Guild Wars 2

nosleepdemon.1368:

Did you buy over $800 worth of gems with dollars, or did you farm the equivalent amount of gold and convert that into gems?

I converted about 69 gold when the exchange was about

18ish silver / 100gems and then here and there once in a while. Exceeding over $800 gems total.

I don’t really think it really matters where the gems comes from as it has a value attached to it.

As a consumer who consumed over $800 worth of gems, I have to say the prices of goods on the BLTP is highway robbery. $10 for a outfit really? $3 to revive once, really?Why not add more stuff to the BLTC at a cheaper cost so that $10 can get both an outfit and something else? That would give more incentive for people to get gems because they can do more with it.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

World chat wouldn’t work at all. Anything that anyone said would be immediately pushed up. There are too many people for that to work. Map chat and Guild chat are just fine.

Not unless there is a cost associated with its use each and every time.

Hybrid.7059:

Gold Sellers/Spammers would have a field day with this. Nope.

Cost gold to use world chat everytime. Help get rid of some excess gold.

With the appropriate consumer demand, the United power of the consumer(us) can quite frankly force anet to do as we demand. Too bad ppl rather buy gems.

Karizee.8076:

notebene.3190:

Seems like a reasonable assessment. So GW2 is losing population, and by definition, dying.

At this rate it should be quite dead by the year 2075.

A hundred or so ppl on a screen on server wide events at prime time is not at all proving that it is not dying.

Jski.6180:

Sky.7610:

notebene.3190:

What are you playing now?

I don’t play any mmorpg. I’m not saying gw2 ducks but I’m saying it’s declining base on observation.

What observation on the forums can you make that the player base is declining though? Are there less post here can you see when the last time some one played on these forums can you account for ppl only posting when they feel strongly one way or another? To base things purely off of seconded hand observation on something slightly related to something else is a bad way to say one thing or another.

The decline in activity. Granted, it may not be nearly as accurate as hoped, it is the only medium by which a player can evaluate in its entirety. Normally, a player would be limited to any particular server or magazone at any one point in time but on the forum, you can grasp the activity level very well. Just for example sake, let’s look at Lol. We all know it’s popular, not arguing about which game is better or Apple to orange, their forum is VERY VERY active simply due to their population. In that sense, we can get a sense of how the game is doing base on the activity on the forum.

When you look at a game’s forum, you will generally notice that the more popular and populated the game is, the more activity there is. If there is a decline in activity, it would not be far fetched to assert that there is some level of decline for the main game in popularity and therefore by definition, population as well.

notebene.3190:

What are you playing now?

I don’t play any mmorpg. I’m not saying gw2 ducks but I’m saying it’s declining base on observation.

Judging from the forum, it seems a lot more like a ghost town then it used to be. Also, the game seems to be on a decline month after month. The very act of implementing megaservers was to address the decline population. Even if China is a huge success, it is irrelevant to us US and EU players since we are separated from them.

Haven’t played gw2 in months and decided to come back to check things out. Launch the game and the game patched for over 6.5GB. Then I login to discover that nothing was added…. except the bytes the game take up on the hard drive and Internet bandwidth LOL. Why is it that returning player have to download temp content that was already removed from the game? Great incentive to return.

Jski.6180:

From the dailies alone you can get the meta achievement i am not sure if it could be any easier then that.

I do not like to be told how to play and the dailies are actually time consuming… especially one where u have to wait to participate in a event and win… those things take 2 hrs.

seriously the living story meta achieve is so time consuming, as a real normal causal player, aint nobody got time for that.

$0 and it will stay that way….forever

no, it is forever soulbinded to your mesmer. If you don’t like it, you can salvage it and get a piece of medal/wood back in protest.

Removing dailies and we getting weeklies?

Any help, anyone?

I have moved the program folder to my SSD, which significantly reduced my loading time but I also want to move my user folder (local.data) located at my document library to the SSD as well. How do I redirect the path to the SSD?

BillFreist.1527:

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

You heard it here from Bill folks! Better ready your pitchforks! If no improvement is made in 2 weeks, there will be a special event featuring the lynching and grilling of Bill with pitchforks! Add the event to your calender people!

is it possible for them to switch engine or is that like starting from scratch? what is the flaw of the unreal engine?

So… With school starting tmw, do you think the game will be less clustered with kids and be a lot more empty?

Did empty zones just got emptier?

Also, now that students have less time on their hand, should living story have less requirement for rewards?

What is your budget?

A custom build $700 system will allow you to play most modern game with modest fps.

$1000 will allow you to play any game with high settings/ultra in pretty high resolution.

$1500+ will ensure maximum performance and future proof the system.

Never buy a Alienware. They are extremely expensive for what you get and they have terrible cable management and overheating problems.

If you can tell me what you have, what ur budget is, and how you intent to use the system then I can create a better list. Do you already own monitor,keyboard,mouse, etc? Do you need a new power supply,Rams,storage,optical drive or can you salvage it from your current system?

>$1500 build
CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($219.99 @ Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($99.99 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($148.99 @ NCIX US)
Memory: Patriot Viper 3 8GB (2 × 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($54.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($176.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($62.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB Video Card ($349.99 @ Newegg)
Wireless Network Adapter: Rosewill RNX-N250PCe 802.11b/g/n PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter ($19.99 @ Amazon)
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 w/Window (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case ($79.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: XFX ProSeries 750W 80 PLUS Gold Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($79.99 @ NCIX US)
Optical Drive: LG GH24NS95 DVD/CD Writer ($15.99 @ Microcenter)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8 (OEM) (64-bit) ($88.90 @ Amazon)
Total: $1398.79

>$1000

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($219.99 @ Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.99 @ Microcenter)
Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($119.99 @ Microcenter)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 × 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($66.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($102.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($62.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 760 2GB Video Card ($249.99 @ Amazon)
Wireless Network Adapter: Asus PCE-N15 802.11b/g/n PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter ($24.99 @ Microcenter)
Case: NZXT Source 210 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($38.99 @ Microcenter)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80 PLUS Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer ($18.49 @ Amazon)
Total: $965.39

>$800

CPU: Intel Core i5-4570 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($199.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: MSI H87-G43 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($97.24 @ Amazon)
Memory: G.Skill Sniper 8GB (2 × 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($58.50 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB Video Card ($175.66 @ Newegg)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case ($57.99 @ Microcenter)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 500W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($47.99 @ Microcenter)
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-04 DVD/CD Writer ($17.99 @ Newegg)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($89.98 @ Outlet PC)
Total: $797.33

kossman.8206:

w0w.. noones kittened.. i am amazed… Bring this back ANET!!!

i know, that never happens!

daily dose of justice!

ColinJohanson.2394:

We have folks constantly working to improve performance, we’ve actually made quite a few perf updates this year. You’ll see more perf updates in the upcoming releases, we have a team working entirely on performance at all times that won’t be going away any time soon.

This might sound harsh but considering how terribly unoptimized this game is, it is time to consider letting go of this “performance team”, and start hiring some ppl that knows how to optimize it.

Agreed.

So… Why isn’t this put back yet? >.>

Blaine Tog.8304:

Sky.7610:

1. Explain to me how your one(1) time purchase continues to provide a incentive for Anet to expand the game NOW.

People who love and play the game will naturally bring in new players. New players also don’t want to jump into a stagnated game. They demand vibrancy from their MMOs. And should ANet ever decide to release a full-blown expansion for the game, it’s their existing player base who will be the primary customers.

There are all sorts of ways to monetize games these days. Let’s not oversimplify.

This is something that might sound logical on paper but completely falls apart when slapped with the force of reality in practice. This game sold over 3+million since January, and has only sold an additional 500,000(more or less) since then. That’s the number they managed to pull in with reduced box price,sales, bi-weekly updates, etc. that is $25million revenue at best(not even taking sales into account which probably count for majority of sales). Tell me, do you believe that the expenses and efforts incurred during 8+ months of continuous effort by the entire Anet studio does not exceed $25million and is worth that? This is a drop of revenue compare to what the gem store pulls in on a monthly basis, which is the real reason why they continuously come out with new content to capitalize on it.

Also, your 2nd theory that retaining existing players to sell them an expansion is a good idea. I agree, but considering they already have your $ and the majority of new players looking to pick the game up don’t even know much until after they play, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to concentrate their efforts on the expansion rather than the living story? They even said they are not working on an expansion. Know why that is? Because that’s not where the money is.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Sky.7610:

There’s so much ignorance in this post. As previously noted, your $60 one time purchase is not a incentive for Anet to continue expanding the game, the very profitable gemstone is. Having said that, why not increase accessibility to this gem store while making a modest profit off of this $10 deal? This would not make Anet more poor than they are now. Any extra box sales at this point is just icing on the cake. Also for your 2nd point, there’s countless of free MMO,MMORPG,MMOFPS games out there with microtransaction and I assure you that they are still in business.

Sorry, but there are two things wrong with this.

1) It can’t be a gem store item, that would require already having access to the game since you can’t buy things off the gem store without getting to the gem store. So while it’s cool to gauge things in gem values it makes no sense from a retail perspective.

2) Use and purchase of gems does nothing to server ANet, nor GW2. All Gem purchase profits go directly to NCSoft and bypass ANet entirely. NCSoft owns the Gems and sells the Gems to be used for ingame purchases, and then does whatever they want to with the money they get. They can choose to bring it back to supporting GW2, but they can just as easily use it to boost production in Wildstar, or make Lineage 3. It’s entirely up to them.

So, assuming ANet gets the value of box sales, the end result is, ANet gets $10and then all the money ANet could have gotten for the rest of the price of a normal “box” goes to NCSoft to do kitten-all with. In this case I’d much rather them continue to sell these for $50.

If all sales, regardless of source, go to NCSoft, though, then I completely support this idea, because I think it would be a very good introductory package into the game.

1. Explain to me how your one(1) time purchase continues to provide a incentive for Anet to expand the game NOW. Plz enlighten me. The obvious answer is because they make a steady profit from the gemstone. Now that the sales of boxes are heavily slowing down due to it being a old game, where do you suppose they get their money from? Right. The gemstore. So why is it a bad idea to sell the base game cheaper to get more ppl playing the game so they can spend more at the gemstore?

2. Ncsoft owns Anet. So ALL profits belong to Ncsoft, box sales or gemstone or that expensive keyboard you bought. ALL OF IT.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Lets be honest, the main source of revenue for Anet has been the gem store, and has been for many months now as box sales continue to slow down. This is true of all old games, so why not take this opportunity to capitalize on their main source of revenue and increase the accessibility of the game? It’s fair to say that the vast majority of players who wanted to buy a 2012 game would had already done so.

Chase.8415:

I’d like to keep this game in business.

If people are too cheap to pay for a game, they are most likely not going to buy anything in the gem store anyway.

The current price is fine.

There’s so much ignorance in this post. As previously noted, your $60 one time purchase is not a incentive for Anet to continue expanding the game, the very profitable gemstone is. Having said that, why not increase accessibility to this gem store while making a modest profit off of this $10 deal? This would not make Anet more poor than they are now. Any extra box sales at this point is just icing on the cake. Also for your 2nd point, there’s countless of free MMO,MMORPG,MMOFPS games out there with microtransaction and I assure you that they are still in business.

create a major gold sink = problem solve. But Anet made a system that a small minority of players have most of the gold, and the majority of players broke as hell.

this is incredibly easy to implement.

Evil Octopi.8253:

I want this, I want this, I want this. I don’t know why they removed it. Lots of games these days have that smaller startup window with no sound. There is no impact! It doesn’t feel like an event! When I login I want to feel like I’m being transported to something amazing, not like I’m logging in to go back to work.

this.

It’s rare for something to be so universally agreed. Plz bring it back!

we need this. Now.

this heroic edition replaces the regular digital version and as a result, it should retroactively be rewarded to everyone who owns the game.

Hi,

I’m a returning player and I used to use a spreadsheet that finds the most profitable margin on the TP: http://gw2gt.com/making-gold/flipping-spreadsheet-description.aspx

but it looks like it doesnt work anymore after GW2spidy.com changed their server. The creator of it seems to be inactive. Does anyone know of a similar free tool?

What happened to it? How come nobody do it anymore?

But if u wanted to play Mario, why not go play Mario? Why beg for a half-kitten product of Mario?

7month old necro op.

Sanctus.8350:

Half of that stuff isn’t even accessible anymore, I see they left that part out.

Unfortunately, that’s the downside of the living story strategy, one that i do not particularly agree with. People with limited time or new players do unfortunately miss out on them.

About a year ago GW2’s Economist, John Smith, released a infographic about the economy as seen here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/john-smith-on-the-guild-wars-2-virtual-economy/

Unfortunately, no new offical infographic had been made since then. Since its the 1st anniversary of GW2, fans had made a infographic that summarize the progress of the 1st year of GW2.

Btw, I was not the creator of this fan-made infographic.

What do you think of it? Anything surprising or missing? Do you want GW2 to release more offical infographics? What do you want to see?

For starter, we would a RNG box in the gem store for this new event to justify the “discounted” BL key.

I got paid over 10x the amount that I put into Gw2($67after tax) easily by just uploading a few gameplay video and stream a couple times when the game first released…

oh and i got a couple hundreds worth of gems by exchanging gold to gems…

mrauls.6519:

This game better not go F2P… Why do you care about their revenue? As players all we should care about is the content

Imagine all the crazies that would flood this game if it was F2P… Sweet Jesus

well, what kind of craziness would bother you from an increase in playerbase?

Lucyfer.9517:

The moment they go into DLC is the moment i drop this game. Expansions are ofcourse welcome as long as they are proper expansions like the GW1 ones, not like what SWTOR calls expansion. But am not gonna get nickel and dimed by worthless DLC.
Also for me F2P always translates into P2W so i hope this game never goes F2P just as GW1 never did.

F2p does not necessarily translate into that. You can look at Tera for example, its not P2W. You need to realize that will not be force to go P2W because they are going to make more money than they will right now, and they do not need to go P2W at the present moment so i do not see the risk.

Sales of Gw2 have reached well over 2million at preorder. 1 million units have been sold in over 6months after that. As a game ages, so does the rate at which copies will sell. Do you guys think there’s still a lot of juice left in direct sales?

Even if it can sell 1million units in 6months(which i highly doubt at this point in time).

thats only $50million in revenue(tops and not taking retailers into account/other expenses), do you guys honestly think the gem store can’t pull more than that from the playerbase increase of F2P in the same timeframe?

It has almost been a year since the launch of GW2. The game has sold over 3millions units since January of 2013. However, it is without doubt that sales of this title has now ceased to insignificant numbers. Without a expansion planned, it is safe to assume that that the company generate most of their revenue from the gem store and could be supported by it alone. Also due to lack of expansion, new hype for this title will unlikely occur again, meaning direct sales of the game is unlikely to rise at any significant level, especially with upcoming mainstream mmorpg competition.

So, the logical question becomes: “should GW2 go F2P from B2P?”

F2P will undoubtedly attract loads of new players at almost no cost(the game have no sub and ppl who would buy the game had already done so, for the most part). This surge of playerbase would make the game pacted once again and increase the profitability of GW2 gem store by (most likely) at least a few fold.

So, do you support GW2 going F2P? If not, why?

If so, should there be rewards/compensation for existing players? If so, what should they be?

I agree. Dailies discourage me from logging in and it make the game seem more like a job…

btw, how do you get to the location of the new event?

Hallo ppl! I haven’t played GW2 since the secret of southsun. So, as a returning player, was there any permanent content added since then?

Also, I realize that today is the last day of the current event, what should i do to make the most of it?

Thanks!