Guild Wars 2

Medieval.1679:

Shufflepants – you said exactly the same thing I said except that you used about 2000 words more and dressed it up like it was some form of logic. Please spare us the dime-store logic and lay off the googling of statistics and probabilities – you just embarrass yourself.

I googled nothing. I did the math myself. Perhaps Aberrant’s analogy was more succinct, and my essay was rather long winded, but I was afraid without breaking it down and providing more concrete examples you would brush it off once again without learning anything. I disagree that I said the same thing you said because your conclusion was that you think that there is something wrong with the RNG in the game. I’m sorry that you feel my degrees in mathematics and computer science were wasted, but if you could refrain from calling my reasoning “dime-store logic” and refrain from insulting me without at least pointing out where and how my reasoning or math was incorrect, that would be appreciated. I could show my work, but that would have made it much longer.

Draco.2806:

Deniara Devious.3948:

It is possible that the random number generator (RNG) of Guild Wars 2 is borked.

WARNING: Very Technical Stuff ahead.

…

Good god, please post a topic about this.

I mean, I know ANet doesn’t seem to be very active on the forums, but they’d have to see this if it’s a possible issue.

He’s only saying that it is possible, not that anyone here has the data or has done the analysis to show that it is actually likely. A few player’s “feelings” and anecdotal evidence is still not statistically significant. And even if there were a flaw in the RNG it is not necessarily the case that it would produce the kinds skewing that people are concerned about.

“Sure, statistically speaking someone out there will flip heads on a coin toss 100 times out of a 100 and another will flip 0 out of a 100, but given the player base numbers and the probabilities being mentioned, the numbers in these ranks should be in the low single digits.”

That you used this example and claimed it was likely to happen to someone is proof that your intuition is out of whack. Do you actually know what the probability of flipping heads 100 times in a row is? Perhaps you think it’s like 1/1000, or maybe you think it’s like 1/50,000,000; something like the odds of winning the lottery. If you thought these, you are WAAAAAY off. The probability of flipping 100 heads in a row is:
1/1267650600228229401496703205376

Really, it is lower than you can probably imagine. Suppose you were just flipping sets of 100 coins at a time. And you could flip these sets of 100 coins at 1 set per second. It would still take 4 * 10^22 years before you should expect to have gotten all heads in a set. Or what if all 7 billion people on the planet could flip 1 set of 100 coins every second? Then it would only take 5.7 * 10^12 years of everyone flipping for it to be likely for one person to have gotten 100 heads. That’s 5.7 trillion years. That is 407 times as long as it’s been since the big bang and roughly 30 million times as long as humans have existed.

“Personally I think the system is borked and is based on a single one time generated roll – it’s the only thing that can account for the skewed nature of drops.”

I disagree, and in order to confirm such a theory, you would need access to all the drop rate for every player and do some serious math on it. And you neither have the data nor would you know what to do with it in order to confirm you guess. Your guess is based on just your experience, a small set of anecdotal evidence, and failure to fully appreciate big numbers, small numbers, and the need for sufficiently large data sets and actually doing the math.

“If this is the case though, Anet have a serious game breaking issue on their hands.”

Sure, if it were actually the case, they would. Good thing they don’t.

But this does not even consider the fact that not everything is even capable of dropping a precursor. How many of your kills have been mobs that don’t drop anything? Or mobs killed while leveling that weren’t high enough level. Even if there is a 1/100,000 chance of a precursor on mobs that can drop them, you’d have much less than an 11% chance at one given 1000 hours of gameplay. And for all we know, the precursor drop rates are even lower than 1/100,000.

“It does seem to be that the “random” element is not really that random afterall, but is in fact a one time “roll of the dice” at the start of the very first character creation and whatever number you happened to get, is from that point on your lot in life."

It may seem that way. But psychology has taught us that people’s brains are ill equipped for large data collection, inference based on large numbers or infrequent events, and are biased towards only remembering data if it confirms our theories and forgetting data that flies in the face of it. You may have heard of that one guy with all the drops, but you have also heard about the people that win the lottery. Do you believe that people who buy lottery tickets have their tickets cursed buy the lottery organizers, doomed never to win anything? Or can you grasp that the chances of winning were just so low in the first place, but someone was bound to win because there are so many people entering?

And why does a “one time roll” of the dice make so much more sense to you. A one time roll of the dice, and a ton of rolls on even more weighted dice can have the same likelihood of resulting in a good outcome for you.

“I know people who have extremely high achievement levels (talking >11k) that almost never get exotics, get crap from champ boxes but instead have to buy everything to acquire it. I also know others who barely manage to scrape together a couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th Legendary.”

Yes, most people don’t get exotics very often. They aren’t as rare as precursors, but having on a handful drop for you over the course of a year is as expected.

I know some people get precursor drops with very little play, but you are clearly exaggerating with your “couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th legendary”. Even if they got 4 precursors day 1, it takes a lot of work playing the game and farming karma and the like to actually craft 1 if you are not just buying it straight off the TP.

“Sure, “random can be random” and statistically speaking such instances can be valid – if highly improbable, however the consistency of these occurrences goes against any such statistical probabilities."

No, it doesn’t, see the rest of the post as to why. What you mean to say, is it goes against your understanding of what is statistically probable, and what I’m telling you is that your intuitions are incorrect.

Medieval.1679:

Random being random I can understand, and even taking into account axioms of probability you can sort of excuse the current system – but the overall experience of the system (from myself and others) has the feeling that the randomness is generated once per account, after which you are stuck with that forever.

This may explain why someone gets precursor after precursor and exotic drops almost daily, whilst others get sweet FA even after 1000’s of hours of game time.

It does seem to be that the “random” element is not really that random afterall, but is in fact a one time “roll of the dice” at the start of the very first character creation and whatever number you happened to get, is from that point on your lot in life.

I know people who have extremely high achievement levels (talking >11k) that almost never get exotics, get crap from champ boxes but instead have to buy everything to acquire it. I also know others who barely manage to scrape together a couple of thousand achievement points and are on their 4th Legendary.

Sure, “random can be random” and statistically speaking such instances can be valid – if highly improbable, however the consistency of these occurrences goes against any such statistical probabilities.

Sure, statistically speaking someone out there will flip heads on a coin toss 100 times out of a 100 and another will flip 0 out of a 100, but given the player base numbers and the probabilities being mentioned, the numbers in these ranks should be in the low single digits.

Personally I think the system is borked and is based on a single one time generated roll – it’s the only thing that can account for the skewed nature of drops.

If this is the case though, Anet have a serious game breaking issue on their hands.

Almost every single things you said beyond your first paragraph is wrong. Yes, it can give the feeling that it is rigged. But please try to understand that your personal experience does not a statistically significant sample size make. And before you say “but I’ve seen all these people on the forums saying the same thing”, even seeing 50 people saying the same thing does not mean much considering that there are roughly 3 million players and the probability of a precursor dropping is so low.

But lets break it down.

“This may explain why someone gets precursor after precursor and exotic drops almost daily, whilst others get sweet FA even after 1000’s of hours of game time.”

No, no it doesn’t. Probability and drop rates explain it perfectly. Now, there isn’t much good date for drop rates for GW2 because there are no mods, so lets look at rare drops from another game. I played world of warcraft for thousands of hours. I never had a single epic drop out in the open world even though regular mobs of the right level can drop them. Let’s look at the Krol Blade:

http://www.wowhead.com/item=2244

If you look at the drop rates, it seems that in regular drop tables, this item had about 1/100,000 chance of dropping. This means that if you wanted a 90% chance to get this drop from farming normal mobs in the right level range, you would have to kill 230257 mobs. And this would only get you a 9/10 shot at it. If you wanted that to be a 99% chance, you would on average need to kill 460514 mobs. Even if you only wanted a 50/50 shot at it, you’d on average have to kill 69314 mobs.

Let’s put that in perspective. If you can kill 1 mob every 10 sec, it would take you 8 days of straight farming to kill those 69314 mobs just to get a 50/50 shot at it. If you wanted that 99% shot at it, it would on average take you 53 days of straight farming just to get 1.

Now we don’t have great drop rate data for precursors, but I would estimate that the drop rate for them is in the same ballpark. But you probably don’t spend all your time farming at 1 mob per second. In fact, you probably average much lower than that. I would estimate that it’s probably somewhere between 1 per minute and 1 per 5 minutes considering all the down time in game. So at one per 1 minute, if you’ve played 1000 hours on your account, you’ve killed about 60,000, at 1 per 5 minutes, you’ve killed roughly 12000. Which if you were going for the Krol Blade back in WoW, you’d only have had an 11% chance of having gotten one.

Or, instead of invoking all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories, you could actually take the time to learn about modern random number generators, realize that only really old games used RNG’s that were so weak as to be game-able, understand that the developers aren’t out to get anyone because that would be defeating their goal of getting people to like their game, and take a course in statistics and realize that given the sheer number of people playing the game it is entirely expected that there are players who have not had a single exotic drop and other who have had 30 of them drop.
Have you people not heard of a normal distribution?! Just look at it some time. The people in the middle are the people experiencing the average rate of some event, but there are still outliers at both ends in the 0.001 percentile and people up in the 99.999 percentile. Just due to random chance and the size of the sample set, there will be people who get shafted and people who win the lottery just due to random chance even over the course of many hours played per person.
Say it with me now:
Random is Random!
If you need some one to blame, blame the universe and its physical laws for being or seeming probabilistic instead of fixed and determinate.

There’s “luck”, "RNG luck, and then there’s a failure to understand statistics and probability.

Tom Gore.4035:

Shufflepants.9785:

I feel like this is obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c

I for one love that this isn’t some static world where all technological progress ceased thousands of years ago.

To be fair if our world had magic we wouldn’t had to invent stuff to make our life easier, which is the base of all invention. A combination of technology and magic would definitely still be viable.

To be fair, if our world had magic, it would be called “science”.

It would get studied and researched like any other current aspect of science. And this seems to be the way that the asura approach magic, scientifically.

Gandarel.5091:

Seriously, I thought I bought a fantasy game. But after seeing megalasers attached to skyships defended by golems, and repelling a terimantor invasion from an alternate future (after I destroyed a high-tech weapon facility), what about magic? Most of the classes are magic users. Only engineers and sometimes thieves fit this game nothing else (warrior is totally outdated). Others are outcasts.

Why aren’t we replaced with golems? It’s just a matter of time I guess.

TA was one of the few fantasy-only dungeons, but BAM it needs some technology for sure.

Will fantasy ever return?

I feel like this is obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c

I for one love that this isn’t some static world where all technological progress ceased thousands of years ago.

I don’t really give a kitten about people’s thoughts on what they think is “too technological” for their fantasy MMO’s. GW2 is its own universe, it doesn’t HAVE to conform to every aspect of the archetype. And what else are all the mechanominotaurs and mechawindriders all about? But I suppose you’d just rather those things be removed from the game, you party pooper. I think it’d be cool if all this lead to a big dragon reveal, because so far there’s been no such lead ups of the sort. Everything else was in from day 1, or we roughly knew it about it for weeks due to patch previews.

I hope Scarlet IS the buildup for the release and debut of some yet unknown mechano-dragon. We’ve got Zhaitan, dragon of undead, Jormag of ice, and some other themed dragons, but we’ve got all these weird mechanical creatures running around that has even some of the characters in game curious as to their purpose and origin. We need a mechanical dragon

Knote.2904:

Aberrant.6749:

This is actually one of the reasons I usually chose an asura… so I can see more of my screen since it’s already eaten up by other things.

Except as asura your camera is shoved further down your neck so you actually get to see less lol.

Uhh, no it’s not. Players with asura characters can zoom to the same exact distance as any other character.

Cruril Darksbane.2318:

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

4. How will they release them? I definitely wouldn’t mind having to pay to to unlock them, but I am sure most people would get upset if they had to pay for them.

4. Living story, have players go to the Dominion which then sets them up to be a playable race since you now have access to their home city and it becomes clear they have some part to play in the world. Given their solitary nature prehaps they come under attack from one of the major factions, begin to struggle and request the aid of other races/factions thus granting them entry to their homeland in order to help them. In return for helping them they agree to have a greater pressence in the fight aginste Zhaitan which then gives the Tengu a reason to be part of the story and makes sense then to have Tengu playable characters.

Again, you have no idea how much work goes into creating these things. It’s not that they can’t figure out how to write them into the story. I’m sure they already have plenty of ideas. It’s that they have to write them, script the dozens of personal story missions, make new character models for new missions, hire new voice actors to voice all these new characters, record them, do new motion capture for all the cut scenes. Not to mention all the new work for programmers to do to piece it all together. All of that and more I didn’t even go into costs lots of money. He is concerned about how it would be released cause he doesn’t wanna buy an expansion because he doesn’t wanna spend the money. Sure, they could release it as a free patch like living story has been, but that would mean the money they spent to develop it is a sunk cost that they can only hope to recoup via gem purchases; they would just have to hope that this new content inspires more people to spend real money to buy gems. But if they don’t wanna take that risk, then about the only option is to release a paid expansion, which he doesn’t want.

Cruril Darksbane.2318:

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

2. Armour – they don’t want to spend the time and resources to make armour sets that are specifically made for one race, and with a new race they would have to make 9 new cultural armour sets, and also a 3 new tiers of all weapon types.

2. Given they made ascended weapons and skins for each weapon set with each living world I don’t see this as much of a problem.

You missed a key piece of information. He said Armour, not Weapons. Adding new weapons to the game is relatively easy since all you have to do is get artists to create static models with maybe a couple of particle effects on them. Then those weapons can just be slapped into the hands of every kind of character automatically with auto scaling no problem. It doesn’t matter if it’s going into the hands of a charr or an asura, the character animations require no change. But with armor, it’s a different story. The different races each have several different body types and each one would have to be manually fit for each piece of armor your create, and for a new race all of the already existing armor would all have to get essentially remade from the ground up to fit a new set of character models.

As a thief myself, I collect new stat sets of gear like each one I have is going out of style. Up to full armor sets of berzerker, PTV, clerics, carrion, and I’m up to 3/6 celestial. I also switch my spec around a fair amount. Although, I can’t seem to not put at least 20 points in Shadow arts. I’d put 40 points in Shadow Arts if I could; there’s just too many traits in there that are too useful. How in the kitten are you supposed to cure conditions off you without “Cure a condition every 3 seconds while in stealth”?

BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAH….

AHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHH

Oh wait, you’re serious, let me laugh even harder

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHHAHHHHHHHAHAHHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHHAHHAHHAHHAHAHHHAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHA

But in all seriousness. You do not understand consequences of the change you are asking for and you are more likely to win the lottery without ever having bought a ticket than you are to get the change you are asking for. This is a core mechanic of nearly every single MMO that has ever existed. There is a constant production of items in the game. If they were trade-able to other players or other characters, every time you got an upgrade you’d just sell your old one. This would absolutely plummet the price of most exotics and over time as the game aged even the most expensive items would eventually become worthless and it would decimate the markets for armor and weapons.

And you might say, “Who cares? Then everyone can get a cheap legendary!”. And while that sounds nice in theory, most players don’t actually know what they want, and don’t have the willpower over themselves to do the thing that would give them the most enjoyment out of something. While it might sound nice to be able to afford all the best gear after like 2 weeks of playing the game, like half the fun of MMO’s is collecting new gear. Many aspects of the game might not feel very rewarding even if they dropped 4 legendaries because “big deal, I’ve got like 300 of them sitting in my bank”. The only items that would retain any value would be consumables like food and potions.

There’s only one real way you can have an MMO with an economy where there is no soulbound or accountbound, and that is if items have a limited number of uses like IN THE REAL WORLD. Would you exchange all your armor and weapons for armor that can only take 500 hits before it breaks and is destroyed and a sword that can only slash a 1000 times before it breaks and is destroyed and you have to go buy totally new armor and weapons if it meant you could eliminate the soulbound mechanic?

I didn’t think so.

Lexandro.1456:

Shufflepants.9785:

Lexandro.1456:

Wanze.8410:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Justdeifyme.9387:

most of the EU population is german.

Do you have any evidence to support this?

Well, it wont be the majority of all EU population (but it will be close, i assume) but german is the most common spoken native language from all players on EU servers.

Sorry but this is nonsense. English the most spoken language in the EU, its the “international buisness” language. Its taught all over Europe as a second language. Spanish and French players speak some english, many German players speak English and the Nordic counrties generally speak excellent English.

So no German is definately not the most common language. Its not even close.

Just because it’s the most common language in the region does not mean that it is the most common language on those servers. Pretty sure he is saying that a disproportionate number of germans play the game.

And yet he is still wrong because

1. There are nearly double the number of English servers to german servers in the game
2. The English servers in the majority are high population
3. German speakers are outnumbered massively by French/Spanish/English speakers combined,
4. And thats not even mentioning Nordic countries, Baltic countries, and mediteranian countries that all have some grasp of English who also play GW2.

He is wrong in his assumption. It is based on anecdotal evidence, which is proven false with actual RL information.

Source? But until you work at ANet or can link to ANet language statistics or demographic statistics, I’m afraid your claims are as baseless as his.

Lexandro.1456:

Wanze.8410:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Justdeifyme.9387:

most of the EU population is german.

Do you have any evidence to support this?

Well, it wont be the majority of all EU population (but it will be close, i assume) but german is the most common spoken native language from all players on EU servers.

Sorry but this is nonsense. English the most spoken language in the EU, its the “international buisness” language. Its taught all over Europe as a second language. Spanish and French players speak some english, many German players speak English and the Nordic counrties generally speak excellent English.

So no German is definately not the most common language. Its not even close.

Just because it’s the most common language in the region does not mean that it is the most common language on those servers. Pretty sure he is saying that a disproportionate number of germans play the game.

JMadFour.9730:

Reading the class forums, it gives the impression that every single class is the worst, most worthless class in the entire game. well, except Warriors and Guardians I guess.

How can so many classes all be the worst at the same time?

You must keep in mind that vast majority of players never make even a single post on the forums. Most people just play the game happily instead of raging on the forums. And even people who complain about various issues with their class of choice still prefer the playstyle of that class to others even if they feel it is underpowered or broken in some way.

Hyper.6374:

tolunart.2095:

Hyper.6374:

TLDR:- is anet manipulating the trading post that’s supposed to be player driven?

No.

Awesome and your source?

What can be stated without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

HiddenNick.7206:

So you farm AP… And in what way it’s not a grind?

He plays all the varied endgame content. The fact that he has so much AP is more a reflection of the variety of content he has done. His point is that if you are complaining about nothing to do, but haven’t done as much as him, clearly you’re just not actually playing all the content available and so your complaint should be rephrased as “I don’t want to do the content that’s available” and not “there is no content”.

Living story IS endgame. You might say, “NUH-UH, raid’s are endgame! Dungeons are endgame”. Why yes, yes they are. But they are not the only endgame. Perhaps living story is not end game you’re interested in, but it’s endgame nonetheless. Endgame is not a set with only 1 item in it. And I’m sorry this isn’t <insert your favorite MMO here>. Get over yourselves and stop trying to use such self centered definitions in public discourse and acting like yours is the only opinion that matters. The game HAS endgame. Maybe you want more dungeons, maybe you want raids. Then ask for those things. Say “I would like for there to be more dungeons and raids”, not “WAAAAHH, this game has no endgame! In fact it’s not even a game! It’s only a mini game! Just how pluto is not a planet, it’s a dwarf planet so it doesn’t count!”.

I for one love the extra lengths you have gone to with the return of SAB, Josh. However, there is one thing I have not seen mentioned here that was actually a bit of a problem in world 1 as well. You keep saying how there are plenty of baubbles to be had via digging, but even when I already KNOW where a dig site is, I have a heck of a time actually digging the thing up. It seems as though for many of them it needs to be within just a couple of pixels to actually get it. On the 50 baubble dig site under the beginning of the long narrow bridge with the assassins in World 2 Zone 1, I tried digging the spot like 6 or 7 times, wondered if maybe it had been removed with this new release, watched a youtube video confirming the location, and then it still took me another 6 or 7 tries to actually dig up the baubbles.

Do you think you could increase the radius for these dig sites? I can’t imagine actually discovering for myself all of the dig sites when it takes me 13 tries to get one even when I know exactly where it is. I’m sure there’s been at least a handful of times I’ve suspected that there was a baubble dig site somewhere, dug several times, not found anything and given up when there was actually something there. It is made even more frustrating when there’s an awkwardly long 4-5 sec cooldown on digging.

But, keep up the good work. As a programmer, I feel like I can appreciate the monstrous beast you’re working with.

kaat.8237:

Yes you can still trade the claim tickets. It’s a different line of conversation with the guy in the BLT area.

I just confirmed this. If and only if you have the claim tickets in your inventory and not in your bank or something, the black lion weapon specialist will have an additional dialogue option that will allow you to properly exchange your ticket. And this seems to apply to to the other kinds of legacy tickets. You have to have the ticket in your inventory to see the extra shop listing.

Have people even played other MMO’s? Loot is almost always crap in every game. Unless you were in a raid, epics just did not drop except in like 1 in 10,000 chances. And even in a raid, oh look, 3 epics dropped, and you can’t use 2 of them and half the raid is rolling on the one you can.

Also, although they have not said this, I can only imagine that there is a soft or hard cap on the amount of magic find you can acquire this way. Otherwise, rich players would be able to buy up so many items and salvage them and end up getting precursors every time they sneeze on something.

I’m not quite sure which I hope it is. A hard cap would mean one can hope to get a competitive magic find eventually, but it would also mean that after some point, that part of the game would be “over”.

And a soft cap would mean that it’s never “over”. You always want to salvage more for a higher and higher magic find, but it would also mean you could get super behind other players and/or get to the point where all you ever get anymore is like +0.000001% magic find.

Stooperdale.3560:

The problem with improving 1x Basilisk venom is that 10x basilisk venom has to still be balanced. A thief can get up to 10 applications with shared venoms. I’m guessing this limits the design of all venoms since they all underwhelm without trait benefits.

This is why I think they need to completely get rid of the venom sharing trait. They can’t possibly make venoms balanced for x10 and still be worth anything for x1. They either need to just get rid of the talent, or make venoms always share without having to have a talent.

Calae.1738:

Don’t make the mistake thinking that dailies aren’t grinding.

Dailies is grinding.

It’s grinding with a limit. The game places at artificial limit on how much you can acquire in a certain amount of time.

Don’t make the mistake of not knowing what grinding is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_
Dailies do not require you to do the same content over and over again. They change from day to day. You can get your daily without even realizing it by merely spending some time in WvW playing normally our just out playing in the open world PvE.

A grind is spending 4 hours killing the same 3 camps of mobs over and over.

Doing dailies is in no way obligatory and they are not required in order to be able to play any gameplay content.

A grind with a limit is almost definitionally NOT a grind.

Maybe if dailies reset as soon as you completed them i.e. you get a new set of dailies to complete immediately upon finishing one set AND if doing a certain number of dailies was the only way to be able to get into some dungeon, THEN they would be a grind. But they are both optional and time limited. Both of these things on their own disqualify them from being a grind.

You can complain that they make you feel obligated to log in and do them. But again, this isn’t some game where you have to do X dailies before you can get into the next raid and there are new raids coming out all the time which require even more dailies and if you get behind your guild won’t invite you to the raid. Whatever obligation you feel is on yourself. You’ve decided you HAVE to have as many laurels or cheevos as is humanly possible.

Dailies are excellent tools for game developers because they simultaneously give more rewards to people who have more time (up to a point, those people who can reliably log in every day to complete them), give people encouragement to log on more often keeping people playing the game, and make it so people who can’t play nearly as much don’t feel nearly as “left behind” as if there was no time gating.

Complain all you want but get the kitten definitions right. It may be a sneaky tactic in your book, you may feel obligated, you may wish you could get ALL THE LAURELS because you can spend every waking moment playing the game, but it is not a grind.

Conncept.7638:

The solution is pretty dang simple, GW2’s economists are just ‘college graduate’ economists rather than business men (and women). IE, their economic knowledge is theoretical, and largely based in the opinion of whoever taught them. But how is it simple?

UR-GEN-CY costs!

Nothing for sale in this game has any risk connected to time! There is no urgency to sell. In real world sales, if you overcharge for something, you are losing more money on it than you will gain when someone buys it. Why? It costs money to sit on that shelf; you have to pay an employee to shelve it, to pull it out of the warehouse, to put it back in the warehouse, to keep the product and the area around it clean and presentable, and most importantly it is taking space that you could be used for something that people would buy right now.

The solution is not to limit gold gain, in fact that is pretty much guaranteed to break the economy, we need:

• An account limit to the amount of TP posts, possibly with additional purchasable space
• A daily charge which scales with item cost
• A removal charge which scales with item cost
• A (small) scaling charge for how long the item has been sitting since spawned

And voila! Suddenly, people actually have to price things intelligently as in real world sales. You won’t see people pricing things for amounts of money no one will even have for months and counting on inflation to catch up.

Yeah, urgency costs, those things totally stop people from gaming the system to make money.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-25-2013/john-oliver-s-arcane-details-of-boron-group-metals-pricing-update

Tolmos.8395:

I prefer account, hands down. The whole soulbound system is the most idiotic I’ve ever seen. I came from games like Ultima Online and Shadowbane, so when I first saw “Soulbound” in WoW, I was floored. How ridiculous, I thought. I was used to using armor until I didn’t need it anymore and selling it when I was done. This themepark centric idea of using armor and then vendoring it, because it was somehow superglued to my character? Bah!

The farther we move away from the archaic concept of single character bound, the happier I’ll be.

EDIT- I think I misunderstood the question, or rather the basis of account vs character in this situation.

Would you prefer a more realistic excuse/terminology? In reality armor needs to be custom made per individual to fit properly. It certainly doesn’t make any sense how an asura’s armor could fit on a norn.

Your title is kind of misleading. There are many things in this game that could be called Skinner Boxes, but every thing you listed:

Have I done my laurel daily?
Have I done my daily dungeon runs for the tokens I’d like?
Have I done a fractal daily today?
Have I collected my charged quartz today?
Have to done the living story grind for my achievement points?

Not one of these is a Skinner Box. Skinner Boxes specifically consist of task/reward systems where the reward is given randomly and infrequently. All of these things you listed are “If I do X, I am guaranteed Y” not “If I do X, I have a small chance at Y”.

Throwing rares/exotics into the mystic forge for a chance at a precursor is a Skinner Box. Mobs dropping loot randomly is a Skinner Box. Black Lion Chests are Skinner Boxes. But none of that other stuff you mentioned is.

TL:DR Nothing in your list is a Skinner Box.

Yes, we all forgot about dueling because almost no one cares about it. I’m not being sarcastic. Really, who cares?

If you guys truly wish to nerf stealth or nerf how often players can stealth, you’re going to have to be ok with an increase in thieves’ out of stealth damage. Backstab is a huge part of pve and pvp damage for dagger thieves. And then you’re gonna need to give thieves other ways to avoid damage, say, give thieves access to aegis?

Bismuth.3165:

We already have reasons to visit almost every map (world bosses, quests, altoholics leveling alts, cultural armor, dungeons, etc..) they need to start listening to people who played the game for a long time

Holy Necronomicon, Batman!

Chase.8415:

I find it a disgrace to purposely win first place over and over for attention, acting as if first place is something to brag about or to show as an accomplishment. Wether it’s a PvP race or not, it’s a community event and there is no reason to win first place over and over unless you purposely want to ruin the experience of others; which does not belong in this game.

How about purposely winning first place for fun? Also, what? People are supposed to lose at games? Kittens, I’ve been doing all wrong. Remind me to wipe on CoF1 a few extra times. Wouldn’t wanna ruin the experience for the bosses. Maybe we should get a petition across the servers to let Sorrow’s Furnace win in WvW till they are number one ranked so that they can have a turn at it. I guess in sPvP tournaments, we should just let the worst team win so that they can win a tournament for once. Maybe NFL teams should all just purposely lose to the Minnesota Vikings so they can win a super bowl since they’ve never done it.

This is such ridiculous special pleading just so people can get a title they didn’t earn Let me guess, at your elementary school Field Day, they just gave out participation ribbons instead of place ribbons so everyone could “feel like a winner”.

Siphaed.9235:

Maybe you’re unfamiliar with the concept of this PvP RACE.

It’s a race, against other players, to come in 1st (or 2nd or 3rd). Maybe Blue has set a person goal to come in 1st every time, and that’s fun for him. Who are you -or the people in OP image- to attack him for playing the game the way it was designed ?

You call him “a disgrace”, but you are wrong! Attacking someone who is doing nothing but playing the game and achieving the mechanic set goal is what’s disgraceful. Beggging/demanding that he stop playing the RACE properly, just so some people will cheat the system to get an Achievement they didn’t earn, is what is disgraceful.

This ^
Maybe some of you are unaware, but in most online competitive games, taking turns winning to take advantage of rewards for winning is called win trading. And in most online competitive games, there are systems in place to make it difficult if not impossible to effectively do. And at the very least, win trading is often a bannable offense.

What was wrong with the mechanics from the bouncy shrooms in SAB. Those always bounced you high enough and were completely predictable. Are we SUPPOSED to be dying randomly through no fault of our own? Or do we just need to be standing pixel perfect in the right place for them to work correctly?

My biggest problem with it are the bouncing platforms that don’t bounce you high enough to even make the jump sometimes, and the dashing/spinny platforms that just shoot you down instead of forward sometimes. It’s a total crap shoot with those things.

So… you want a dungeon where you slowly walk around a boring desert at a snail’s pace?

Nuage.5230:

Nah, it seems to me the game just gets started when you level cap. Leveling is just in the way. All the real progress is made after the cap. Leveling is not the game, it’s just a speed bump.

I’m sorry you don’t enjoy playing mmorpg’s.

Drayven.6408:

It’s a Jumping Puzzle… You go through the Jumping Puzzle to do one of two things… You either go through to complete the Puzzle, or you go through to grief other people who are only going through for Chest… If you are going through for the chest, then you have to deal with people who are griefing…

I play PvP, both sPvP and WvW… I go there consensually, and die when I die, and don’t cry about it. When I am introduced to an aspect of the game that is DESIGNED to grief other players, I call it out for what it is… A piece of content that is DESGINED to GRIEF players.

This is the logical fallacy known as special pleading.

If killing people in the WvW jumping puzzles is griefing, then so is killing people in sPvP who are just peacefully trying to capture control points.

This bit right here:
“48,9% of the subjects between ages “16-24” bought a number “Bellow 800” Gems.”
confuses me and makes me distrust the survey even ignoring all its other faults. The minimum amount of gems you can buy is 800 at a time. So basically what this says is 48.9% of those surveyed who said they bought gems either lied or forgot.

Am I the only one who is almost not all bothered by stuff on my character doing a bit of clipping? Or maybe it’s just as a programmer I can appreciate how difficult it may be to account for an handle every single possible clipping issue.

Brom Malochson.9306:

John Smith.4610:

Hello all, let’s keep in mind that this was just one change, it isn’t intended to be the one saving grace of the whole economy it was simply a market correction.

Standard: We saw that dust was too expensive and it wasn’t on a correcting trend. We made it easier and more prevalent to get dust without any major changes to the current balance.

Econospeak

hide spoiler

We wanted a shift of the supply curve for dust without change the balance too much in any other markets, we were making a change in pseudo isoloation (bisolation if you will).

The issue is that there is no balance in Orr. A lot of the loot that used to drop, which seemed very rewarding to players fighting difficult enemies and partaking in difficult events, is now gone. Rare loot has a very low drop rate, so low that it’s borderline nonexistent. Risk > reward in Orr. Even after Southsun, player counts continue to be minimal in these endgame zones. The scales need to be rebalanced so that Risk = Reward.

I recommend a case study. Strip a level 80 character of everything in his inventory and run through Orr. Now go through Orr and participate in each temple event, but also keep a count for what happens outside of the event chains too. Count:

-How many times did you down during this run?
-How many times did you die during this run?
-How many items did you pick up during this run?
-What is the total value of the items in your inventory post-run?
-How long did it take you to finish Temple Event X? (Where X is a temple event; pay close attention to Grenth in this one)
-What is the total value of the rewards you got from Temple Event X? (Where X is a temple event; pay close attention to Grenth in this one)

Very simple, effective, and easy case study to make concerning the status of Orr.

Your test would prove nothing. Different players have different skill levels and abilities. I hardly ever die in Orr unless I’m trying to solo group events. And as developers, they don’t need to do your silly test. Your test is supposed to figure out drop rates, but they already KNOW what they are because they are the ones that coded them. The only thing that they might potentially want to test is what the average time to kill various mobs are or maybe what mobs kill players most often. But even then, they wouldn’t just go marauding through Orr themselves. They’d just write a script that would automatically collect that data from every player who enters the zone on any server and leave it collecting for a few weeks. I’d actually be surprised if they didn’t already collect this kind of data.

Valena.5160:

Ever since the hologram projectors made their appearance yesterday, I’ve been seeing a lot of high level players running around in low level zones using speed buffs and aoes to burn down the hologram mobs with no thought to the people around them. It’s happened to me, and I’m guilty of doing it to others. So in an effort to keep this event fun for everyone I thought I’d point out a few things.

Feel free to contribute your own rules of Courtesy._

This assumes that other players are out to be nice and not to maximize their coffers per hour.

Valena.5160:

_1.) There is no rush.

Yes, there is a rush. People want to get as many coffers as they can as quick as they can. This event will not last forever, and you can easily open hundreds of coffers and not get a ticket.

Valena.5160:

2.) Everyone gets their own loot.

Yes, sure, in an ideal world, everyone would go around to every spawn together as a group and everyone would get credit. But even then, there would be too many people for everyone to tag the mobs before they die. But this is not possible to coordinate, people aren’t capable of traversing the map at the same rate thus leading to the faster people having to slow down and wait for others to catch up, and as I said, people are out to maximize their coffer drops. It can work for a handful of people to move around as a group, but there are not enough holo projectors out in the world to accommodate everyone interested in farming them even if everyone grouped up to the largest manageable group and farmed only a large enough circuit so that the first one respawned as the last one died. And even then there would be contention because some circuits are faster to complete than others.

Valena.5160:

3.) Help people clear normal mobs.

Why? This does not increase a person’s coffers per hour.

Valena.5160:

4.) Don’t steal projectors.

In fact, if a person is out to maximize their coffers per hour, it is in their best interest to steal as many projectors as possible and to disallow any other players from getting any hits in. If you steal projectors out from under some one enough and they are getting very few hits and very few coffers themselves, they are more likely to give up and leave giving the stealer access to more projectors uncontested resulting in a tighter and more projector dense circuit and a higher coffer per hour.

Valena.5160:

5.) Remember that projectors spawn quickly.

This is true to an extent. One player does not need an entire map in order to complete a circuit of popping projectors without interruption. However, it does take a pretty good chunk of a map to maximize intake. I’d estimate that most maps could only support 3-4 players farming at optimal efficiency. But since people aren’t following some agreed upon rules. For an individual to maximize, they have to get to every projector they can. Even if you see one on the map, if the map is quite populated, there’s a decent chance that even if you waypoint to it immediately, another player may pop and finish it off before you can get there.

Valena.5160:

6.) If you have no intention of showing other players any courtesy and have an ‘Every man for himself’ mentality, then at least leave the lower level zones and farm mobs your level. Not only will you be giving lower levels a chance to farm their own holograms, but there are typically fewer people competing for kills in the higher level areas.

Players will go to whatever zone they think they can farm these things the fastest. Which, if people were clever and able to get a gauge of the population on each map, this should theoretically lead to evenly populated zones. However, some people are not so adept at running past mobs and others just don’t want to deal with the hassle.

Unfortunately, this particular facet of the game was not designed in the same vein as most of the rest of the game. ANet tried really hard to make a system where players would want to cooperate instead of fighting for resources among each other, but with this system, it really is a zero sum game. If one player is nice they will take a hit to their efficiency, and maximizing efficiency will necessarily lead to being a bit of a jerk.

Yeah, this is something that bothers me about the wiki too. That even though we have all these millions of players killing things and getting items, we have few if any drop chance data on almost anything. I think this problem is directly because there are no mods. In world of warcraft, there were a few mods that people would run that would mostly just sit in the background, collect data, and then automatically upload that data to a central site. In this way, it gathered the data from thousands of players without any sampling bias. And as such, the drop chance figures on places like wowhead and thottbot were very close to the actual number within just a few hours of new content going live.

The most likely prospect is that all of these places are parts of the world that were later redesigned before launch. The first looks kind of Orr-ish, the second looks like it was supposed to be Black Citadel, and the third like it belongs in Lion’s Arch. Basically, these are scenes from Alpha GW2 before the zone layouts and designs were finalized and launched. They likely do not exist anywhere except perhaps on some old back up sector on one of ANet’s internal servers.

If you use the Block feature, it only Blocks that person from sending you whispers, /say, and map chat, but they still appear in places like guild chat. How are we to block obnoxious people in our guild?

Nihilus.3015:

Shufflepants.9785:

Ok, managed to get the other side of that door by swimming around from elsewhere. And based on the proximity that big blue sphere is to where spekk’s lab is, It almost seems like that the two area’s were supposed to be connected. Like, it seems like the end of spekk’s lab would otherwise be right next to the big blue sphere room.

You’re a tenacious one. I challenge you to get inside the Sphere.

KITTENS! I had already given it quite the go but couldn’t figure it out
It’s so far above the water line!

Oh well. Guess I’ll have to give it another go later.