Guild Wars 2

Are they sellable?

Can you Mystic Forge other weapons bought with Badges of Honor?

Can you MF other weapons bought with, say, Dungeon Tokens? I wonder if this is an intentional restriction to keep people from buying a steady supply of exotics to forge into more expensive exotics?

Sorry, I didn’t mean every sentence in this post to be a question, but I wonder if that might be the case?

I’m mostly okay with the way achievement rewards are set out, even though I’m not very likely to ever reach the higher reaches. Some players like achievement hunting, and I like the way the rewards are set up to fill out your collection as you go along, while getting you your first picks earlier.

I don’t like the way you have to earn near-complete sets of Radiant and Hellfire armor (gloves, shoulders, helms,) before you start earning boots.

That means that if I want a full set of the available Radiant (or Hellfire) skins, I have to earn 21,000 AP, rather than 12,000 AP, earning a bunch of Hellfire (or Radiant) skins and a bunch of late-pick Zenith skins along the way.

(12,000 AP is when you unlock your second-choice glove skin.)

12,000 AP is an objectively huge accomplishment. I can say that, because after two years, I only have 7,271 AP, and I’m in the top 90% of players in North America. I’m not nearly high enough to appear on the leaderboards, but that suggests that fewer than 10% of players have unlocked their first helm, which is 9,000 AP.

There are ~270 players in North America who have their first pair of boots. What percentage of players will start unlocking the set they don’t want before completing the set they do?

“Legitimate scam” or not, if people complain and are unhappy about it, it becomes a customer service / customer satisfaction problem. The goal isn’t cut-throat capitalism, it’s customer satisfaction.

It’s partially the victim’s fault, sure, and partially the scammer’s. Just because you can sell Mursaat Tokens to careless players doesn’t mean you should if they’re expecting ectos.

The waste of the free usage is a deal-breaker for me when it comes to “store in wardrobe.” While I like most of the ideas in the wardrobe, I still have all my one-use armor skins taking up space in my inventory, because I’d rather have the free charge.

I’d like to see players get one transmutation charge for every new armor skin they store in the wardrobe. That’s more generous than simply wasting the free transmute, without letting players rack up one free charge per alt if Anet every gives out free hats like the Devil Horns or Wizard Hat, which can be obtained multiple times.

(Note that this wouldn’t apply to every armor/weapon skin they unlock, just the free-to-apply skins. Skins you unlock off normal equipment never had a free application, so they don’t get one.)

I’m against direct trading. While it might squash some niche cases (Ashen’s underselling, for example, or selling potions to party members in a dungeon,) I think the Trading Post is better in the vast majority of cases. I haven’t forgotten how great it was at launch to be rid of trade spam, and it makes buying/selling a lot more straightforward.

Sounds like some people don’t want direct trading as much as they want looser theft detection, so they can send more items to their friends without the system thinking they’re clearing out a stolen account. That’s a valid complaint, but direct trading is tangential to actually solving that particular complaint.

Manasa Devi.7958:

P2P trading would also put certain ultra-rare items beyond the reach of some people, because you can only reach a very small percentage of the playerbase at a time. And these are exactly the items that people would want to sell off the tradepost, because the tax on them is huge.

Of course, people would find ways around that, through auction websites, and once such 3rd party resources exist, more and more items will go through those instead of the BL TP, because everyone wants to avoid tax where possible.

The end result would end up being exactly what we have now, except split up over several browser-based trade meet-up ‘tradeposts’ where there’s no tax. Buyer convenience would suffer severely and we’d probably end up with other gold sinks to complain about, that compensate for the loss of the current TP goldsinking.

No thanks!

This is a thought-out and well-written assessment of a likely problem. If they did implement direct trading, I’d still like to see taxes on it. Yeah, it’s aggravating to have to pay a lot of gold out of a high-end transaction, but if it applies to everyone, it’s just the cost of doing business. If it didn’t apply to direct trading, the whole trading post is going to get undermined by third-party solutions just to avoid taxes, to say nothing about what happens to the gold sink aspect of it.

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

You know what else we do?

We help the new players learn the game in a way that is much more rewarding than a more spoon fed leveling process.

Ideally, yeah, it’s nice when players help other players and build a personal connection. But there are also players who used to tell newbies that the best thing they could be doing was the champ train in Queensdale, or jump straight into the WvW zerg, not because they thought it was fun, but because it was efficient. Veteran players can be useful, but they can be off-putting, too.

/reminder

Tachenon.5270:

Crius.5487:

There is no such thing as a “Finished” MMO.

Well…

Star Wars Galaxies, Tabula Rasa, and, alas, City of Heroes (never forget, never forgive) all seem pretty well finished to me.

ZING

hannah mee.7925:

The #1 thing I am disappointed about was all the leveling changes they announced in Week 2. I never felt it was that difficult in the first place and they allocated resources to make it even easier? Seemed kind of wasteful.

I feel like I keep repeating this in different threads, but it’s worthwhile context: Lots of changes for leveling and the early game were apparently developed for the launch of the game in China, so most of the resources involved were going to be allocated anyway, regardless of whether we were going to get those features. Then it’s a question of leaving these already-designed features sitting on the table, or go ahead and integrate them into our version of the game.

I don’t have any special insight into how much work that integration took, but it seems practical to not let those developments go to waste.

hannah mee.7925:

Everything else are features people have been asking to get for a while. Could’ve done without the 3 week drumroll rollout though.

Agreed. It’s hard to sustain excitement over three weeks when so many of the updates were just nice, neutral, or questionable. Minor improvements are appreciated, but dragging them out…

Would it have been nice to have some of these new features at launch? Obviously. But that’s not always possible. Should they have come sooner? I don’t know.

As for new features being friendly to new players, if it feels like a relaunch of the game, a lot of that is because features were developed for the China launch, which gave them a chance to rethink the early game, benefiting from a year-plus of experience after our launch.

As for waiting to release it “when it’s finished,” I don’t know if that feels like a clever use of their own words against them, but I waited a long time for the game to come out, and I’m glad I didn’t have to wait longer. It had plenty of problems, but they weren’t generally problems that were going to get fixed by delaying the game further, IMHO.

Paponzi.1637:

You sure you didn’t miss any exclamation marks?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Andred.1087:

NYG.2568:

Andred.1087:

This post again…

There is no cause, there is no crisis, there is no need to be upset. The CDI is starting up again in 2 days.

There already has been a CDI. What’s come out of it?

You’re right, screw Anet for trying again.

+1

!!!!!!!

Paradox.1380:

-removal of hobo sacks
My Thought: I have No Idea what this even is?

“Hobo sacks” refers to the way Engineers have a big ol’ backpack-thing appear on them when using certain skills. Some people find it unattractive, and others are just frustrated that it hides their chosen backpiece, which is pretty significant considering how many event rewards were backpieces. I’m not really sure what the best solution is there, and I barely play Engineer, but it’s a reasonable gripe.

Anyway, I think the minis update is a good way to kick off the third week. The preview titles for the upcoming blog posts don’t sound super exciting, but I think people might as well wait a couple more days before getting riled up about them. The feature pack ship doesn’t turn sharply enough for a couple days of earlier complaining to make a difference, and it’s easier to judge the situation when all the cards are on the table.

The minis update sounds awesome, if you like minis. I like minis moderately well, and I’m going to like them a whole lot more from now on, thanks to the usability improvements.

It’s not for everyone, because not everyone likes minis, but this is a really solid update.

Huzzah!

As far as longevity goes, I thing GW2 in general will be up for a very long time, if GW1 is any indication. However, as your question relates to completion, I think it’s important to look at the game as a thing that changes semi-frequently, not just something you can realistically do all of. (Which is part of the idea of the Living World, that the game changes, including things that are temporary, not just permanent additions.)

Although, as of Living Story Season 2, they’ve steered away from hitting temporary content so hard and towards making things you can put off and play on your schedule, which should be excellent for players who want everything. Taking a break this season is a lot less weighty a decision than it was last season.

I’m…not entirely sure about this complaint. Neither the trickle of information about the feature pack nor the anniversary sale are meant to be taken as “new content.” The anniversary sale is just a sale, and the blog posts are just build-up to the next release, the September Feature Pack. None of this has anything to do with the two-week schedule the Living Story releases have used in the past.

I mean, I don’t know exactly where you’re looking for a promise of new content every other week, or what language they used, but I’m sure it was talking about the Living Story releases, and I think they’ve been acceptably good about communicating the timing on that. (Even if their communication in other areas isn’t always the best.)

Are they using a promise of new content every other week in currently-running advertising? I don’t really see them as doing anything misleading otherwise.

(I might have my own complaints about things, but the OP’s complaint seems to be picking a problem out of its reasonable context.)

That’s awesome, Odinius. Well-done!

In fairness, that comparison would be more apt for some people if the restaurant started giving away free toys with the cake, but still had no napkins or silverware.

It’s a small thing, but the non-stacking issue is still ridiculous. Maybe, giving the benefit of the doubt, there’s some tech reason for it, but it’s still confusing and aggravating as a player that I can’t stack Item A with Item B when they share the same name, effect, icon, etc., and are stackable with themselves.

Now, if they were scrolls that gave us 20 levels / 20 skill points, that would be understandable and useful. Old as my account is now, however, I look at a “to twenty” scroll and don’t get excited. I think “Oh, okay,” and toss it on the pile with the others.

Except this time it bounces off and makes a second pile. What?

Coopziana.1802:

WE are the one’s who get NOTHING!!!

I dunno, I got a pretty awesome gun that shoots birthday cake recently. It’s not something everyone will appreciate, but I love it.

It’s worth bearing in mind that many of these new-player-friendly changes were made for the Chinese release earlier this year, and are getting brought back around to our version of the game with this feature pack.

I’m reserving any real kind of judgement for the feature pack until I see what’s in store next week. It might be awesome, or it might be underwhelming, but I can’t complain about being left out until I actually see if I’m being left out.

That said, I am disappointed with the direction of communication. I know the roadmap blog posts weren’t perfect, but nowadays I just don’t feel like I have any idea at all what’s going on until right before it happens. CDI just doesn’t do it for me, both because of how time consuming long threads are to read, and because they feel more like discussions of theory and possibilities more than anything tangible.

The feature pack blog posts are generally useful, but I think they probably could have been planned a bit better to drum up excitement, rather than merely dragging out a list of changes.

Oh! My old links were dead, and I couldn’t find the archived boards because I’d clicked the arrow to minimize / hide them. (Read: Because I am an idiot.) Thanks for that, folks.

Anyway, I expect Halloween will return, because it and Wintersday are our two big holidays, and they still have parts of it they can reuse even if they don’t expand it. I don’t expect much new from it, after last year’s gutted rendition, but I’m hoping for something that will at least make a smidgeon more economic sense. (20-slot holiday bag cost about 90 gold. Recipes cost waaay more to make the new way than to simply buy leftovers from the previous year. The numbers just didn’t make any sense.)

I’ve played pretty heavily and I have absolutely no idea what the death slope bug is. o_o

Does this mean I’m the chosen one, the King of the Hill?

Atin.1237:

I would personally like to see him brought up to the level (or simply close to it) of the new Tequatl. I know a LOT of you hate that fight, but lets be real, these are dragons. I should not feel safe while fighting them in the first place. I should have a sense of “If I mess up I’m dead.”

While Tequatl does require a reasonable amount of individual skill (if you mess up, you can get killed,) there’s also a large amount of “If other people mess up, I’m also dead. If we don’t have enough people, I’m dead. If we don’t have enough people to kill him fast enough, we can waste a lot of time without getting anything, so options are to be in a big, organized group or abandon it completely.”

There’s something pitiful about being in an instance, doing the fight for a few minutes, and deciding there’s no way your group can kill the dragon fast enough. Then you have to decide whether you want to beat your head against a wall for nothing, or bail out on everyone else.

I really like Tequatl, especially after some fixes were made to him. But the boss fight is difficult for reasons that go above and beyond “if I mess up, I’m dead.”

I’d like to see some improvements to Shatterer, but more along the lines of the Claw of Jormag than Tequatl. We already have Tequatl and the Three-headed Worm for big, organized fights.

Remember: A lot of these “improve the new game experience” features were developed for the Chinese launch, and are getting ported back to the international version of the game because they’re mostly finished already. While they do take a certain amount of developer time to integrate into the international version, it would be pretty wasteful to just leave all that work sitting on the table.

It’s not super exciting, as a veteran player, to get a bunch of adjustments to when characters learn abilities, unlock story arcs, etc., but I get where they’re coming from. Most of the work is already done for the Chinese version of these features, so it makes sense to bring them over. As long as you’re introducing new features, it makes some sense to write them up, to build excitement as well as to inform.

(Although, I hope Week 3 has some substantially better news for current players, or this feature back is going to continue to feel a bit lackluster. Basically the one change that I can think of off-hand that will affect me personally is the improvement to dungeon ownership, which is good, but not exactly a killer feature.)

I’m mostly looking forward to the return of the Clocktower, the Labyrinth, and the city decorations. The first two seem like a shoe-in, although it’s hard to guess what state events and rewards will be in for the Labyrinth. Hard to say what LA is going to look like, unless they do some rebuilding between now and then, but I’m sure they’ll do something, somewhere.

I was expecting last year’s Halloween to primarily carry over content from the first Halloween, because that was always the plan for holidays, but then they took out Reaper’s Rumble, the Diary of the Mad King quest chain, and the dungeon. I can accept the dungeon getting the boot, and the new story instances weren’t bad, but there’s really no clear reason why RR and the Diary quest were cut.

I really liked the Mad Prince story, except its pacing was awful. We let the Mad Prince out of his box. We farm a bunch of candy corn. We put the Mad Prince back in the box. It felt like the story was missing a middle.

Just, just don’t get me started on Sonder the Seller. The numbers were way out of whack for him. Creating a “Recipe: Gift of the Moon” using last year’s method cost approximately three times the price of just buying the recipe off the trading post (98g at the time,) and that was /after/ the recipe’s price had quadrupled from their prices in September. I did a more thorough analysis of Sonder back then, but the Blood & Madness forum seems to have been deleted completely.

I begin to think there might be something suspicious about Minister Caudecus.

Jski.6180:

Your just asking for a different type of spvp is all. GvG rules should be set by the guild fighting not by a set program. Open maps are the best for true GvG. Both handily caps and “do nots” is best something that is talked from guilds leader ship.

I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I’m asking for, or, rather, what I think most people are asking for when they want GvG, which is why they’re not satisfied with do-it-yourself alternatives, especially if they were fans of Guild Wars 1’s GvG, which was its own type of PvP.

Let them eat cake!

Cake for the Queen!

Cake for the Countess!

Cake for the Krait!

Time for Krait to spread some birthday cheer in Lion’s Arch.

LOCK AND LOAD, BIRTHDAY BOYS AND GIRLS

Something to keep in mind: A lot of these new-player-friendly improvements were implemented from launch of the game in China, which gave the team a chance to reassess things like how new players learn the game, with the benefit of experience from the international version of the game. Those changes appear to be circling around to the international version because, hey, they’re mostly done already.

While, as a veteran player, I’m only vaguely interested in new character improvements, I don’t think it would make a lot of sense to leave these improvements sitting on the table if they’re 80% complete already. (A number I pulled out of thin air: While porting a feature from the Chinese version of the game still requires work, I’m sure the bulk of the work is transferable.)

I’m not really a guild player, and I don’t have any interest in GvG, but saying you can “technically” fight other guilds, in WvW or PvP, is really missing the point. A real GvG mode would likely get special rules tailored to it, areas designed specifically for it, and support for things like tournaments.

Comparing a game mode to something you can simply do is a bit like comparing Sanctum Sprint to simply racing other players to the top of Labyrinthine Cliffs. It’s similar, but not nearly as fleshed out as what people want from a GvG experience.

-shrug-

Colin Johanson, A Fresh Start blog post

The coming feature pack is bringing improvements that were designed to ensure the leveling experience and, most importantly, the learning experience is solid, clearly messaged, easy to follow, and rewarding. These were part of the game when we launched in China, and now they’re making their way back to North America and Europe.

The something with a hype train was the China launch, which gave them a reason to rethink how players are introduced to the game. It’s possible something else big will happen in the future, but it’s probable the something big already happened.

I collect tonics, and I can’t tell you how awesome it is that the Birthday Blaster works with every tonic I’ve tried so far. I can now turn into a kitten that shoots birthday cake.

THANKS, DEV TEAM!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME~

I don’t care whether Personal Story characters have anything to do in releases, but I really like seeing them return (Riot Alice) or at least be referred to. (Some Priory NPCs gripe about Gix.)

It goes a long way to making my characters feel rooted in the world, like the Personal and Living stories don’t happen in totally separate universes.

Whether you want the Obsidian Shards or the Crafting Bags is an economic question, but it doesn’t seem worth the time farming tokens takes unless you just happen to have the tokens, and don’t want anything else.

I’d go for the Candy Corn. I’m a big fan of that character model, and I don’t like how compressed the Sanctum Model’s cutscene is. (The one that plays when you intereact with it.)

I’m sure I’m in the minority on this, but there’s a part of me that likes the fact that you can buy/sell Legendary weapons. They’re valuable to the person who made one, but there’s an implicit undermining of anyone who tries lord it over others.

There are some titles and items that are difficult to obtain, and not just time/gold/money sinks, but if you really want to make an impression on people, it takes a real sense of style, a memorable personality, good battlefield tactics, etc., rather than just a card you can flash and expect respect.

Forming a guild that plays to certain rules is probably a good way to give you a like-minded group if private achievement isn’t enough for you. (Which I realize sounds a little condescending on my part, but isn’t meant to be! People play different ways.)

Attach, preview, attach, preview, etc.

That’s how I do it, anyway!

I wouldn’t count on it, personally. You could stick it out another month to see if Dragon Bash returns, and brings Fortune Scraps with it for whatever reason, but since the Bazaar returned without bringing them back, I’ll be surprised if Dragon Bash uses them.

I cashed in my remaining scraps a while ago for boxes and just tossed the remainder. It’s one less thing I have to fool with in the meanwhile, and if they ever return, I don’t think I’ll miss the (relatively meager) amount I had.

There’s really no incentive for Anet to go back into GW1 and make changes. The game has settled into a stable, long-term maintenance mode, and opening it back up for new additions means spending time and money that just aren’t there for it. At this point, there’s no such thing as a “small update,” because even small updates require putting a team together to design and implement them, and then continued work to fix any bugs or problems that come out of it. Even something like dodge-rolling has room to cause a ton of bugs, and completely upset the PvP environment of skills that weren’t designed with it in mind.

Are there things that could make GW1 a better game? Of course! But a lot of those things are part of why we have GW2 instead of a fourth GW1 campaign, because they were impractical to reintegrate into an established, years-old system.

Short of introducing player-run servers, it’s the fate of every MMO to die out eventually. It’s nice that GW1 is getting a slow retirement, rather than a sudden pulling-of-the-plug, but it’s not really a big concern for Anet if GW1’s player number decline. Even if they made it F2P, it’s not exactly expensive right now, it would struggle to compete with other games (including GW2,) and there’s not enough cash shop revenue streams built into it make the switch worthwhile from an accounting perspective.

Well-played, Danikat, well-played. And I totally agree.

While I’ll probably continue playing most of the content as it comes out (at the very least any of the non-delayable content, like any large group events,) it’ll be nice to have some more flexibility. The next time we hit a long dry spell between releases, I look forward to dusting off some previous LS content, either to get more achievements or to catch up on things I missed.

Jerus.4350:

But yeah couple more weeks of this, then new stuff. At the very least I recommend exploring Labyrinth cliffs a bit as it’s a beautiful place.

Seconded. Labyrinthine Cliffs is a really cool zone, and it’s very accessible to early level players, since there’s not a ton of combat and it downscales people to a relatively low level this year, since they were thinking about making it accessible to players in the recently released Chinese version of the game.

It’s just a cool place to hang out, honestly, and I find the activities there fun! It’s definitely worth a visit before it goes away for another year or whatever.

Having said that, I would steer clear of the Crown Pavilion/Queen’s Gauntlet in Divinity’s Reach if you’re new. Those seem to be designed more for higher level characters, and I don’t see them being very much fun for a new player.

Vired swordhammer.9134:

Also they ask you if you want to buy this item before accepting it maybe if you take 35 days to get something then you would actually look at what you are buying or see that there are multiple rings of the same stat and wonder why that is.

If I’m playing a certain build with 1h weapons, I’m probably going to equip two of the same stat combination if I’m aiming to min/max. Same thing happens here.

Vired swordhammer.9134:

I mean you just don’t buy a shirt at a store and not see if it is the right size until you put it on at home then get angry at the store for not asking if you really wanted to buy that size small instead of the large.

I don’t get mad, but I do consider them a pretty lousy store if I can’t try it on before buying it, or, having bought it, I can’t even return it for the appropriate size. There’s a difference between “ethically wrong” and “will make customers unhappy.” This falls under the latter heading, and while it’s not a crisis, it has obvious room for improvement.

(For anyone wondering: I’ve never had the ring problem, but I’m also the kind of person who loves reading patch notes and wiki entries. Not everyone does that, or wants to do that, or even thinks of doing that.)

eekzie.5640:

Even though I agree that some names just are stupid and ugly and I wouldnt want to see them, I do think that (as long as the name isn’t offensive/etc) people can choose any name they wish. If it makes them happy, they should have that option. I don’t think it’s up to me to decide someone can’t be called Xxx SlayerSkull Xxx, or Asdf Fdsa .

Quoted for truth. My character names tend to be either actual names or more title-ish names, like “The Storyteller,” or “The Young Coward.” Those are nice since they get a sense of personality across while still feeling like an in-world nickname or reputation.

There are a lot of nonsense names, but trying to restrict that is a bit like trying to convince everyone to use complete grammar, or to stop jumping up and down on the apple cart. Player freedom 1, world immersion 0, and that’s probably for the best in this case.

tl,dr; for my post above:

“Unique” is never explained in-game, and shows up in some confusing, irrelevant places. The problem could be largely avoided if, upon a player acquiring their first piece of unique equipment, a hint box told them what it means.

That’s what the hint system is for.

Elementalist! I had a Ranger/Elementalist as my main in GW1, but he leaned pretty heavily on Fire Magic, so he was almost more of a thick-skinned ele than a ranger. When I started GW2, I made a Ranger and an Ele in the first beta weekend, and enjoyed them both, but preferred the Ele.

I could say I enjoy the skillful play or diverse utility skills, but I’ll be honest: Half the reason I’m in it is for the SHEER FLASHINESS OF IT ALL. Elementalists get some of the most colorful, flashy skills in the game, from conjured weapons to an obscene number of particle effects, and I enjoy that. Mesmers have a lot of great skills as well, but they have a much, much more limited color palette.

The “one of each ring” surprise situation is just dumb. “Unique” is a keyword that is never explained in-game, as there are no NPCs that ever mention it or even a hint about it. It’s also used extremely unevenly across the game; there are trophies and other items that have the “Unique” keyword even though they aren’t able to be equipped. I don’t have a list of which items those are, but I think a casual player is probably more likely to run into a unique trophy before they’re ready to buy ascended gear, which gives the impression that it’s just a flavor word, not something with hidden rules attached to it.

For anyone who thinks it’s self-evident that “Unique” has special game meaning, I present my first unique item. It was only available per-character and it was soulbound on acquire, making it basically impossible to get more than one into a character’s inventory. (Barring transmutation? Maybe?) Plus it’s a backpack, meaning it would be impossible to equip two into the relevant slot even if you did have more than one.

Look at that and tell me it seems more likely “Unique” is a warning against an impossible situation, and not just more flavor text. I realize this particular item is an extreme case, but if I go a month or two and only ever see that keyword in meaningless, flavor-only contexts, I’m not going to magically know that it has a special meaning for rings.

Half of what’s sad about this is how simple the fix is. Just add a “Unique Equipment” game hint that pops up the first time a player acquires a unique piece of equipment, explaining what it means. Teaching players this kind of information is exactly what that system is for.

I don’t see a problem. Anytime you buy a game new, you should be aware that you could get it at a discount by waiting, or get the “game of the year” edition with some bonuses, or something. That’s normal.

At least the things they’ve added are things you can easily buy, so it’s not like we’re missing out on some neat exclusive. The game isn’t new anymore, so I’m totally cool with them lowering the price or adding little bonuses to encourages sales.

Just play whatever you like. Unless you’re into a seriously hardcore play style, pretty much anything is reasonably viable.

My Elementalist is my main, and he’s fitted out in Exotics with ascended trinkets, but my alts are all wearing a weird mish-mash of exotics, rares, and even occasional masterworks. I usually make sure to bring my main if I know I’m in for a rough fight, but I rarely, if ever, have serious difficulty with my alts, either, even though their builds have zero thought put into them. (They’re more for casual play, which fits most of my needs.)

That’s code for a web page. You can see the <html>, and <head> tags, among others, which are HTML, while the body{…}, h1{…}, etc. bits inside the <style> tag are CSS statements used to control font formatting.

Of course, you can’t use HTML/CSS in chat, so you end up seeing all that junk (which is usually hidden on a web page) and they run out of characters before they even get to the page content, which they probably intended for you to see. I’m going to guess it’s gold selling, but completely incompetent gold selling.

Probably just a copy-paste job of an existing advertisement, if I had to guess, with no thought for whether it would make any sense in GW2.

I don’t suppose you have a screenshot of it showing up in the BLTP window? That sounds more unusual. The Trading Post window is actually a sort of website embedded into the game using the Awesomium HTML UI engine, which is part of why it sometimes updates or behaves strangely. It’s likely the text showing up in the Trading Post window was the result of an error or bug. Did it have the <title> tag with the Chinese characters in it, like the whispered message did?

I cannot agree more on this. As a fix, this still keeps us from mixing and matching, but at least we’d be able to dye them again, tonics are generally much more usable than tonics, and we’d be able to use them in combat, which is some consolation for lost functionality.

Outfit tonics on the other hand, have all the worst parts of both systems: Unmixable, awkward to use, time-limited, unusable in combat, and undyeable to boot. I might have mixed feelings about the change to Outfits, but at least they have some upsides. With the tonics, however, I have absolutely no positives to even list, much less try to outweigh their negatives.

Tastes will vary, but, as a counterpoint, I really love Sanctum Sprint. I find the course itself exciting and challenging to run through quickly, and I’ve reached a point where I can usually pick out suspiciously-placed crystals. There are some potentially obnoxious places to drop a fake crystal that make it very difficult to get around, but between the Grounded skill and smart use of the Zephyrite skills, along with a good knowledge of the course, there are some surprising ways to apply skill to a race.

I have mixed feelings about the griefing element of it. While I usually don’t care for griefing as a play style, some potentially griefing things in Sanctum Sprint, I don’t mind so much, even on the receiving end. If someone ahead of me drops a clever fake crystal, I think, “Dang, well-played,” and a lot of my own mistakes could have been avoided if I used Grounded better. (Say, before running into a place I know fake crystals are popular, or before doing risky jumps.)

Maybe it takes a lot of practice to reach that point, but I don’t get as much of a sense of griefing from Sprint, and it’s easily my favorite daily activity.

(Griefing Disclaimer: I still drop some fake crystals where I know they’ll wreck someone, particularly someone right behind me, but not as much as I used to. Focusing on using Grounded correctly seems more interesting at this point.)

Edit: And while I hear about lag and bugs with Spring, I rarely have any problems with either. Or maybe I just have a good connection, and I’ve stopped seeing bugs as bugs rather than just normal behavior for Zephyrite skills.

I’d say it’s probably out of the question. GW1 is in long-term maintenance mode, so I can’t see them implementing a new feature like this, particularly since encouraging people to play more GW1 (rather than populating GW2,) doesn’t do much to serve their current goals. GW1 is still going, and I’m sure they’re happy to have people still playing it, but there’s not enough reason for them to spend resources on it.

Linking the two like this might do a little to increase brand loyalty, but I’m doubtful it would be enough to justify cracking open the GW1 code to make changes, then keeping an eye out for bugs and problems.

Even if it sounds like a relatively simple idea, actually implementing it would take too much for too little.

I think those tonics really should be made into outfits. I’ll still miss being able to mix-and-match them, but at least we’d be able to dye them again, and they’re a lot more usable than tonics, since they don’t take up inventory space, wear off, or require hunting-for-and-clicking to re-apply them. Town Clothes were sometimes called “useless” before, but even the people who loved Town Clothes seem to consider the tonic versions useless now. It’s a real shame for a feature that, while not widely-loved, was still loved, to go to such waste like this.

That said, I’m not particularly interested in seeing them made into fully interchangeable armor skins for all three weight classes. They weren’t designed for that, and, technical obstacles to making that happen aside, I still think it would be an aesthetic disaster.