP than being annoyed with strangers challenging them and duellers fighting around them. I’ve played plenty of games with open world duelling, and I’ve never once seen someone say, “Wow, I never realized how fun PvP was until I accidentally hit accept after being spammed 50 times with a duel challenge and then getting roflstomped by a player that was twinked to the gills.”

I understand the appeal of going mano-a-mano in your PvE gear instead of doing sPvP, but I don’t understand why it’s only appealing to some folks if it is open world.

Bron.9647:

I also disagree. I really like the dynamic leveling, because it opens up the possibilities of places where you can play at the high levels. I mean who wants to be stuck to 3 or 4 zones at level 80. Plus, you can play on your level 80 with your lowbie friends and not feel like you completely over power everything and are wasting your time one-shotting enemies that you get crap loot for.

I agree with you – in other games the world gets smaller as you get higher level. I was level 80 for a really long time before I set foot in Orr. Dynamic leveling allowed me to experience all the starter areas without having to make an alt.

The most important thing in my experience is to keep your gear current to your level. I had forgotten about my underwater weapon being 10 or so levels away from my real level and got my butt handed to me in that underwater event in the low level Asura zone. If your gear is close to your level it seems to scale better (even if it is only masterwork gear). I did a lot of group events in lower level zones solo without much problem.

It’s also nice that you can get XP and level appropriate drops when you’re cruising around looking for T1 crafting materials so you aren’t penalized for waiting to level your crafting (or trying to take advantage of a lack of supply on the market).

Nothing in this thread hasn’t already been said in Open world Duels [Merged]

I don’t understand why folks wouldn’t want to duel it in an easily accessible area like the arena in the Black Citadel. It would make it easier for duellers to find each other, and you wouldn’t have to spam challenge random strangers to find someone interested. Heck you could evolve it into a mini-game with betting, leaderboards, different duel types (disable healing for example) and all sorts of fun stuff.

I’m not opposed to there being a duelling option added, but I don’t want to have wade around folks duelling in the streets or have to fill up my ignore list with folks that won’t take no for an answer.

It would be great if I was warned that my post was going to be over the character limit when I previewed it instead of getting an error when I hit reply.

I’m not always that long winded, but I do like to quote a lot for context. It’s not a huge deal to trim things up after I hit reply and get the error, but I think if the system can check on posting, it could be made to check on previewing without too much trouble.

Also, it would be nice if the topic title box didn’t let me put in more than 45 characters, seeing as I just ran into that error too. I guess I’m more long winded that I thought

Kaon.7192:

The bottom line is the current system is both objectively inefficient and subjectively unfair (to most market participants that don’t engage in automated trading).

I don’t see how minimum increments are going to solve the subjective problem (I don’t really see it as unfair, but apparently I’m in the minority), and I think the that whether increments solve the objective problem would really depend on the implementation. It seems like a brute force way to solve an issue that may be able to be solved more elegantly.

I wonder if sellers had an opportunity to select from say, the top 20 buy orders instead of being forced to take the literal best price if that wouldn’t take care of some of the problem. If the seller sees 4G and 4G +1c as the same price, why shouldn’t they be able to choose the 4G orders to sell to? It would be interesting to see how folks’ strategies for buy orders and selling patterns would change. I wonder if the buy orders would change to increments that try to say “Hey I’m not a bot!”.

If only I could steal John’s job for a few months…. I could make thousands of GW2 players my lab rats I don’t know how John resists the temptation.

And sorry for my earlier posts – I didn’t intend to pick on you Kaon.

Behellagh.1468:

This is what the whole topic is about, feeling better when you lose because you lost by more than 1c on a multi-gold item.

Ah you’ve caught me. I was hoping it could be diverted to a more interesting and productive discussion but I can’t get folks to let go of the subjective part of the argument. Probably the thread is too far along for that so I’ll stop with the needling

Kaon.7192:

Yes but the ebb and flow of supply and demand in the TP will be much more efficient (i.e. reach equilibrium and minimize spreads much faster) if it didn’t have very the same noise issues most auctions would face if they had no minimum increments implemented.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Well why not make that argument instead of talking about sniping?

Kaon.7192:

See the quote I was responding to.

I did. You’re arguing about FIFO and fairness, not equilibrium and spreads. I’m just curious why you would go down that path instead of arguing from what I think is a stronger position.

Kaon.7192:

Pandemoniac.4739:

The TP isn’t an auction house, it’s a commodities market. There is no sniping of one unique and special item up for sale, there is only the ebb and flow of supply and demand.

Yes but the ebb and flow of supply and demand in the TP will be much more efficient (i.e. reach equilibrium and minimize spreads much faster) if it didn’t have very the same noise issues most auctions would face if they had no minimum increments implemented.

Well why not make that argument instead of talking about sniping?

Kaon.7192:

To snipe an item on ebay or most other auction sites, you need to outbid by more than the minimum increment that scales according to the current max bid of the item. This is precisely to preserve the notion of “fairness” for its bidders and because an 1c difference on a $1000 item is in fact considered noise as far as ebay is concerned.

The TP isn’t an auction house, it’s a commodities market. There is no sniping of one unique and special item up for sale, there is only the ebb and flow of supply and demand.

Risingashes.8694:

This isn’t a la-di-da commune where we sing coom-bye-ya and howl at the moon. We’re all capatalists here. Competition is a valuable aspect of markets. If you get underbid or overbid then cry crocodile tears, them’s the breaks.

I don’t see how picking an arbitrary point in the undercutting and saying at THIS point someone is getting priority when they shouldn’t, but not at THIS point over here, makes any sense at all as a logical argument.

The person that gets priority is the one with the best price. If your price point sticks around long enough that other folks can list at essentially the same price point and your stuff doesn’t sell within the time period you want, you picked the wrong price.

Risingashes.8694:

People asking for a change aren’t asking to stop undercutting. They’re asking to fix an area where competition is being limited by a market failure.

The person really hurt here isn’t the undercut person, it’s the person buying the item instantly, or the people selling items instantly. They’re paying more, or getting less than they should be if the market was operating properly.

I don’t understand your point here (probably because I’m not seeing the “market failure”). There is no imaginary correct price that folks are getting screwed out of here – if the price isn’t right, folks won’t buy the item. I don’t pay any more than I’m willing to pay for anything I buy on the TP. You can hypothesize all the scenarios you want to about how the item could have been sold for less or might have been sold for more, but what it comes down to is the item is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and not 1c more.

I understand the feeling that somehow it’s unfair for someone to list something at essentially the same price and sell theirs first. I actually go out of my way to buy items that were undercut by such a small increment that it’s sort of insulting to me that the undercutter thinks I’ll prefer his price.

I poked around the TP a little bit however, and I’m just not seeing a lot of overcutting or undercutting by 1c over an arbitrary sampling of items. Maybe the solution isn’t minimum increments, maybe it’s to allow the seller to fill the buy order they choose, even if it isn’t the best price. I know it seems silly to allow folks to do that, but in the cases where the 1c over-bidders are trying to cut in line, the seller could make a conscious decision not to do business with them, and still instantly sell their item.

Risingashes.8694:

If the current sell price for an item is 500g, and you think “that’s silly”, I’m going to move this fast and sell at 450g to sell it fast. Everyone is getting items in the same way, there is no such thing as efficiency when it comes to item aquisition. So if you can sell for 450g and be happy with it, others are going to also think that’s profitable- not as profitable as 500g mind you.

So the undercutter will list at 449g99s99c, and they’ll have priority over you. It’s impossible for you to find a price point where it’s not just as worth it for an undercutter to list at -1c, because -1c is nothing compared to the total price.

My item will most likely have sold before the undercutter found it, and if it didn’t sell before it was undercut, both mine and the undercutters’ will have sold because the price is so attractive. It might even be bought up by a trader who will flip it at a higher price. I don’t care because I got the money I wanted for it in the time frame I wanted to get it.

You can create all the hypothetical scenarios that you want, but I never see the folks undercutting me. All I see is the indicator that I have stuff to pick up in the TP. 90% of everything I list or bid on gets executed. The other 10% was mostly gambling to see if I could do better.

Risingashes.8694:

Pandemoniac.4739:

I just think the FIFO/undercutting/overcutting argument is a poor justification.

It’s a poor justification because you don’t know how it would effect things and therefore shouldn’t be done?

Well the glib answer would be “If it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it”… or maybe “First, do no harm”.

In my opinion, it’s poor justification because it’s based on feelings of unfairness and hypothetical scenarios that are basically how folks imagine things would play out. I think getting prices to their equilibrium point more quickly is a better argument because it’s more objective.

We don’t have the information to know how big a problem 1c undercutting actually is in economic terms nor exactly what effect minimum increments would have. That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it and speculate, but I think it’s counter-productive to argue it as the only possible solution. I don’t even think we’ve managed to agree there is a problem to be solved yet.