Guild Wars 2

Warchiefomega.2738:

d the group disbanded mid dungeon because i refused to go on my lvl 80.

This bit stands out. Why did they wait until mid-dungeon to disband instead of telling you to switch characters at the start ?

Have a read of what roleplaying servers need to be done well.

As someone who is active in table top roleplaying, I’m used to having a lot of freedom when I roleplay. Which means most MMOs are simply far too restrictive in their mechanics for roleplay there to ever satisfy me. The only one I’ve seen that comes close is Eve Online.

Other sandbox MMOs might also offer that much freedom, I just haven’t looked at many of them. Thing is, most MMOs use the theme park content model.

Epikku.7495:

I spent £49.99 on a game with no trial <: can use whatever words I like.

I’d hate to see how you would be on a subscription game.

Doobie.4795:

Lets Roleplay , “Walks to Centaur Camp, /me Starts to rai- Dead.” Yea, Good luck…
Stupid Idea.

The Centaur’s are just playing their role perfectly: They hate humans and human allies, so are trying to exterminate them. You got to close.
Why should they wait for you to finish talking ?

The trading post has two fees:
– 5% listing fee. Paid on listing.
– 10% sales tax. If it sells

The projected profit is the amount you have listed the item for, minus the sales tax. The listing fee is not included in that calculation.

Absolutionis.9427:

You should have seen the trade spam in the game before the TP went online. Everyone that found an item of green or gtreater would spam map chat in pretty much every zone.

Oh, I did. That further reinforces my theory because the trade spam stopped very quickly as soon as the trading post went up. Meaning that as soon as there was a viable alternative to trade spam, the spam stopped. With no trading post, the only way to trade with other players was to spam.

It’s been mentioned a lot. Basically:
– ANET intentionally chose to not include a secure trading method. They have posted on their reasons before.
– GW2 has much less trade spam than any other MMO I’ve played. I think that this is because there is no trade window (or COD mail, or some other equivalent). With no safe way to trade with another player, people are really hesitant to respond to the spam because of the obvious risk*. With no payoff to spamming, most people don’t spam. I’ve yet to hear anyone even attempt an alternative explanation to the lack of trade spam.
– I haven’t seen anyone state any credible advantages that having a trade window would bring to GW2 as a whole. The closest I’ve seen are reasons that would help RPers, but they are only a subset of the community. Certainly nothing that is worth the cost of the trade spam that will come with it.

But then people would be happy to receive rare, highly desirable, items that they can’t use themselves. And people who hate running FOTM would be able to get the Ascended items without ever having to step foot in there.

Which is exactly why Ascended gear should be tradeable.

Kaimick.5109:

A: it tells you when you first start it how large it is, the latest path was 13456 KB I believe regardless it tells you how large it is when you first start it and before it goes into he progress bar.

Two problems:
1 – That size isn’t the total size of the update. Never has been. In fact, from watching how fast the number grows, it looks like the size of something that needs to come down before you learn how many files you need to get.
2 – Even if the size was accurate, it only stays on screen for a few seconds. Look away at the wrong moment, for example by logging into your guilds TS server, and you will miss it. So even if it was accurate, it would still be useless.

This should be a very simply change for ANET. They clearly know which files need to be downloaded, as it is necessary for the number of files to download. They must know the size of each file, as the file is sitting on their servers. They know how much you have already downloaded as they display it.
Getting the file size remaining should be very simple. So why don’t we have it ?

Instead we just have the number of files remaining. Which annoyed a lot of people in GW1, but still remains unchanged.

It probably salvages into a valuable pile of materials if you use the right salvage kit. Just sell it.

How will your algorithm work when ANET adds new servers that have no color history and they get placed against servers which have a color history ?
What are the initial values ?

What happens if the random number generator goes strange and gives one server a long run of only two colors ?

Another algorithm is one that remembers how many times each server has had a specific color. When it comes time to assign the colors, the algorithm finds the server and color combination that has come up the lowest number of times. That combination is then assigned for the upcoming round.
The algorithm then does the same for the remaining servers.

When there is a tie, use a tiebreaker method. How is unimportant. Randomness is not required.

This method guarantees that every server will go through all colors eventually. If the brackets don’t change, each server will go through the following:
Match 1: Random color
Match 2: Random color that wasn’t used in match 1
Match 3: Final color
Then the cycle repeats. Though the color for Match 4 is only guaranteed to be the Match 1 color if the tiebreaker method is a non-random method.

New servers are easy to add in, as their history values start at 0. Which means that they are going to be cycling their colors even more reliably than older servers, because the new servers will always have significantly lower history numbers.

If a server stays away from one color for a while, then the other servers history numbers for that color will exceed its one. So all servers are guaranteed to go through all colors in time.

Fikfain.5849:

BuddhaWrath.5073:

Black Lion Trading Post >> all your tax money belongs to them.

But really, trade post allows for easier trading and offers a much wider audience.

The TP is useless for me to agree to craft an item with specific skills and signets for someone for a price. Without COD, there is no secure way for me to be a crafter for hire. Instead I’m forced to list a random assortment of goods on the TP hoping they eventually sell. Meanwhile, a buyer has to browse for what they want hoping it is listed for a price they are willing to pay.

Crafting is pretty much useless if I can’t ply my trade for cash…and instead I’m at the mercy of the TP, so rather than selling my skills I am limited to only selling my goods.

Crafting has a much bigger reason for why it’s useless: Due to all the people leveling crafting to level their character, or to craft Legendary weapon components, the market is flooded by gear produced by people who crafted it expecting a loss but are still trying to reduce the loss. So GW2 is flooded with crafted gear that’s being sold for below cost. It doesn’t matter what trade system we have, because the problem is oversupply. The Trading Post just makes it easier to see the effects.

The only exception is stuff that gets crafted at rank 400. There you’ll have price competition bringing prices down to the point where they are barely profitable for people who are acquiring the ingredients at minimum possible cost. Maybe even below that if there are a significant number of the if I mine it myself it’s free crowd who believe that crafting items is a good idea even when they could sell the ingredients for a higher total price.
The only way other trading systems could keep crafting profitable is if they restrict trading so that a lot of people decide it’s not worth the effort to sell stuff for small amounts (after trading fees) above vendor value. The trading post make trading so effortless that it’s worth listing something if you expect to get even a single copper above vendor price.

Because COD mail will have the same effects on GW2 that a trade window would have. Effects ANET decided that they didn’t want when they chose not to include a trade window.

Shadow.3475:

Green is 1, 4, 7 Blue is 2, 5, 8 Red is 3, 6, 9 so simple make sure your server gain in rank and you switch color

That doesn’t help the top WvW server.

As far as I’m concerned, anything that comes out of a RNG should be tradeable.

The breakout mechanic is only going to make this harder because the tower nearest each servers spawn on enemy borderlands is going to be very difficult to hold for any length of time.

How would your rotation work when servers shift from one bracket to another ?

I think randomizing the colors each WvW reset would be a simpler option to produce the same result.

Amadan.9451:

since it’s still possible to trade by mail, i don’t see how actually implement a real trade could be raise the trade spam…

Have you ever seen an MMO with trade spam as low as the trade spam in GW2 ?
If you have, I’d like to know about it. If not, it must be that GW2 does something to reduce the spam. If it’s not the lack of a trade window, what is the cause ?

As for why I believe the lack of a trade window to be the case:

Trading by mail has a very obvious risk of the first player sending their part of the trade, then the second player not sending the part they promised. That risk makes a lot of people very reluctant to trade because they don’t trust the other person. They just see it as far two risky. Especially when there is always someone willing to call any trade spam a scam. The spammers quickly learn that they aren’t going to get any bites. So they stop wasting their time.

A proper trade window requires both players to lock in their offers and transfers them simultaneously. So the risk of the second person not sending their goods is gone. Even if you don’t trust the person you are trading with, you can still safely trade with them because you do trust the trade window.

Since trading with people you don’t trust is made safe, people will respond to trade spam that looks like a good deal. So the spammer sees the payoff from the spam in the form of the trade happening. So they think that spamming is a good use of their time*, meaning they will engage in trade spam.

*Even when it isn’t. For example GW1 has trader NPCs to assist in trading specific goods. Since their is a difference between the traders buy and sell prices, players would sell items at a price between them and earn more gold for that item than they would if they just sold to the trader. However selling to a trader takes seconds, finding a buyer takes time. Just selling the item to the trader and spending the time questing would consistently earn you more gold than spending the time looking for a buyer.
Yet I regularly saw people trying to sell items via trade spam that they could just sell on the trader.

so what is the problem to add a feature for people who ask it for the sake of role playing?

Because it will harm everyone.

Inflation is far more easily controlled by limiting the amount of money entering the game (i.e., the gold rewards from dungeons, events, renown hearts, etc.). Using the TP is entirely optional. If you want to reduce the amount of gold in circulation, you simply tweak the game to generate less gold in the first place.

Except that the trading post gold sink is the only gold sink that will eat more gold as inflation happens (as inflation rises, the tax take does also, slowing inflation until the tax take is eating more gold than is being created. Then we have deflation and cycling around an equilibrium). Meaning it is the only goldsink that can stop inflation.
Remove that sink and the GW2 economy will be left in one of three situations:
– More gold is coming in. Thus inflation.
– Less gold is coming in that going out. So players are losing money. Until they stop using goldsinks and we move back to the previous scenario.
– Somehow ANET has perfectly balanced the rates of gold creation and destruction. This balancing needs to be exact. Any variation is a problem. Any balance change will break the equilibrium. Thus I don’t consider this option viable.

The fee on the TP is there to prevent people from simply using it as temporary storage. Direct trading cannot be used for that, so the problem wouldn’t exist.

I can’t see that as being anything more than a side effect of the tax.
Which games actually have people storing items in the trading system ?

Thanks for summing up all possible human contact in four lines.

I’m only summing up every single trade I’ve had in GW1 after I realized that almost nobody was willing to haggle. Each line of my summary represents a single message, except the last one which is two. The only thing that ever happened differently is one player stating their location.

…
Nope, none of that can possibly happen and in fact never does in any other game…

Sure, it can happen. But I’ve never seen it, so it must be extremely rare at best.
That’s your problem. You’re looking at the best cases and ignoring the rest.

Yes, it would certainly make it harder to track all the “LF1M FOTM 27” lines. And it’s not like it would be possible to have a separate trade channel or anything like that.

FOTM group formation is another problem that needs solving with some form of dungeon finder.

As for a trade channel, spammers will know that using a channel that everyone views will make their spam much more effective. So how do you plan to keep them in the trade channel ?
They will bypass any chat filter setup, and ANET doesn’t have enough moderators to keep gold sellers in check, let alone trade spam.

“Hear ye, hear ye! Pierre Van Hoelbrak, the great norn chef, has come to Divinity’s Reach! For a limited time only he will be offering his services for free near the cooking station. Bring your ingredients and watch as he turns them into works of art. Tips appreciated, a norn’s gotta drink.”

Specific enough for you?

Then watch all the people jump on him calling him a scammer. After all, he can’t craft without the ingredients. So the person giving him the ingredients will have to hand them over in one trade window, then he hands back the finished product in another. Which is something that can be done with mail trades.

So could you give me an example that can actually rely on the security of a trade window ?

You also have the problem of the roleplayer being drowned out by the spammers.

Really, you can preview on the trading post? You must be running a different version of GW2.

Ok, I did make a mistake with that. But I see no reason why previewing is impossible within the trading post. It’s just something ANET hasn’t coded in.

You have it backwards. It’s not good because it’s popular; it’s popular because it’s good.

The popularity is irrelevant. I haven’t seen you say anything to convince me that the benefits of a trade window (limited to RP) outweigh the problems it brings (trade spam, avoiding gold sinks, etc)

Bahamadude.4925:

Honestly, the people who run on with WE MUST USE THE TERRAIN!!! IT’S MORE FUN!!! are only basically saying “we wanna kill everything including bosses in safety.” Most monsters are soloable, and you only run into those odd situations like you see in the pic once in a while. At worse this is a mildly annoying issue and is nowhere near as game breaking as people try to make it sound imo.

Problem is, this invulnerability triggers in all sorts of stupid situations. Like underwater with no obstructions between me and the enemy. Or when I’m in melee range (both on land and underwater). Those are really annoying.

ANET has several other options for when an enemy can’t get to a player. For example the enemy could run away and get out of the players range. Or the enemy (especially ‘flying’ enemies) should be able to navigate its way up to the player. Some enemies could have a ranged attack they only pull out when melee doesn’t work.

Going invulnerable is the worst method I can think of to stop players outsmarting enemies. Especially when it triggers in situations where the enemy should be able to reach the player.

Account.9832:

Direct trading lets players save 15% in the cost of transactions,

Bypassing a gold sink means more inflation. Thus it is a bad thing for GW2 as a whole.

I don’t see how bypassing the gold sink can be considered a good thing if you are thinking about anyone but yourself.

allows human interaction with other players,

In theory, yes. In practice this interaction is mostly something like:
– Seller in map chat: WTS x for y gold
– Buyer in whisper: I’ll buy
– Trade happens
– Both players say thanks.

That’s it. No meaningful interaction while the trade spam makes meaningful interaction in map chat much more difficult.

allows crafters to suggest items that casual players might not even know about,

I never saw that in my years playing GW1. Why would GW2 be any different ?

and which might be useful to them, improves the RP aspects of GW2 (which was advertised with the line “Putting the RPG back into MMORPG”),

Be more specific. How does flooding map chat with trade spam help RP aspects ?

allows sellers to link items so that buyers can actually preview them, and so on.

Finally an actual advantage. However it is also something which can also be done with the Trading Post. Therefore it doesn’t count.

Most MMOs have at least 3 forms of trading (face to face, CoD mail, and a marketplace / AH / TP).

So what ?
Just because it’s popular doesn’t make it good.

ANET chose to not include a trade window or CoD mail. They have said why in previous threads. If you want to know why, go find those threads. All I’ll say about ANET’s arguments is that they apply equally to a trade window and CoD mail.

I generally ignore ANET’s arguments in favor of one thing I have seen: With no trade window, the trade spam in GW2 is vastly less than any other MMO. That alone justifies removing it, though other arguments do have plenty of merit.

fellyn.5083:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

fellyn.5083:

Uh… the people who are saying it is easy by far out number those who are saying it’s hard.

The majority are the people who aren’t saying anything. How do you know what they think ?

Go look in the other threads about the puzzle. Most people are saying it’s far easier than the clock tower.

When you say ‘most’ do you mean 51%, 99%, or something else ?

Not that the number would be useful. People posting on the forums are only a minority of the GW2 player base. The majority of players are silent. How do you know what they think ?

fellyn.5083:

Uh… the people who are saying it is easy by far out number those who are saying it’s hard.

The majority are the people who aren’t saying anything. How do you know what they think ?

DreamOfACure.4382:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

You are still suggesting a feature which is improved by people muting their own friends. All because that friend is having a conversation with a stranger that you don’t understand because you’re only seeing half the conversation.

I never said people would mute each other because they don’t understand half a conversation.

Then why did you bring up muting in response to people only seeing part of the conversation ?

I’m only going to repeat myself one more time.

Repeating yourself won’t work. If we didn’t agree with you the first time, why do you expect any different the next time ?

Things like “seeing half the conversation” is a good thing when it comes to casual conversation.
- It allows people to get to know each other more vicariously. That’s something people can’t do in real life, but in a game like Maple, you can do it by choice – By choosing to keep them on your list.

Please explain this point.

- And it encourages people to converse more when they want to get in on an interesting conversation.

How can you ever join in on a conversation when you can only hear half of it ?

Now, let me pose two questions to you:
1. How many friends have you added from GW2, that aren’t in the same guild(s), in the last few months?
2. How many of those friends have personally went out of their way to contact you through whisper just to get to know you better?

How can seeing someone part of a conversation, and thus missing the context provided by the parts you don’t see, ever help you know someone better ?

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Come to think of it chatting was often impossible in Maple Story because the chat filter have a very high false positive rate

You’re either making that up, or it was only implemented in the last year or so.
When I played, it only muted the words that were curse words.

Oh, looks like they finally removed that stupidity. Still, you’re talking about a feature that existed at the same time the devs thought that filter was a good idea.

Olba.5376:

Honestly, I don’t think that the mess and drama it creates is worth the gains. If you want to talk to multiple friends outside of your guild and you’re too busy to talk to them individually, you probably shouldn’t be talking in the first place.

The system I’m suggesting ANet follows had better management then the Diablo II chat you mention…

How exactly should they manage it better ?
Beyond letting people turn it off, I don’t see anything you can do. And once people turn it off, I don’t see why they would ever turn it back on.

And again,

Friend Chat is not merely a way of communicating with friends.
It acts as a personalized central chat hub where you can hang out with friends, where those friends are free to chat, listen, stay silent, etc..

Or block the friend chat entirely because the stupidity inherent in its design makes it too annoying to leave on.

sdragon.7605:

no overflow?simple, that means huge drop in population, no? lol

I’m on SBI. I went from being always shunted into overflow for LA one day, to no overflow at all the next. That means that whatever happened was sudden. Population drops that sudden don’t happen without a reason. Usually something that got changed.

What caused the sudden population drop ?

DreamOfACure.4382:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

So you want there to be two levels of mute ?
Mute in buddy chat and mute everywhere.
Or are you suggesting that we mute our friends ?

Two levels of mute.

The mute-everywhere feature you speak of is called “Blocking”. We don’t want to be that harsh towards overexciting or spammy friends.

If it ends up anything like MapleStory, Friend-chat would be the most used channel for most players. There needs to be a more lenient way for people to (temporarily) mute friends who get carried away while still being able to continue to use their friend-chat channel.

Edit:
Although with the message-suppression feature that currently exists, I suppose the need might not be as great as I think. That thing blocks people for an incessant amount of time.

You are still suggesting a feature which is improved by people muting their own friends. All because that friend is having a conversation with a stranger that you don’t understand because you’re only seeing half the conversation.

But lets say you do mute a friend over their friend chat. Then they try to get your attention through it. What happens to the friendship when you tell your ‘friend’ that you muted him for having non-mutual friends ?

Or, even worse, when your friend says something and you give a very insulting reply because you don’t know the context of your friends message, because the context was provided by someone who isn’t your friend, but is your friends friend. What happens then ?

Come to think of it chatting was often impossible in Maple Story because the chat filter have a very high false positive rate, and any time it detected something it wouldn’t allow, it blocked the entire message. So was this suggestion of your ever implemented in an MMO where the developers cared about players talking to each other ?
Because the Maple Story devs didn’t. Blocking bad words was much more important to them than people being unable to have a conversation because of the swear filter.

Don’t forget when you are fighting an enemy in a farm, you go to move the camera and start harvesting.

Or stop fighting to res someone.

Or open up an NPC dialog box.

haviz.1340:

Don’t we have enough rng already?

The problem isn’t RNG. It’s RNG and bind on pickup being used together. Remove either and the problem of rare (low supply), desirable (high demand) loot being vendor trash goes away.

Malediktus.9250:

I think they changed the maximum allowed people on main server in lion arch. Today theres no overflow over 2 hours earlier than normal.

For you it was 2 hours. For me, I usually always see an overflow. Yet right in the middle of US primetime I loaded into LA (on SBI) and had no overflow.

Sure, the popularity of http://gw2lfg.com/ should be treated as a symptom of an underlying problem. But ANET didn’t fix the problem, they just killed a symptom.

Malediktus.9250:

bad idea to change this when you need overflow to cross server play fotm. Not a bright decision.

Thing is, dungeons do allow cross-server play without needing an overflow. FOTM is the big exception.

Turns out we didn’t even get a month out of the Flavor of the Month dungeon before ANET killed it

Shlamorel.8714:

Not sure if it’s against the rules OP but I got yelled at in Lions Arch for selling exotic jewelry in map chat by many people who said “stop spamming map
Chat” or “use the TP kitten.” And I only advertised twice.

The only people who like seeing trade advertising are the people who are trying to trade. Everyone else just sees it as something getting in the way of what they are using chat for. Throw in the scams that have taken place over mail trade and hostility should be expected.

Also while we are at it, a cash on delivery system would rock in the mail service…it prevents scamming, however, I believe this would not give the gold sink anet is looking for which I do understand the need for a gold sink.

Making player to player trading safe means that trade spam can pay off. Thus there is an incentive to spam to avoid the TP fees. So trade spam will show up.
Especially among people who don’t properly value their time, so they spend time spamming to save an amount on TP fees that is less than what they could have earned if they just listed it on the TP and went farming for that amount of time.

Flyfunner.2093:

Introducing a middle man would be a waste. Who would want to waste their time trading items back and forth from players. What would they get in compensation? Money? If so, then they’d just be acting as a TP (with the tax).

If both players trust a middleman then it would solve the trust question for people who have never traded before. As for his fee, as long as it’s below the TP tax it would be good for those involved. Problem is the middleman establishing that he can be trusted.

Then there is the whole issue about avoiding the gold sink. ANET won’t like what that does to the economy. How many people would keep operating as a middleman if they keep being hit by anti-RMT code because of their middleman activities ?

There are two good reasons why an item becomes soulbound:

1 – To get it out of the economy. If these items weren’t soulbound, their price would crash over time as the economy is flooded with them as they are never destroyed. So they would all become vendor trash. The more expensive an item is, the more important the soulbinding is to maintain its value.

2 – Because the Trading Post can’t handle modified items easily. ANET had to chose between not allowing people to trade modified items, or have a trading post for every single possible combination of item stats + upgrade + skin. Including all the stupid ones.

3 – So that the only people to get the skin are people who have done specific content.

So allowing people to remove soulbinding in those cases will be bad. As for the other cases of items being bound, those should all be removed without needing us to spend gems.

ANET should tell us about bug fixes, so we know that it’s safe to go back to something we stopped doing because of bugs.
ANET shouldn’t tell us which exploits are fixed. That way any exploiters will waste time trying the closed exploit before moving on to the next one.

The area between the two is very murky.

The basic idea is that ANET tracks some measure of how active a zone is. Periodically ANET looks at the total activity, zones which have more activity than the median have something tweaked to make them less desirable to farmers, zones with less than median activity become slightly more desirable. The tweaked values are displayed publicly so that players react quicker to the desirability shifts. The end result is that all zones have similar populations and the adjustment keeps increasing the tweaked value one cycle, decreasing it the next.
Until ANET does something to disrupt this equilibrium. But it’s a stable equilibrium, so it will restore itself in time.

The only questions are:
– What should be used to measure activity ?
– What gets tweaked ?
– How long should each cycle be ?

An added complication is that disrupting the Coin:Karma:XP ratio may mean players have trouble affording gear while they level a character.

For dungeons I’d suggest that the activity measure should be the number of times the dungeon gets completed (each path counts as a different dungeon) and the value that gets changed is your base Magic Find (gear and food are improvements to your base MF, so they will still work). This still risks the complication for characters that are leveling, so it’s not idea. But I don’t see many <80 characters running dungeons so it is acceptable until a better idea comes along.

For open world content I’d use dynamic events as the measure. Each person who gets a gold award for a DE counts as x points, a silver is y, a bronze is z. I’ll leave the exact value up to ANET. The thing that gets tweaked is a multiplier on the coin, karma and xp reward at the end of each dynamic event.

So you want there to be two levels of mute ?
Mute in buddy chat and mute everywhere.
Or are you suggesting that we mute our friends ?

These hackers sound very easy for ANET to automatically detect. Just keep track of how many nodes per hour each character is mining. Legitimate players will be distributed in a nice curve.

These hackers however will show up as a spike at the high end, all clustered together very tightly. So tag them as known hackers. Then wait some time to:
– Identify the other accounts involved in RMT. Especially the buyers
– Make people think that these hacks are safe. Thus allowing ANET to tag more accounts for termination.
Then get Dhumm to deal with them.

Detecting them may be even simpler than that as tracking their movement throughout the world will show them moving at speeds impossible without hacks.

So I won’t be making any effort to report these bots. The bots that need reporting the most are the ones that aren’t using obvious hacks.

LordGustoff.3752:

Seriously? Another content update? bashes head against keyboard

I realize that Anet has various teams of people working on different aspects of the game. ie: a team for bug fixes and a team for content. Seriously though, if they want me to continue to buy gems they need to fire some of those content designers and hire a few more bug fixers and whatnot. Right now I want a STABLE game that’s less buggy, not more content. Jeeze.

There will be some people who can create new content, but aren’t able to help fix bugs. For example, the people who work on an NPCs appearance.
Those people will be either making content or doing nothing.

I only have a problem if the people who could be fixing bugs are working on something other than bug fixes.

TimeBomb.3427:

So you’re asking for a new chat channel that you and all your friends can talk? Wouldn’t that get very messy very easily?

Example:
I have 5 friends.
Friend 1 knows Friend 2.
Friend 2 knows Friend 1 and 3.
Friend 3 knows Friend 2 and 4.
Friend 4 knows Friend 3.
Friend 5 doesn’t know any of my friends.

I send a message in the friends channel, and thus to all 5 of my friends. I get responses back from all of them, and start talking to all of them as a group, but Friend 5 sees me having a conversation with seemingly nobody. Friend 4 gets confused because he doesn’t see Friend 1 or 2 or 5’s messages. And so on and so forth.

Maple Story had exactly that happen.

A much better system would be to let us create our own chat channels and controls who enters them. That way you can create channels for your friends and know that if someone is in the channel, they see the entire conversation.

Leablo.2651:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

The trade window not coming across is easily understood. With no trade window, there is very little trade spam.

That’s a tautology. In general, the people who want direct trading know there is going to be spam and are willing to tolerate it because the ability to trade outweighs the annoyance caused by spam.

What about the people, like me, who don’t care about direct trading ?
For us, there is nothing to offset the annoyance of trade spam.

As for why you like direct trading, what advantages does it give to GW2 as a whole to have it ?

Bypassing the gold sink means more inflation. Trading outside the trading post means less volume going through it, making the trading post more vulnerable to market manipulations and reduces how well you can use it for price checking.

As for it being a tautology, which definition are you using ?
using different words to say the same thing, or a series of self-reinforcing statements that cannot be disproved because they depend on the assumption that they are already correct: Doesn’t fit. What I’m saying can be easily disproved if you just find a single game which allows direct trading, has a lot of trade happening, but has a comparable level of trade spam to GW2 in that games trade hubs.
a technical notion in formal logic, universal unconditioned truth, always valid: I can’t see how it could be considered unconditional when the statement I’m making is if we get direct trading then we will see more trade spam. A very conditional statement.
a rule of replacement for logical expressions in some systems of propositional logic: If you think this definition is relevant, I’d like to hear you explain how it is.
If you’re thinking of a different definition, be sure to include where you get that definition from.

With the GW1 trade window, there was a lot of trade spam and ANET had a lot of trouble keeping it in the trade channel.

Actually, the GW1 chat window automatically directs 99% of trade spam based on the keyphrases “wtb” and “wts” which players actually use. If you turn off the trade channel, you would see virtually no trade spam. You really should try out GW1 sometime.

Oh, I did play GW1. I remember how bad it was. I remember when the filters were added. People bypassed them. ANET changed the filters. People bypassed them again.
Trade spam in local didn’t die down until ANET put a notice on the login screen reminding everyone that it was against the rules. Removing the trade window is a much more effective method against trade spam, and also one that doesn’t require anyone from ANET to deal with reported trade spammers.

Wesley.4590:

If someone doesn’t know what CET stands for and how it compares to GMT they could just look it up and learn something new.

CET has daylight saving. GMT doesn’t. That means that GMT is much easier to convert in your head because you only need to track the dates of when DST goes on an off for your local timezone, while CET requires you to know its DST dates as well.

That is the reason why GMT is the superior timezone to use when giving a time to an international audience.

Minos.5168:

Bluesavanah.8562:

Unless a trade window similar to WoW is introduced you are open to either the buyer or seller scamming you. Also the chat filter prohibits you from spamming so all in all it might not be illegal but I’d say you’d be wasting you time.

It’s funny, because a very similar “trade window” existed in the original Guild Wars.

It’s a shame how many useful features from GW1 didn’t make it to GW2.

The trade window not coming across is easily understood. With no trade window, there is very little trade spam.

With the GW1 trade window, there was a lot of trade spam and ANET had a lot of trouble keeping it in the trade channel.

Forget scamming. The reduction in trade spam alone justifies the lack of a trade window. As for the gold sink of the trading post, that is essential to keep inflation down in the long term.

Today I had some lag in FOTM. Skills wouldn’t work, enemies frozen, all the standard lag symptoms. Except that chat was still working perfectly, I could still communicate fine with party members and use guild chat with no noticeable lag on the chat. Making this the fist time I’ve ever seen the in-game chat has remain functional while everything else was lagging.

After about a minute of this the rest of the battle suddenly restarted and proceeded at high speed.

Has anyone else seen this strangeness ?

AnonEMouse.7932:

When did the normal Anet policy of using UTC/GMT for European zone timings, change to using CET?

Most English speaking users in Europe, are not even in the CET timezone.

Probably because they want to cause more confusion to southern hemisphere countries.

Unspecified.9142:

I’m willing to bet a lot of people have forgotten about those orders (when you buy/sell a lot things just vanish in your list of buy/sell orders). If Anet suddenly purged them and returned all that money to people that would be a HUGE surge of gold entering the market all at once.

The trading post sales tax would fix that. The higher prices get, the more gold the tax sinks. So the tax will cause the total rate of gold sink to reach an equilibrium where it’s sinking gold at the rate it’s being created. A surge of gold would disrupt the equilibrium but, because it doesn’t change the rate of gold creation, the equilibrium would be restored.

Edit: Oh, it would also mess with the economy because supply/demand numbers would shift radically on a lot of items. Those numbers are used by a lot of people when determining prices. Not sure if it would be good or bad, but it would be a crazy time for the economy.

Purging the low buy orders would make the demand numbers more accurate, because the demand numbers would no longer include buy orders that can never be filled.

Awesome.6120:

Why do you care that these orders exist?

Because when I’m looking at the sell items page, items with a buy order too low to be filled still show a price beside the item name. Making it annoying to tell them from the items with buy orders that can be filled.

Items with no orders have no price listed. So I can quickly see that there are no buy orders for them.

Items with no buy orders, or items that only have buy orders too low to be filled, are items that are very unlikely to sell on the trading post. With the items with buy orders too low to be listed, I still have to spend time checking if the buy orders are reasonable. And I’m creating extra queries on the TP database, which would slow it down with enough people doing the same as me.
Purging those low buy orders would speed up the TP a bit, as you get rid of those extra queries.

Guild Wars 1 did have low level PvP arenas. They were constantly deserted.

Dietere.3476:

Crazy idea:

…have them deposit their payment, you remove the payment, then give them access to withdraw the item you are selling them, then kick them from your “guild?” I know this sounds silly, but isn’t it a more secure possibility?

BTW, I don’t know what the costs are for starting a guild or having a guild bank, etc. but for a serious WTS trader, wouldn’t it be worth the cost to have a Perma-secure trading hub for yourself?

That idea adds extra complexity while solving nothing. The risk of scams involving mail trades is that one player has to give the other player what they are offering without any guarantee that the other player will give them what was promised.
Your method has the same trust issue as you demanding the person gives you payment before you hand over the goods: The other person needs to trust you enough to go first.
The person sending their stuff second is never at risk of being left with nothing.

You might get banned for spamming, if someone reports you. Or you might find that the only buyer that sees your spam demands you send the item first, then never sends you the gold. ANET might ban the other person, but they will never return your item.

My advise for you is that your plan sounds very risky. You’re either gambling on something random*, which is a bad idea. Or you’re relying on something that somehow hasn’t become public knowledge yet, meaning your trade spam is likely to be undercut at the trading post when the method becomes public. Or you have overlooked one very important detail, and your method isn’t profitable.

Either way, returns like that sound far too good to be true.

*If you average any GW2 gambling method over infinite rolls, the best you can possibly get is to break even.

While you guarantee a ring, you’re still invoking the stupidity of randomly generated loot. A better idea would be to have a vendor that takes the tokens and lets you chose a specific ring.

GW2LF has a few level 1 groups. Try using it.

By making the stats suck, ANET has made it clear that the only people they want buying cultural armor are the people who like its looks and are willing to transmute it onto something with better stats.

How many of you would be happy if the armor is exotic, but exotic with a horrible (for your build) stat combination ?

Make the stats good and ANET has two choices:
– Have the vendors stock a large list, then have to deal with people who accidentally bought the wrong item.
– Divide the people who buy it into groups: Those who like the stats, and those who don’t.

Beorn Saxon.4762:

Ah, figures. Well for me I could care less about Ascended. Either way, T3 should be Exotic or Ascended. To have it at Rare is just ridiculous.

Until you start looking at cultural armor as a way to drive sales of transmutation stones. Then giving them lower stats makes sense.
Though I’d have given them level 1 stats, just to make it clear to everyone that you shouldn’t be buying it for the stats.

Okuza.5210:

I think they stopped short of the finish line on so many UI features with “well, this is good enough.” The UI could be phenomenally better with just a little more effort. Missing LFG tool, secure direct trade panel, trade chat channel, pan-server chat channels, etc. etc..

Leaving out a secure trade window was an intentional decision from ANET. They decided that the negatives of it outweighed any positives. Since I have never seen any other MMO that has killed trade spam as effectively as GW2 has, I agree with them.
With no trade window, all a trade chat would do is encourage people to be scammed by attempting to trade through mail, so a trade chat is also a bad idea.

The lack of a LFG tool is inexcusable.

Tank The Lord.4790:

“Repair instructions for the mac client are not current available”

Then just uninstall and download everything again. That should get rid of any damaged parts of your client.