Guild Wars 2

Whenever I complete a daily achievement, I’d better be watching the bottom corner of the screen right when it happens, because that’s the last chance I have to see what I’m being rewarded for.

The text quickly goes away, leaving nothing but a chest icon to click and be rewarded for. There’s no tooltip on the chest to tell me what I did to get it. There’s no text on the reward panel either.

This is an occasion where a game with more customizable action bars would win. Though… it wouldn’t really help me, with my 10 bag slots taken up by the various foods I discovered while leveling my cooking =P

I think they need to add a “gold selling advertising” option to the report function. If someone sends me one single message for their gold selling website, they’re not technically spamming (sending the same message repeatedly) and they’re not technically scamming (they’re not actively trying to trick me into doing something)

They’re just trying to advertise something that happens to be illegal. I find my report options unsatisfactory for this. For now, I just hit the “scamming” option and assume that the employees who review the chat logs will see the message in question and know what I meant by it, but I’m still less than happy about my options.

When I’m on the Trading Post gem trade, I want to obtain a certain number of gems, in order to buy something. Let’s say I want 800 to get another character slot. I can’t just put 800 into a box and have the game tell me how much it will cost. No, I have to put in some amount of money, see how much it is, change that amount, see how much it is, ad nauseum until I eventually land on the amount of gems I want for the cheapest price.

It seems surprising that the interface would be arranged in this way, because I assume most people are using the gem trade in the same way I am. I’m not desperate to get rid of a certain amount of gold in order to get however many gems I get for it, I am aiming to get a certain amount of gems to buy something I want, and I want to know how much they’ll cost. I assume it is the other way around for many players on the other side — they want a certain amount of gold, and want to know how many gems they’ll have to give up to get that money.

The current system cheats the player out of a little bit of money with every transaction. If, say, I want to convert all of my current amount of silver into gems, I put that number into the gem conversion. It tells me how many gems I’ll get for that. But what are the chances of that number of gems dividing perfectly into the amount of silver I have? Say I put in 4 silver. It tells me I can get 14 gems. I reduce that number to 3.90. Still 14. 3.80, still 14. I just saved 20 copper by fiddling with the numbers, and my more naive lower-level self didn’t even realize my money was being taken in this way.

None of the rest of the trading post works this way. I don’t go searching for onions, and have the trading post ask me how much money I’m willing to pay, and then tell me how many onions I can buy with that money. It asks me how many onions I want to buy, then tells me how much it will cost. Why is it so difficult to trade for the number of gems that I need to buy what I want? I needed just three more gems to hit 800 the other day, and it took forever to narrow down the correct number I had to type into that little box to get what I wanted.

As an aside, while I appreciate the little graph with the highs and the lows and the week-long average, it doesn’t answer the main question that I was looking for the answers to from the first moment I tried using this interface: how much do they cost RIGHT NOW? There isn’t even a vague estimate, due to the rapidly fluctuating prices.

The interface has a long way to go in explaining how this system works or what determines the prices of gems.

After fiddling with the prices for a bit on the conversion interface, it seems to me that the price of gems varies greatly on how many you’re buying. I can currently buy one gem for 49 copper, or I can buy ten for 2.89. Eleven for 3.13, which makes that eleventh gem only cost 24 copper. But then the twelfth gem costs another 48 copper, up to 3.61. I know these are really low numbers, but I’m rather broke at the moment, so bear with me.

Anybody able to shed some light on this?

Making this into a button is one of my top suggestions, simply because an option I use every few minutes the entire time I’m playing seems out of place in an options menu next to things I select once and never touch again ever.

Though my personal preference would be to LEAVE it in the gear menu, and transform it into a toggled option. “Automatically deposit collectables” that could be disabled if I need to have the items in my bag to sell or trade them. There could be a tip popping up when you first open your bag to tell you about the existence of this useful menu, but otherwise it would default to off so that players wouldn’t be confused about “where did my loot go?!” before they find the option to enable it.