Guild Wars 2

Saulius.8430:

it’s not hard to find people for those paths, because a lot of people want those paths for dungeon master title. unfortunately most of those people are dead weight, and what’s worse, they don’t even realize that. and if you try to explain them that they are doing something wrong or they are not prepared, they take it as an insult.

and as toxyn wrote, weekend is the best time to search players for those paths.

Explaining what is going on goes a long way to nullifying those perceived insults. There’s nothing worse than going into a dungeon and seeing someone, who has made it quite clear that they have never done it before, stand in the wrong spot and cause a wipe… and then get yelled at and kicked for doing the wrong thing. In my experience, the people who don’t listen, or are simply so awfully bad at playing that they should reroll a Warrior, are very rare. Most people will listen and do what they are told if for no other reason than that they want to successfully complete the content… And every person that gets it explained to them is one more experienced player that isn’t going to kitten up the next PUG.

You know what I found hilarious? Back in the first week of September people demanding only lvl 80s with full exotics and that have done the dungeon before to do CoF runs. Yeah… You can’t teach stupid.

katniss.6735:

Scoured Google to no avail.

Because nobody has 100 laurels to find out yet.

I have completed my PS, sans Zhaitan, on my Human Ranger and am getting close on my Human Necromancer. My Sylvari Elementalist is only in the mid-20s so has barely scratched the surface. I’m currently part-way through Minister’s Defence on my Charr Guardian.

Playing my Charr got me to thinking… I don’t remember the friends of my Ranger or Necro playing anything other than a very minor role in the PS (I don’t think the Sylvari has any friends at all). I think in both cases they had to be rescued from something, but that’s about it. My Charr’s friend, however, joined me on nearly every mission up until I joined the Vigil.

This doesn’t feel right. Shouldn’t a “Personal Story” that starts with your best friend actually involve said friend more than for a couple of missions at the very beginning?

Lonami.2987:

They should have integrated the rest of the dungeons in the storyline, or let the personal story be over after The Source of Orr.

Ruining Arah story mode is the worst of options.

If you’re worried about players having problems, let them have a special buff until they complete it the first time or whatever.

Which is exactly how LotRO handles things. You get a seriously big buff to everything when you start a quest dungeon, and it gets reduced with each party member that joins until it’s removed when the party is full. You can solo the entire main quest, despite it taking you into full-party dungeons.

Still haven’t done Arah on any character despite first getting to it in early September…

I just came back from a while off, in which I played Skyrim and X3: Albion Prelude, and started a new character – new race, new class, new story path (finally joined Vigil). It all feels fresh and exciting again. Even Lornar’s Pass, a place I loathed getting my Ranger and Necro through, has been fun so far on my Guardian (probably less fun once I do more Dredge and can’t use Blind).

I headed into Lornar’s Pass today and after hitting level 32 I suddenly noticed that a lot of the loot I was getting was all level 1 Mighty weapons. My initial reaction was that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a level 1 weapon before and I’ve never seen such a low level item drop off a lvl 30-ish critter, but I have a vague feeling that this happened on my last character as well (could be wrong).

I got (all Mighty):
Rifle
Short Bow
Warhorn
Focus
Shield
Sword
Hammer
Mace

And while doing Story mode in AC I got another level 1 Mighty Rifle.

Has anyone else had this happen? Am I imagining that this happened several months ago, or is this an old bug?

Isn’t Ceiling Cat floating around somewhere, too? Or was that Skyrim?

I went out to WvW for the first time in a couple of months today (Kaineng? Really? KAINENG??) and the culling was no better than I remember it. Eight or nine of us ran up a hill chasing one guy and when we got to the top we all just dropped dead, surrounded by a huge zerg. the same thing happened four or five times. Culling hasn’t been fixed at all.

Every single person that doesn’t have a Thief or Warrior just LOL’d when they read this thread. And every Necro is wondering what kick kitten beast of a Necro you managed to build that can kill faster than the worst Warrior.

You people should be banned from recruiting more Warriors and Thieves into your ranks.

It’s funny, I was thinking about this exact thing last night, but slightly differently.

On top of what has already been mentioned, I would add that it is a boon for collectors to know exactly which armour sets they are missing and/or what to aim for. I know I still need to find a Medium Trooper’s chest piece because it’s missing from my locker… once I have that I have completed a nice set. It also means that collectors actually can collect armours.

I would like a system that requires destruction of an object to put it into your “locker”. This makes putting something in there a choice with real consequences. Maybe a special grade of Salvage Kit that works the same as Master’s but with the added benefit of placing a copy of the skin in your locker. The Kit only works on an item if you don’t have that skin.

Once you have skins available you can go to the Armoursmith or Weaponsmith in any settlement (you know, those guys that are currently utterly useless because all they sell are low level white items) and buy a copy of that skin for a nominal price, exactly the same as how the HoM Heritage skin vendor works. When I say a nominal fee, I mean nominal. 5s would probably be fair, but making it cost you 1g per piece, for example, defeats the purpose.

I am torn over whether such a locker should be account or character based because arguments can be made for both. I think the strongest argument for an account-based system is a) Skins that you only get at character creation can be made available to other characters and b) Legendaries. On the other hand, the biggest reason to have them as character specific is that it becomes a never-ending hunt that adds longevity to the game, but having said that many people, myself included, would rather Dyes be account-wide rather than character specific, so…

I’ve been on Dragonbrand since Headstart. I have seen people comment before that the population doesn’t appear to be what it used to be, but appearances can be deceptive.

Back when the game launched, everyone was at a low level and therefore the low level maps were absolutely packed, while the high level maps were ghost towns. Now that dynamic has changed. 99% of those people that were struggling to tag anything in Kessex DE’s back in September are level 80, and a large number of them have multiple 80s. The population is now spread throughout the game world, dungeons, fractals, Mists and WvW. This leaves far fewer players in many places… but it is by no means dead.

Just the other day I had to put up with culling in Straits of Devastation because there were so many people doing Balthazar . A day later I was in Wayfarer Foothills for map completion (and doing the Living Story while I was there) and there were at least 30 people doing the Frozen Maw event. The day after that I was doing map completion in Diessa Plateau and there were about 20 people that came to kill the giant… the day before yesterday, when I was there on a new character, it took us over an hour to get six people together for the same event. And before you say that it was only because of the Living Story (and I have no doubts that that played a role in the population), I have seen similar numbers of people in Brisban, Metrica and Malchor’s.

Remember also that just because nobody is talking doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Personally, I rarely talk in /map unless I have something to contribute to an on-going discussion or have a question or comment about something. If I’m in LA I am there to use the Vault, do some crafting and/or pick up stuff from BLTC, otherwise I am out in the world doing stuff.

Something that I have noticed in the last week that probably also has relevance to this is that I have been seeing a lot more people using /say rather than /map to have their discussions.

One thing that I absolutely will say to support the notion that there are less people is that going into the BLTC rarely results in culling anymore. I was shocked the other night to only see four people there… a couple of hours later there were about a dozen.

Unless something has changed recently, overflow is not automatic.

As far as WvW goes, I’ve been away for a while and seeing Kaineng in our bracket was a real “what the kitteny kitten” moment.

All these posts and nobody has repeated “play the game your way!”?

The worst part about this change, even worse than the horrible future for PUGs, and people that are simply new to a given dungeon, is that some classes now have mandatory skills.

Rangers now need to have “Search & Rescue” and Spirit of Nature equipped.

Necromancers need to have Signet of Undeath.

Mesmers need to have Illusion of Life.

Guardians need Signet of Mercy.

Warriors need Battle Standard.

Engineers need Elixir R.

Elementalists need Glyph of Renewal.

Since Thieves don’t have a revive that I can think of, they may be even less wanted… or they may be wanted more because they can be at their full potential. Rangers are the worst off since they have two less skills than they normally would.

And then there’s the issue of having specific Traits to improve your healing and revive skills in one way or another… and even the possibility of needing a specific gear set-up so that you have +Healing rather than +<insert attribute here>.

Maybe I’m going to extremes here, but this was the only way we were able to complete a PUG AC yesterday, and we still wiped half a dozen times on Kohler (possibly because the three Rangers in our group stayed silent about Spirit of Nature so we could keep our Elites), and people have been demanding full exotics to join their dungeon runs since the beginning.

Death-rolling content is never a good thing, but neither is a system that encourages players to demand specific skills and traits from other players.

I noticed that the other day too. I thought it had to do with speaking to the Explorers and then completing the Hearts they point out to you, but my Achievement count didn’t go up after trying it.

I go for what looks good on a character. Some of the gear you have to grind for just looks plain horrible, so I get it for the stat’s and then transmute it. I wouldn’t be caught dead with some of the Legendary skins. I have never seen a female Human wearing the same thing as my Ranger and all her gear skins are Heritage and Story.

Remember when the Karma cost of stuff got changed and then for the first week or so of the game people were kittening and moaning about how much Karma they were going to need to do anything? How many people went and dumped Karma on those Orrian boxes the other day? Laurels are the new Karma. Once you have your Ascended gear and Mini’s and whatever else you want from the Laurel vendor they will just be sitting there growing. Hell, people will probably be on the forums kittening and moaning about having nothing to spend their Laurels on.

You want a guaranteed Exotic? Go and run dungeons.

I agree about the furniture/floor/wallpaper, my LotRO house is filled with trophies of all sizes, and, aside from the seasonal wallpaper which I had no other use for (since it’s BoA), I don’t think I ever changed them from default. But that’s me, lots of people do like to have options to personalise their spaces and the more the better.

Absolutely agree about those achievements resulting in trophies, in fact, I think LotRO did something similar, possibly in PvP.

When I played LotRO, I was on what was then one of the newest servers. Very few people transferred from other servers because “proper” transfers were disabled for a long time and they were obliged to make new characters. Essentially, 90% of the people on that server were newbies (and a lot of n00bs too), and the other 10% had to start from scratch.

Buying a house was expensive. There were small, medium, large and Kin houses with prices that ranged from about 2g to 18g, and then a weekly “maintenance” on top of that. Every house was located within a neighbourhood and every neighbourhood was located within one of four race-based districts (one each for Elves, Humans, Dwarves and Hobbits). Each neighbourhood had a unique name but was otherwise identical to all the others within the same district, with the same size houses and Kin houses in the same places. In other words, each neighbourhood was a different instance of the same district. Each district had minimal services – vault access, a couple of basic merchants, a furniture merchant and a couple of trading stations, all located in the “town square” which made accessing these things from the main towns a better option and had absolutely no impact on town populations.

What did this investment get you? Depending on the size of your house, you would get 1-3 storage chests, which were not connected to your vault and a number of “hooks” that could be used for either furniture/decorations or trophies, both indoors and in your yard. You had the option to place generic furniture that you could buy or craft in almost any hook in the house. Included in the loot tables, however, were trophies which had a very low chance to drop and were Bind on Acquire. The point is, you didn’t need to make your house a “home” if you didn’t want to – you could very easily turn it into a trophy cabinet. You could also, if you chose to, buy furniture on LotRO’s equivalent of the gem store.

My Kin (Guild) grew to become one of the top two on the server and was the only one that was able to run raids on a daily basis, on top of the constant dungeons. As a result of this, we were the first, and in some cases the only, people/Kin to have certain trophies rewarded as loot for completing certain dungeons/raids. These trophies were proudly displayed in our homes and Kin House for anyone to see and some of them were very cool. A Balrog’s Sword. Three Orc heads that dropped off three Orc bosses in one raid that combined into a single trophy. A mysterious murky pond that did nothing until someone stepped in it when one of the tentacles from the Watcher grabbed the player and hanged them upside down. Various mounted animals and animal heads. A tiny, and very shy, pet turtle hiding in a bush. It should be noted that trophies were not only available from dungeons, but could be found in the open world and as quest rewards, though most of the best stuff came from raids.

Most people got their houses specifically for the extra storage. Even though it was fixed and could not be expanded, it still added much needed storage space for your account. It was the perfect place to store those things you needed to keep but rarely had to access… or those useless things you simply couldn’t bare to part with. One of the fun things about housing in lotRO was going to your house and watching your neighbourhood evolve. This guy has a new statue, that guy has the bloody banner of a particularly difficult Orc he killed, that Kin house has a relic that only comes from the hardest dungeons. And that’s just the front lawns, if you’re invited into someone’s house (they need to set permissions to allow you entrance) then you’d see even more stuff inside that records their adventures. On top of furniture, you could also set the ambient music, paint the interior and change the floor of your house, which added even more personalisation. I believe my large house still has wallpaper from the Christmas event in 2009…

So do I want player housing? If it’s anything like LotRO’s then that’s a resounding “YES!”

Extra storage.
House expansions (like a tower, basement or an extra wing)
A place to store Mini’s (let them run free!)

Crafted furniture.
Merchant furniture.
Gem store furniture.
Karma furniture.
Trophy furniture (like a rare shelf made from bones, or something, only found by killing a certain Champion).
Event furniture.
Seasonal furniture.

Merchant music/floors/wallpaper.
Gem store music/floors/wallpaper.
Karma music/floors/wallpaper.
WvW music/floors/wallpaper.
PvP music/floors/wallpaper.
Event music/floors/wallpaper.
Seasonal music/floors/wallpaper.

Crafted trophies.
Merchant trophies.
Gem store trophies.
Loot trophies (like a Boar’s head or a mounted Devourer)
Event trophies (blue, green, yellow orange and pink versions).
Dungeon trophies.
WvW trophies.
PvP trophies.
Seasonal trophies.

The avenues for decorating your house are many, to say the least.

If they are at all “true RP’ers”, I would look for one of the RP servers because anyone that is already 80 is by definition a powergamer so most people will be under 40. Of course, finding people that aren’t standing around the cities emoting might be a problem…

I haven’t logged in yet, but I have to ask – since it is midday on the 1st in Australia, and the 1st is still quite a few hours away in America, how do you know what the new monthlies are?

The Daily I can handle, it’s the Monthly one that shows up when you’re finished with the Daily that annoys me to no end.

Toggle FTW.

It’s 6pm on the 31st here.

The problem with that, hugemistake, is that you’re wrong. Outright wrong. They are not time-consuming in the least because you can get them all through normal playing.

Fyrebrand.4859:

This is how it should be done:

- The mini-pets collection is viewable anywhere, via its own menu. Mini-pets are summoned/dismissed directly through the menu.

- Mini-pets are not considered “inventory,” and thus do not enter your bags at any time, nor do they get dismissed when you “Deposit All Collectables.”

- A summoned mini stays with you indefinitely, until dismissed, or until you summon a different one

- Right-clicking on a particular mini’s slot in the menu displays the usual options for Buy/Sell on Trading Post.

/Signed. Pretty much how Ranger pets works. Put in a new equipment slot that works like Ranger f4 and problems are solved.

The mini slot was brought up at least as early as Headstart, so it’s clearly something that people want changed.

Give me persistent Ranger pet names first though…

Some Most of the complaints about these new Dailies are idiotic, but what’s even more moronic is the lengths that people go to get them so that they can get on with their game. The only effort I have ever had to go to to get any Daily was to leave Orr and kill critters on another map… which is what every single player that has been in Orr has had to do since launch.

Hell, I’ve been away since the Lost Shores event, only coming back two days ago, and I have 33% of my Monthly done. I could finish it tonight if I could be bothered (and I still might, just not sure how long 7 fractals will take), and I could certainly finish all but the fractals in under an hour with the only effort being that I’d have to go to the jumping puzzles (four of which I have discovered just through normal playing in the last two days).

You only get to “complete” a map once. The new WP’s do not allow you to get the map completion bonus a second time, even though your map completion says you only have 97%, or whatever it is.

Just so that there’s no misunderstanding, after the patch yesterday I logged in on my Necro, who had only just arrived in the Straits, completed the map (including a number of PoI’s, WP’s and a Vista, and got the bonus. Later on I logged in with my Ranger to grab the new stuff and there was no such bonus, nor was I expecting any, because I had completed the map back in September.

WAI.

My lvl 20-ish Ele’ got a bunch of chests in Caledon/Brisban and they all had Blues. Found a couple of Greens and a Yellow off corpses.

My 80 Necro, in Orr, got a grand total of two chests both with Blues. He also found three Yellows and four Greens on corpses.

My 80 Ranger found three greens on corpses and no chests anywhere.

Something isn’t right.

I got the Healer one literally within five minutes of logging in on my Ele’. One of the towns in Caledon Forest had been overrun by Nightmare Court and I just rez’d all of the NPCs. The Dodge I got just by normal combat.

I didn’t have to do anything to get either of these achievements. I would have rez’d those NPCs anyway. I dodge in combat anyway. Maybe the achievements are bugged for some people, but I think it is far more likely that they are trying to find the “easy way out” by looking for a way to get credit for something in the game by not actually playing the game.

You know what the funniest thing is? If they switched to GMT/UST then all the Americans would be on here complaining about timezones and everyone else would be happy.

It’s 5am on the 29th here…

IIRC the patches seem to come around in the early evening (of the next day) for me.

It could be worse. I am in Australia and when I registered my Diablo III account with Blizzard they decided that because I chose to use “British English” rather than Yankspeek, Australia must be somewhere in Europe so they made that my default server (rather than US which is meant to be Australian default, or Asia which is far closer and doesn’t suffer from the sometimes horrendous latency). When D3 patches, or even goes down for regular maintenance I not only have to wait until the day after it’s advertised, but I also have to wait until both the US and EU servers are done, so a 3-6 hour downtime always results in 6-12 hours. One of the many reasons I am playing GW2 instead of D3.

Just for some persepctive…

I played LotRO from 2009 until 2011 on one of the (then) new servers. The top-ranked Freep on that server, someone that I knew fairly well and did pvp with quite frequently, is now Rank 14. There are 15 Ranks. That’s over three years of almost daily pvp and he’s still not at the top rank yet. Granted, that server has never had the population of the older servers where there are r15 Freeps (and Creeps), but those servers have also been around for several years longer.

Here’s the thing, though: The massive rank grind in LotRO rewards people with highly visible icons and titles, useful gear (useful for pvp, but not pvm) and cosmetic gear. When you’re out in the ’moors there is always a sense of “just a few more kills” and you can easily get lost killing Creeps for hours, without even noticing it.

The event will culminate in a one-time only event chain that will run multiple hours with a finale of defeating the Ancient Karka.

…

Join in on the epic multi-hour one-time event, battle the Ancient Karka in Southsun Cove.

Source.

If today’s event is anything to go by, Sunday’s event is going to be remembered for all the wrong reasons for a very long time to come.

Fort Kitten? LOL. You know what you’re called on Dragonbrand? Fort Aspie. I don’t even think it was intentional, but google the word “aspie” if you don’t already know what it means.

I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but the update happening rtight now is not The Lost Shore. This update contains a “preview”, or a hint to what will be in the release on November 15th.

Also, please, while I think we all speak with one voice on the topic of “no more Risen”, have mercy and fix underwater combat’s many bugs before introducing major underwater areas. The single worst experience in this game is trying to fight Risen underwater in Orr.

I really don’t understand people’s obsession with capes/cloaks. Every RPG has people clamouring for them. Why spend all that time and effort making your armour look cool only to put a cape/cloak on so that you will never see it?

If FA can shamelessly bump their “help us, we have nobody to defend us at night!” thread when they have dominated the map all night, then so can we.

EU/Oceanic guilds that aren’t going to hop server as soon as things don’t go their way are more than welcomed.

Oh! HELP us Eu/Oceanic guilds! We are defenceless at night!

FA is Green. These screenies are after their night of being defenceless. The map has not substantially changed since before midnight… and it’s still almmost all Green now.

FA doesn’t need your help, Dragonbrand and Maguuma do.

If you’re offended by that, I suggest you avoid going to Concordia in Timberline Falls…

What Bluestone said, except that I live in Australia with an equally kitteny ISP and a better computer.

The only time that lag has ever been an issue for me was a couple of weeks ago while doing Teqatl. Everybody complained about the horrendous lag and about half the people there got disconnected at one point during the fight… and the number of people there was about half of an average WvW zerg.

It’s your computer.

Consider what happened to Diablo 3?

Okay.

With each successive patch, Diablo 3 has become a better game. Therefore, Guild Wars 2 will become a better game through it’s patch cycle.

Pretty straight-forward.

Wow… according to Urban Dictionary, it’s a slang word specific to Philadelphia. Wait, that can’t be right. Unless you said “U” or added a “u” as a typo between build and keep. Even then, the second “e” from keep remains… so Duke is offensive now?

I don’t know that you can say they have “nerfed” the jumping puzzle. There have been a number of occasions where I have spent a long, frustrating, time on a puzzle only to log off for a while and then come back to it later and do it first go.

You have to be transformed in order to be involved in the Costume Ball… which you would know if you had continued reading the patch notes past what you have quoted.

Which you would know if you had read the patch notes.

1, Descriptive of a female body part (in particular) in the UK and used to call some one useless or an idiot. In the US it is used for the ‘rear end’ I’m told – anyone’s rear end!

I can only think of one word here and I can’t imagine it being used, the way you describe, “to call somoene useless or an idiot”, especially given the frequent use of “the C-word” in some parts of the UK. Fanny is a girl’s name.

2, Shortened version(s) of old description a type of cerebral palsy and used, freely and casually it seems, stateside. I get called it from time to time as do others with disabilities in the UK. The word(s) in question are extremely offencive to a disabled person in the UK.

An extremely good example. While I disagree that it is offensive, it is in very poor taste, but get this… the French word (which starts with “R” and is removed altogether, rather than being replaced with “kitten”) means late/delayed. It’s usage in English is actually entirely correct to describe people with developmental delays. It’s in a similar position to the word kitten, however, in that it is correct in use but burdened by some negative connotations. So… that would mean French people couldn’t say “I’m going to be late”. That just goes to show the ridiculous situation we have here.

Hello everyone,

it’s quite interesting how you wonder why words/ shorts aren’t edited by the filter while others are. Does that mean you want those words to be filtered, too? Feel free to suggest some, then.

Greetings

As for this barely comprehensible response…

In Australia we can shorten almost any word, or name, and add an O (or Y). Robert becomes Robbo, Wayne becomes Wayno, bottle shop becomes bottle-o. Some of these shortened words are considered mildly to moderately offensive – refugee and Aboriginal are not offensive, but refo and Abo are.

Boong is extremely offensive in Australia. As already mentioned, it is worse than “the N-word”. While it is arguably the most offensive possible racial slur, and has no other meaning, in Australia, I believe it is the “normal” word in parts of Indonesia for brother.

The reason I highlighted these words is because games have a specifically American point of view. Words that are offensive in America can be meaningless or harmless in other parts of the English speaking world, but words that are offensive in the rest of the world are perfectly acceptable in America. And then there’s words that are in a grey area – most Americans probably don’t even know the word bugger, but if they do know it’s meaning (same as sodomy) they would probably think it highly offensive… but here is an ad that was widely broadcast in Australia and New Zealand a few years ago.

In most of the English speaking world, an kitten is a kind of donkey while an kitten is a piece of anatomy… kitten is almost always censored, but kitten rarely is. And just to point out how amusing linguistic differences can be, when an American says the word “Aussie”, it usually sounds to Australian ears as if they are saying “arsey”… and what makes this even funnier is that former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating once described Australia as “the kitten end of the world”. Americans also seem to get defensive when Commonwealth people call the “Yanks” because they use the word “Yankee” in a specifically American Civil War context, while the word “Yank” (no “-ee”) is used in much of the Commonwealth to mean “American”, in the same way that “Aussie” or “Kiwi” are used to describe someone from Australia or New Zealand.

Someone mentioned that if you turn off the word filter then you are accepting that you will see swearing. It would be great if this were the case, but sadly it isn’t. LotRO has a word filter which is on by default and the option to turn it off is quite hard to find. The LotRO forums have many, many, examples of people that turn off the filter and then complain about the unfiltered language. Some people even pride themselves on the fact that they have the filter turned off so that they can report people for swearing. You can’t win. This is why I disagree with word filters, because people are going to complain about the language anyway. Even if there is a permanent filter in place, you can tell what the censored word is 90% of the time anyway and your mind fills in the blanks – even when you’re not actually seeing the word it is still being “read” by the brain. Just look at these forums, where people find the use of the word kitten so hilarious that they actually type it in and restructure their sentences to fit it in a lot of the time. I think that all words should be acceptable for names and that those names are banned on a case-by-case basis if reported.

Lvl 80 Ranger, 400 Leatherworker/400 Huntsman – Full self-crafted Exotics, had to buy about half the mat’s on TP… 3s 45c. 100% explored all lvl 70+ areas for mat’s.

Lvl 74 Necro, 400 Jeweller/345 Chef – Aside from wearing some random jewellery I kept from craft levelling, wearing all loot gear… around 4s. Only just reached lvl 70 areas.

Lvl 7 Elementalist, 118(?) Tailor/26 Artificer – The cause of my current financial situation. 2s remaining, but I neeeeeeed moar mat’s to make my Necro some Exotics.

10s in Bank.

Probably the biggest gold sink for me, outside of mat’s, is WvW. Even those 6s upgrades at towers and supply camps add up on a heavily contested map. Never had more than 15g in cash at one time.

I currently have 91 BL Chests, and I buy 5-10 keys every two weeks. There are a further 60(?) in the Guild Stash. To the best of my knowledge, everyone in my guild is in a similar position. This tells me that the servers are flooded with Chests, something that is reflected in their TP value. ANet could sell the keys at 50% off (10 for 450 gems) and they still wouldn’t put a dent in what’s out there because most people already have more Chests than they will ever pay to open.

I would hope that the drop-rate of keys would be increased. I think I have found about 10 keys since release, almost 8 weeks ago. You could double, triple or even quadruple their drop rate for the event without impacting sales on the Gem Store.

Of course, we’re all assuming that normal keys will work and that there aren’t Halloween Keys…

I noticed in one of the red posts early in the botting thread that it was implied that if you report a gold-seller for sending you mail that you shouldn’t delete it. Presumably this would be so that the mail can be verified. Is this the case? Is it okay to report and immediately delete, in the same way that most people report and immediately ignore the chat spammers? If you shouldn’t delete the mail how long should you hold onto something which is taking up one of the precious few spots in the mailbox?

I don’t have the time to read through all 566 posts in the botting thread so I’ll admit that a clearer answer may be found there.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that neither abo nor boong are censored on the forum… but I’m willing to bet one or two thirds of the name of a famous Australian racing car driver (and I believe an American reporter as well) is censored on the forum and a banned name in-game – kitten Johnson.

EDIT: Wait… Johnson isn’t censored despite it’s use as a colloquialism? This is making less and less sense. That driver’s birth name was Richard, by the way, but he has used the normal shortened version of the name for over 50 years… and it’s the name of his company too.

I have one to add to the same category as Gathering Tools – random jewellery.

I cannot conceive of any reason why a random ring I find is soulbound on acquire. In fact, I can’t think of any other non-event loot that can be found that is like this… and even some event items aren’t soulbound. To add insult to injury, they are worse than crafted jewellery and as rare as hen’s teeth.

So, the forum just went down while I was replying and I lost my post…

Here are your answers:

1) Frostbite is banned because Anet bans every harmful medical condition.
For all you know your next player’s sister could have died of it and it wouldn’t be cool to remind him.

Wrong answer.

I tried to name my Hyena Mr Bitey and had no clue what was wrong with it. Now I at least have an idea (though I thought the French word was bitte).

I have seen enough trolls in my time online to know exactly why some names can be banned. During the kittenushima disaster a couple of years ago, I saw a few people come online with names like Tsunami. All of them were level 1 and all of them were spamming chat with distasteful remarks about the disaster. The same thing happened after Hurricane Katrina and I’ve also seen it after tornadoes. I happen to think that names like Tsunami, Hurricane and Tornado can be very good, if unorginal, for some characters… but the trolls are why we can’t have good things.

What I do find annoying, though, is when perfectly innocuous words are banned because they might cause offence, but offensive words that have no other meaning are perfectly acceptable. Thinking that if the word “bite” is a banned name that these words must surely be on the list, I just made a new character. Apparently the name Abo Boong perfectly acceptable. While the word “Abo” can be debated (it is the contracted form of Aboriginal), and actually is used as a name sometimes, that doesn’t change how offensive it is. There is absolutely no defending the use of the word “boong” because it’s a worse racial slur than “The N-Word”.

I am appalled that I am unable to name a character/pet Mr Bitey, but Abo Boong is perfectly acceptable.

Dragonbrand. A couple of guilds decided to server hop (to the enemy) last week so we basically have 40 less people playing every day than we used to.