Guild Wars 2

It doesn’t have a countdown on it, which the explicitly Halloween-related outfits do. That implies that it’s not going away at the same time the others are, or it would, logically, have the same limited-time notice.

As far as I know, no one has explicitly confirmed how long the outfit is sticking around. Personally, I feel very safe in thinking that it’s more or less permanent, but if you reeeaaally need to be sure, buying it now is the safest bet.

…What kind of solution do you think an admin could provide? A badge that says “This person gets reported a lot, but they’re cool, so don’t worry about it?” I’m asking seriously.

If you find yourself getting reported a lot, reassess your behavior and see if you can or should do something different. It’s possible they’re just taking out their frustration/annoyance on you, but it’s also possible that perhaps you’re not entirely blameless, for reasons you haven’t quite noticed.

I’m not saying you are. I don’t know you, and I’ve never played with you, but it’s something to think about. If you’re sure it’s not your fault, I wouldn’t worry about it.

In fairness, that cutscene played once in the original Halloween event, and it was so bugged that when I saw it, there was no Mad King in the shot. The statue just blew up for no reason. I think people occasionally forget that Halloween 2012 wasn’t perfect, even though I do like a lot of things it had, some of which haven’t returned.

You can’t fight the Mad King himself this year, but you can fight his son, the Bloody Prince. The Labyrinth, Clocktower, and Lunatic Inquisition are also back, although Reaper’s Rumble has been MIA the past two years.

saalle.4623:

Why u wait 1h to do Tequatl when it does not give you anything?Its waste of time since its not rewording at all.

-cringe-

But, to answer the question, the fight itself can’t take more than 21 minutes, and it’s usually more like 13. I usually get there half an hour early, but organization can start later and be perfectly fine; I just like erring on the safe side, getting my favorite place, and hanging out. So while the whole thing might take an hour, it’s really less than that, and a substantial portion can be AFK or goofing around with other players.

It’s not crazy-lucrative by any means, but it’s enjoyable and reasonably profitable. I meet interesting people and turn a tidy profit.

Huh. Just checked it out, and there is, indeed, an endurance drain on the witch broom.

How long has that been happening? Am I just so unobservant I didn’t notice it in two years? T__T

That stinks. For what it’s worth, though, most Tequatl runs, in my experience, don’t have this problem, so I think your experience was more exceptional than normal.

There are some achievements for the racial storylines, but, trust me, the AP gained is completely negligible unless you’re a hardcore achievement hunter who needs every. Single. Point.

Just play whatever appeals to you. If you want to get a broad experience of the world, you can try a storyline from each race, centered around their home cities. If you find you really like, say, Norn, you can make three different Norn characters before you start repeating storylines. Each race has some unique armor skins, and unique skills, but you don’t need those skills to be effective at any given class. Most people seem to ignore them.

(Personally, I really like some of the racial skills, but they’re not enough to make me choose one race over the other at character creation.)

Is this the witch broom or the riding broom? Witch broom is the one that comes with the outfit and includes costume skills, while the riding broom is sold on it’s own.

I have the witch broom, and I’ve never noticed any endurance drain with it.

I’m not particularly knowledgeable about economic theory, but I can’t help thinking this is stretching the concept of a monopoly well past the point where it’s very useful.

I was there, too, and I took a TON of pictures.

Crazy days. I loved every minute of Beta, minus those minutes wasted on technical issues and my laptop overheating, the poor thing.

<3

I’ve gotten back into fighting Tequatl at reset lately, which is a relatively low-intensity way to make some gold in a short period. I usually get there around half an hour early, chill out at my favorite spot (North Boats FTW!) and often get to meet some fun people in the meanwhile. Then it’s fifteen minutes of well-organized combat, and everyone goes home with their pockets full and their spirits high.

If I have more time, I’m still a big fan of the World Boss circuit, especially now that it’s on a more reliable schedule after the mega-server change. You’re never going to make the same kind of gold that way as Dungeons or Champ-farming, but I think it’s relaxing, and a great option if I’m watching TV or chatting in another window.

Labjax.2465:

Silver Chopper.4506:

how do I make gold?

I go to work, 5 to 6 times a week.

I don’t know quite how to say this…

I think you may want to file a complaint with the union if your company is paying you in gold.

Don’t worry, I get paid in company script. I’m not an idiot.

I’m sure there’s another thread about this somewhere, or more than one, but it would be great if we could check/uncheck a box to make our head slot item appear with or override our outfit. While I’m not sure how well this would work with some of the more…unusual…armor pieces, the head slot is just full of interesting pieces, especially after so many town clothes hats were converted to armor.

I’m extremely glad to hear that a custom amount option is coming. I don’t even care about whether it’s coming "soon"—I’m just glad it’s changing, and to hear about it. Despite occasional complaints, I do think people at Anet generally care about the players’ experiences, and I do think they’re open to constructive criticism like this.

For what it’s worth, I was always in favor of hearing about tentative plans, with the understanding that timetables can change, and that ideas can change as they’re developed. I’ve got a lot of faith in the dev team, but silence leaves people to assume the worst, that changes people don’t like were either made carelessly or intentionally.

It’s hard to know your situation, obviously, but I think Guhracie has the right general idea. If you’re losing sleep over GW2, not over people in it, but over the game itself, then you might need to take a step back and reassess how you relate to it, to the importance of in-game rewards, and so on.

I’m not going to downplay your frustration, but if the game is having that significant an effect on you, things are out of balance. It’s totally normal to feel frustrated, and get mad, but if you’re not having fun, and feeling depressed, the game isn’t serving a healthy role in your life.

My advice: Take a break. Take some time off from grinding. If you reassess what you enjoy about the game, and what you value in it, great, but the first and most important thing is to get a little distance, so you can get a fresh perspective on the situation and break out of that rut.

If taking a break sounds difficult, that might be more reason to do so, and to find someone to talk to about it. I hope things get better!

I’m intrigued by this as a new and novel thing, although I’m not optimistic about getting one, so my excitement has its limits. Neat effect, but I’m not going to pay a huge amount for it.

Still, it’s a neat new toy that isn’t in the gem store, which I hope people will appreciate for that fact on top of its own merits.

While I don’t know how many players the game has / how many copies have been sold, about 3.5 million copies were sold in the first year. That was two years ago, so let’s be super generous and say the number is 7 million now.

Do you think one out of seventy players are likely to spend money on housing doodads at the same rate that you do? If we -don’t- assume that the game went full-steam ahead after launch year, is that number still realistic?

If it seems like these numbers seem a bit too arbitrary or incomplete to firmly say how much money would or would not have been made, that’s because they are arbitrary and incomplete. Food for thought, as long as we’re saying things like “That’s $30,000,000 in lost revenue because ArenaNet isn’t implementing <niche feature>.”

This is not an idea I’d particularly care to see implemented. Allowing all the one-handed weapons to have a “two-handed mode” would require dev resources to develop new skills, and I’d rather see those resources put into developing new utility skills or new weapon sets. (Which take even more resources, but, still, I don’t care for this middle-option of filling out one-handed weapons, especially when they’d need new systems for double signets, changing stats, and to make this skill setup work at all.)

I’m not sure what this would do the value of weapons. One-handed weapons tend to cost less than two-handed weapons, but if you could get a full setup with a single one-handed weapon, should they cost as much as two-handed weapons? But, then, dual-wielding setups become even more relatively expensive than they currently are…

It might sound like a simple idea, but it’s more complex and problematic than it appears, and isn’t worthwhile, in my opinion.

They’re retiring Lovestruck, Dragon’s Jade, Aetherblade, Fused, and Dreamthistle weapon sets in a few weeks (according to the patch notes,) so that’s the solution to your “NPC is running out of tabs” problem. Without getting into opinions on whether that’s the best solution, or other factors involved, that’s a thing that’s happening regardless.

You want the option to buy weapons directly…for, what, gold? How much would you say is the appropriate price? Around the same cost as Sovereign Weapons, or the hundreds of gold Black Lion skins cost on the trading post?

I actually prefer the male version, although they’re both a little too close to the Witch outfit, in my opinion.

Kinda a drag when male/female outfits are significantly different like this. They both have their fans, and they both have their fans who would like to have the other gender’s version available.

(Having said that, I think it’s awesome that there’s an outfit that can be earned in-game, and not through the gem store. I might not be a -huge- fan of these designs, since I already own/prefer to witch outfit, but it’s a sweet reward just the same.)

The Clocktower is crazy if you’re not accustomed to it, or having connection problems/lag, but it works perfectly fine for me, so when you’re experiencing it as intended, I can’t really say it’s unfair or particularly confusing.

I mean, maybe the PvP-style setup of it is confusing? I dunno what else there is to be confused about.

(I’m mostly talking about the Clocktower because it’s my favorite Halloween thing to do, and it was mentioned in the OP. I’m not sure what’s confusing about the other activities, either, but maybe I’m too accustomed to them to remember if it’s confusing at all.)

I’m disappointed in this change. At first I was excited about it, because the new exchange screen looks nice and it does give me a quick idea of how much certain increments will cost me. Then I realized I could /only/ buy in those increments, which is just plain anti-consumer. If it’s a question of confusion, I don’t see why they can’t offer custom amounts alongside the fixed amounts.

I know there are sales reasons for fixed amount sales, but there’s no way to look at this, from a consumer standpoint, and say “My experience is better for it,” when fixed amounts are the only option. I know that lots of people on staff care about the consumer experience, but I’m disappointed that, one way or another, this happened.

Also, no longer displaying gold-gem rates over time is just inconvenient. Now I have to check GW2Spidy for that information, because having it on the page, in-game, where I need it, is no longer available.

Daishi.6027:

I understand that these things have little representation of a players skill, but it is also a good way to gauge the level of experience, where someone primarily plays, and much easier to point out biases.

More information doesn’t guarantee that information will be interpreted correctly.

Presenting more background data on posters provides more information on where the opinions are coming from, but everyone’s going to weight those data points differently, and people can use those points to dismiss each other’s (possibly valid) points, or stroke their own egos.

Would this happen? Not every time, but it would definitely happen. Stats like these wouldn’t be all-upside, and I don’t think they’d be quite as valuable here as you might think.

If people want to provide background info, I think it’s enough to say so in the post, or in their signatures.

Dramatic much? While I don’t like people being kicked for now readily-apparent reason, you’ve probably wasted near as much time with this forum post as you would running through Spider Queen. Just don’t party with them again and move on with your life. If you report them, that’s that—Move on.

This thread itself is incredibly awkward. You don’t have a ton to work with, information-wise, and you’re just making up a lot of it from whole cloth to fit the situation. That might have seemed like a good idea, but it’s not. You’re asking for opinions on a made up situation, on a half-fictional person. Even if it started with something that really happened, you, a biased party, wrote it up from the perspective of someone you personally dislike, so is it any surprise at all that other people are finding the character your wrote unpleasant?

I’m not even going to add any more thoughts about the in-game situation, because the strangeness of the way this thread is written overshadows that situation.

[edit] Just now realizing there’s a playlist, not just a single video. Four runs isn’t a great deal better than one, statistically, but it is a better sample. [/edit]

One run, with six people, isn’t enough to really prove anything, except that six people will not automatically spawn champs 100% of the time. I’ve seen multiple champs spawn on five people, and I’ve seen champs spawn with less than five people. There’s clearly some element of RNG involved, but it’ll take more data to figure out the pattern with confidence.

That said, I almost always do North Boats, and we very, very rarely get overrun with five people, and I wonder if that might have more to do with team strength than spawns. Stationing more people there might help, but that’s taking more people from the zerg. Right now, I’m convinced that five at each station is good (or good enough,) preferably with an emergency rescue team (ERT) ready to back up defense teams when they need it.

That said, I almost always run Tequatl at the daily reset, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a failure during primetime.

Depends on what you enjoy. Some people love it, and others don’t bother with it.

If you want to be on the safe side, you can pick a strong WvW server, but other than that it really doesn’t matter nowadays, thanks to changes they’ve made to the server system which mix people from different servers together to populate maps, instead of just having different copies of maps based on servers.

Serious question to the OP: Specifically, what kinds of new items do you want merchants to sell for gold?

Are we talking about more weapons? Armor? Tonics? Environmental Weapons? Minis? Toys?

I’m curious about which area you think needs more variety, and if it’s a popular area like weapons/armor, how you would price it.

…You don’t like how the grass and trees look, so you think the world will look better without them at all?

-blink, blink-

Well, to each their own, I suppose. I’ve never heard of a way to turn them off.

Korossive.7085:

It started good, then they botched it, then they fixed it, recently they botched it, and now were waiting for them to fix it again.

This issue is still pending as developers are currently busy making more minis and outfits instead.

This idea seems to come up a lot, that “thing I don’t like” is distracting the devs from “thing I do like,” and it’s only sometimes applicable. The developers who make minis and outfits aren’t the same developers that do programming bugs and camera controls.

There’s no single right answer on this. Some people are going to be unhappy that they can’t get old rewards, and some people are going to be unhappy when they start giving out old rewards again. I think the laurel vendor selling -some- of the old rewards is a compromise between the two extremes, and I’m okay with that.

That leaves the question of which skins belong in which category, and there’s -definitely- no easy answer there.

I’d settle for the search feature getting fixed.

While I’ve had some good times on these forums, and I understand that they have certain inherent ups and downs as the official forum for the game, they have always felt unusually impersonal. There are just so many users that come through it (because it’s the official forum) that it’s difficult to build up a sense of the forum regulars without something extra to put a face (literally or metaphorically) on the person posting.

I don’t know if somehow pulling character data to generate profile pictures would ever be possible or practical, but it would be a neat feature, anyway. I’m not going to hold out hope for any significant changes to the forum software, however.

I’m not sure where all this talk about gladiums being in the prison is coming from. They’re not super popular, but they’re certainly not illegal. I’d expect most charr to pity them as much or more than scorn them.

Personally, I assumed the prisoners were either some kind of separatist group or Flame Legion. I’m not a fan of whipping prisoners of war to make them mine faster, of course, but it’s certainly not out of character for the Legions to treat prisoners that way. But I don’t approve of Asura experimenting on live ettins, either. It’s a big world, and not all of the NPCs are morally outstanding.

Fortunately, in this case, we can complete the heart without actually beating up prisoners. I’d be more conflicted if we didn’t have an option.

There are more than a couple nice hats that I wish I could use, but won’t, because my character is suddenly bald, which is jarring and strange. I mean, sure, hats clip with hair, but if that’s too big a problem to overcome, even in a “add some tucked-under hair” sort of way, why introduce those kinds of hats in the first place?

As Donari says, I like the Wizard Hat because it sidesteps the problem. I know the inability to dye this old, limited-run skin is not the most important problem in the world, but it’s still frustrating.

That would be pretty great. I assume it was probably grey-only to tie it to Gandalf the Grey, since it appeared to celebrate the first Hobbit movie, but it’s a struggle to match it to most outfits when I can’t dye it.

I can dye the rest of my clothes to match, but, given my white beard and staff, that leaves me thirteen dwarves away from setting into motion my own plan to destroy Primordus. ):

I’m not upset, because I’ve probably never used this it in a dungeon before anyway. (Although, with the five minute use, thirty-minute cooldown ratio, I hardly ever use it at all.) (Although, I can understand that some people did use it and enjoy it in dungeons.)

Mostly, I’m just confused. What problem is this change fixing? If the problem is fixed, why can’t we be told what the problem was in the patch notes?

It’s discouraging when we see things like this get changed for the worse with no obvious reason for it. I know there are people on the other side making these changes, but it makes game updates seem frustratingly random and arbitrary.

…This thread is from October. Of last year.

I don’t know how much the Aether Key Piece drop rate has changed since then, but they’re probably not going to be reading your response. ;P

I assume they’re only offering some of the rewards via the laurel vendor as a compromise between keeping event rewards exclusive and making their skins accessible. While I don’t care tremendously about my own gear being super rare and exclusive, that idea does have a lot of appeal for some people, especially if they thought the events would never be obtainable again, and made a big effort to get them during the event.

As Belzebu says, you’ll unlock a new sequence of story missions every ten levels. You still have a lot of story left to go—It’s just not communicated very well that the next story sequence is a thing that unlocks.

None of the new features, as far as I’m aware, are useful for making a GW2 app. Which is okay, because apparently things like the OP wants already exist.

This seems…a little confused. iOS8 eases up on some of the things it lets apps do (talk to each other, replace the keyboard, etc.,) but I don’t see how the new developer features, as far as I understand them, open up anything that couldn’t be done already, as far as the GW2 API is concerned.

Apple’s always allowed third party software. That’s what apps (usually) are.

Edit: Indeed, a quick search is turning up apps to help with crafting, world boss events, character builds, etc. I can’t vouch for any of them being good or not, but they’re already available.

Hrm. I’m glad to see the trial return, and I don’t mind it being a weekend trial, but not telling people about it on the home page, on facebook, etc. seems like a missed opportunity.

I wonder if it’ll be a permanently-available free trial this time, rather than the trial weekend they did before. If it starts on the 25th, and today is the 23rd, and they haven’t announced it officially yet, that’s not really enough time for people to plan anything with friends.

Hopefully it’ll be an on-going thing, then. Assuming all the expected limits are in place for trial accounts, that should be a good thing, if it encourages more people to try the game. (And saves us from the heavy load of a trial weekend, although I think things should be more stable by now than they were in November 2012.)

I’m fine with time gating, and if this system encourages you to work with friends / guildmates / crafters who feel like crafting for other people is actually valuable for once to get around some of the time gating, that seems like a good system.

Can you eke out some advantages by having a second account? Sure. You could craft time gated things, do more world bosses, earn more laurels (for material bags), or gather more materials from the same locations. But just because you can bypass that stuff by playing alone with a second account doesn’t mean those limits are pointless and should be removed.

It’s completely free to change dye on armor, provided you’ve already bought/used the dye colors, of course. It uses the same interface as the wardrobe / transmutation for confirmation, but it’ll never take any charges to change dye.

Good thing, too, because I change dyes on my characters constantly.

I’m…not entirely sure I see what the problem is. If you don’t like hanging onto things, stick them in the bank, or on an alt, or just toss them out if you’re never going to use them.

Also, I’d have been afraid to see your boost collection before Boost Enchantment Powder. Which is a thing that I’d forgotten exists, and which I should probably invest in.

I say either use it, or hold onto it. If you’re just starting out, what are you going to do with 40G, exactly? You can’t really invest it in gear until you’re max level, and you don’t really need a lot of gold on your way there, unless you want to get into crafting or something. (Which I wouldn’t recommend anyway, since I had fun saving that until I had a healthy stock of materials.)

If you want the black dye option, you can start getting all the bang for your buck right away, and it’ll never go away. If you just want gold, it seems unlikely that the price of Abyss will have dropped by the time you reach level 80 and can see which you’d prefer.

I definitely wouldn’t recommend selling it now, then buying it again later, due to the trading post tax. Even if the price stays the same, you’ll be losing 15% of it to the TP fee.

Draknar.5748:

This is a non-issue. If you guys really need to have that kind of consistency, every time you level, go to a map and grab the nearest skill point. There. Now you have a skill point on level up, plus 7 additional SPs every 7 levels. You’ll have more SPs than you know what to do with…

This…is a pretty good point. If a person needs to have the next skill right away, and they need X skill points for it, then they can go a-questing for it out in the world somewhere. If the new system makes that experience a bit more valued, that seems like a good thing.

That’s…a good question.

FYI, you can use Print Screen to take screenshots directly, instead of pointing a camera at the monitor. You’ll get better quality and we won’t end up with 3,264px × 2,448px photos.

Thanks, folks! These are exactly the sorts of suggestions I was looking for.

Or, rather, where you do prefer to get the exotics to salvage for it? I’m thinking of finally biting the bullet on ascended crafting soon, and Dark Matter is the part of the process I’m the most hesitant about.

Do you craft exotics, then salvage them? Buy them on the Trading Post? Some third option?

I’ve got plenty of freebie Black Lion Salvaging Kits to use, but any suggestions to keep the cost to a minimum would be appreciated.

Just speaking for myself, I talked about GW1’s damage type system because the question was simply “Why are elemental types not in the game?” and that’s a good example of a damage type system being present, but not really adding to the game in a major way.

Could it be baked into the game in a major way that would be a lot of fun? Of course. But it wasn’t designed that way, and I think it would be a distinctly different game if it was. I think trying to integrate it after-the-fact is trying to make it something it isn’t, and wouldn’t go well.