Guild Wars 2

Edenknight.9284:

Sparkie.3465:

@Edenknight – I noticed that you’re an 80 doing a level 11 event chain.

Is it possible that karma DR kicks in harder depending on your level? I could see that as a good way to discourage high-level players from farming easier, more dependable low-level events for karma. They do a lot of similar things to encourage (but not force) you to play in zones that are level-appropriate.

Don’t know, no one knows. I could possibly see that as a scenario. Wouldn’t make much sense to me though to punish people going to lower level maps as they have a scaling system. I personally don’t like Orr, but that’s aside from the topic really. It wouldn’t be wise to pigeonhole people into one zone because it’s ‘level appropriate’.

Mainly I’m saying that we need an apples-to-apples comparison. Your screen shots are excellent to demonstrate that this karma DR happens, but it’s more meaningful to have screen shots of it in ~80 zones during “normal play.” There are additional considerations in low-level zones – complicating factors.

They have lots of these measures in low level zones. I wouldn’t call it pigeonholing. I consider it a risk vs. reward issue. You take less risk in lowbie zones, so you earn a lower reward. That makes perfect sense, and I’d consider the game broken if I could farm for a legendary weapon just as effectively in a level 1-5 area as in a level 80+ area.

That doesn’t mean you can’t go to a level 1-5 area, it’s just less profitable. Otherwise, no one would ever leave the starter zones. I’d guess that you’d see karma in, say, a 70-80 zone that was nearly as good as an 80+ zone, and some respectable karma in a 60+ zone. If that’s the case, you still have plenty of flexibility but you can’t just stomp on things mindlessly in the newbie zones.

@Edenknight – I noticed that you’re an 80 doing a level 11 event chain.

Is it possible that karma DR kicks in harder depending on your level? I could see that as a good way to discourage high-level players from farming easier, more dependable low-level events for karma. They do a lot of similar things to encourage (but not force) you to play in zones that are level-appropriate.

You know how the Trade Post goes down for “maintenance” every once in a while?

That’s the Black Lion union employees going on strike to renegotiate. The trading fee is used to satisfy the union demands for raises. They are not happy about some of the cargo they have to porter across Tyria. Unidentified dyes = hazardous chemicals. Minis? Live animals! Food that needs to be refrigerated, potions in fragile containers. Payoffs are needed for smuggling weapons across different territories.

I’ve heard a rumor that a certain Mr. Hoffa is now involved in the negotiations on behalf of the Black Lion teamsters.

Well, at least I’m not the only one getting few badges per kill. Maybe they really did reduce the drop rate.

@Narathkor – I’m actually looting my bags much more often than my last attempt at PVP. I didn’t know how the WvW loot mechanism worked during most of the first month’s attempt at the achievement. I certainly miss some from time to time, but it’s far less than my prior attempt.

The biggest play differences was that last time, I did most of the achievement on a level ~10 rogue. This time I did it on a ~35 elementalist. The rogue was using a bow, and thus doing more single target DPS, whereas the elementalist was doing more AoE spells. The level difference is significant, and many more people are 80 this week, which is another factor to consider.

There are black lion traders in every zone that I’ve been to. You don’t need to go to a major city to access your ill-gotten gains.

Granted, I’m not 80 yet. However, I can clearly see on the wiki that there’s a black lion trader in cursed shore (can’t tell from the wiki on other high-level maps), so I’m guessing that the pattern continues and you’re just not very observant.

Thurgood – Use the trading post.

The trading post will list items that have been posted in the past even if there are none in stock. It seems relatively safe to assume that all dyes have been discovered and sold at least once by now, so it should have a complete (or very nearly complete) list.

I suggest you make a spreadsheet with a list of your current dyes. Then make a list of the dyes on the trade post and compare them. You should be able to sort the dyes by alphabetical order easily in a spreadsheet program, if you aren’t very familiar with them (like excel or open office calc). You could also list and sort entries by known sets, materials, and color categories. With a little bit of effort, you can also make the spreadsheet pop out a list of dyes you don’t have yet.

That way, if and when they add new dyes, you’ll be able to just expand your existing spreadsheet and keep going.

Pro tip: There are arrows on your map indicating relative elevation.

Look very carefully at your map in one of the major cities in a dense, 3D area (central Black Citadel or The Grove both work well for this). When you get close to an object (poi, merchant, etc.) that is directly below or above you, little arrows on your map and minimap appear that indicate whether the object is below or above you.

This is a really easy way to get hints about where vistas, poi, skill points, etc. are if you can’t find them right away.

I suggest that you encourage your friend to get help for his problem. Many phobias can be diminished or eliminated with treatment. I wish him luck in this endeavor.

My mother is afraid of heights to a crippling degree. She refuses to get treatment for her phobia and it has had severe and negative consequences for her – to the point of isolating her from her own children, other family members, and many of her friends.

It isn’t really viable to make a game like this cater to most phobias. Games that are mod-friendly, like Skyrim, are much easier to alter to fit the common phobias. I’m sure you agree that many games wouldn’t be very interesting if all the terrain were flat to cater to people with my mother’s height phobia. There are many such phobias – there are people will fears of fish, ducks, dogs, germs, and many other things. It’s simply not possible to make a game both interesting and devoid of all common phobia triggers.

If your friend can’t get treatment but wants to play this game, I suggest you scout out zones and regions where you two can play without encountering spiders. There are lots of areas without spiders. You could even start a page on the wiki to share your spider research with other arachnophobic gamers.

So I ventured into WvW to complete my monthly achievement to kill ~50 invaders. I killed at least 50 people, maybe up to ~70 since I wasn’t keeping close tabs on my kill count.

I got 4 badges out of this. Last month, I got roughly 15 badges from a similar (undoubtedly lower) number of kills.

Obviously, I am doing something wrong. It seems unlikely that the drop rate changed quite so much. I’m not a killing machine, so can’t imagine that I am running into any sort of DR. How do I get more badges from kills? Do I need to concentrate more on focus-firing someone and less on AoE to get a better chance at loot? I tend to WvW on a mid-level alt – do I need to be max level in order to have a decent chance at loot getting loot or badges? Does using siege weaponry influence the drop rate?

I know there are other avenues to get badges – the jump puzzles, etc. While I’ll certainly be pursuing those methods of acquisition, I’d prefer to go kill some folks and I’d really like to understand what is dramatically altering my badge drop rate.

Please let me remove items individually from the trading post if I want to. Right now, if you buy more items than your character can hold, you just get as many items as will fit into your inventory. That’s not game-breaking, but it is clunky.

I once started a new alt and put in an order on the trade post for some 8-slot bags and a bit of other stuff – a handful of level-appropriate items. All the alt has was a single starter 4-slot bag and the default backpack. When I went to collect my items after a bit of fighting, I found I couldn’t remove the new 8-slot bags before the other gear – I could only hit “collect” and get whatever the game decided to hand to me. Of course it decided to give me the bags last, so I ended up having to run around to try to vendor or bank some of my other possessions first before I could expand my inventory space.

I’d also like to do this for salvaging. I was trying to test out the salvage rates on some low-level gear, and every time I went to get my items I had to plan ahead to have a salvage kit in my inventory, so that I wouldn’t accidentally fill up my bag and be unable to salvage until I found a way to get rid of something.

It’s not a huge change, but it’d be a nice little quality-of-life thing for people who use the trade post frequently.

Your other ideas are interesting, but I don’t understand the dye request at all.

You can already buy unidentified dyes of a specific color-type. You even get to pick what the potential rarity spread is. They’re made with cooking, and they’re available on the trade post. You can also buy exact dye colors on the trade post, as well as unidentified dyes. Finally, you can combine 4 dyes in the mystic forge for a chance at a new dye. I don’t really understand why all that isn’t sufficient for you.

Bags are not a long-term viable product. Instead of complaining about the pricing, you should be requesting a sink (like the ability to salvage or soulbind bags). Or, better yet, moving on to a different product.

There is absolutely no motivation (and nearly no method) to remove bags from the economy. People occasionally make bags to gain skill points instead of to use personally. People upgrade their bags and then toss the old ones onto the market.

Long term, most of those bags will sell for vendor price, because there is no way to get rid of them. The only reason that they aren’t already at the price floor is because the general population hasn’t had time to level all their alts, gain lots of gold and materials, and fill all their slots with the best bags.

Bags will stop being profitable at any level very soon. Low-level bags are already permanently below cost. Only the maximum size bags have potential to be profitable long-term, and even that I’m skeptical of.

There are categories and sub-categories of items on the trading post. They seemed fairly extensive to me. Some of them have descriptions that leave much to be desired, but that’s a different problem.

Only risk what you can afford to lose.

Rock is too strong, but paper deserves a buff.

-Scissors.

The bug report forum is that way —-—>

You can also use the command \bug in game to report it. They won’t restore your junk, but they have a much better chance to fix this issue if you bug report it.

Also, are you sure it was 83 silver and not 8.3 silver? Did you double-check on “items sold” that 83 silver made sense instead of ~8 silver?

There’s a persistent bug in WvW that makes a specific NPC invincible. I’ve only seen it at the Garrison at the center of the Borderland maps. This bug makes it impossible to successfully assault the garrison.

Please consider removing the problematic NPC until the bug can be resolved! Heck, I’d even be happy if garrisons were disabled as a claimable point entirely until the bug can be fixed. The fact that we can’t assault the garrison is a minor annoyance, and by itself we could live with this. However, communicating this fact to all the players on the WvW map is simply not possible. We end up wasting lots of manpower on a futile and frustrating bug, over and over. Even with repeated and frequent discussion of the bug in map chat, team chat, and local chat, significant groups of people go try to assault the garrison every 5-15 minutes, then ask about how to kill the invincible mob, then get angry and occasionally leave to a different WvW map. I was in WvW on a map with a broken garrison last night, and at least one fellow in map chat was getting slightly hysterical over the incredibly high frequency of this cycle.

It doesn’t seem to give the team who benefits from the bug any huge advantage, but it sucks up an inordinate amount of manpower from the other teams because it tends to look like the “perfect opportunity” – an undefended, strategically located keep, often already badly damaged.

At this point, I’ve seen more bugged garrisons than ones working normally, so it can’t just be our bracket.

People see what they want to see. If you have data on the subject, post it. If you don’t have data to show, then you are speculating. My Tikbalang Ward is working exactly as I hoped it would!

Instead of projecting all your hopes and dreams onto magic find, perhaps you should consider – what is “magic” in this game? What would make sense to the devs? What can you go test on your own? What’s already been tested by players? Do the devs gain anything whatsoever out of spelling out exactly what the stat does for you?

Also consider – if you are guaranteed to get a result from some action (like mystic forge recipes, gathering, and salvaging) does the concept of magic find even make sense? You’d be reducing the chance of obtaining some item for the sake of another item. At least with monsters, there exists a chance to get no items and a chance to get multiple items, so more magic items doesn’t require less of other items to drop.

If finishing your dailies quickly are very important to you, then you should stick to an area you know well. If you wander around an area you aren’t familiar with, it can take a while to figure out the event patterns.

Triggered events are also especially good for the daily. Look for the orange star bursts!

Personally, I tend to use Lake Feritas in the Plains of Ashford (newbie char zone right outside the black citadel). There’s two chaining events nearby that trigger quite frequently. There’s a rampaging skale event that’s nearly always up in the little stream that feeds into the lake. There are a couple other events relatively nearby and a couple along the path from black citadel to this area.

If I don’t have this by the time the tar elementals at the lake and their chaining events are complete, then I wander over to Victor’s Presidium, where I can trigger a multi-step chain of events.

There are a lot of potential public-relations pitfalls to this kind of thing. Whether you like it or not, and whether Anet supports it or not, minors will play this game. Do you want parents complaining to Anet about their 12-year-old game-marrying a 35-year old? Do you want to see that news article about this game in a tabloid or on a slow news day? It’s not a possibility, it is an inevitability.

You are already free to RP this kind of thing on your own. I have no objections to people RPing. However, in-game coding of it is just adding an unnecessary and moderately risky support burden to Anet with very little influence on your actual RP.

They’ll probably add in all of the trappings and froo froos of marriage without adding some bizarre feature to encode weddings officially into the game. I’d recommend for the good of the game that you focus your suggestions on that. Wedding-dress and tuxedo style town cloths, silly vanity rings, a new cake recipe, flowers. Those are all more flexible things to add to the game anyway.

While I personally agree that the numbers would be easier to read, they can’t implement this in a simple manner.

The trading post is shared across all servers (as far as I know). The use of commas like that is strictly an American custom. In Europe, they use commas when we would use decimal points, and they use decimal points when we would use commas. We write the number ten thousand down as 10,000.00 and they would write it as 10.000,00. What’s sensible to you and me would look bizarre to the Europeans, and vice versa.

This is also likely why the game spells out exactly how much something costs with fields for gp, sp, and cp instead of presenting it in decimal form.

I’m sure they could put in a workaround that displayed numbers differently based on some criteria, but it’s not a simple matter of assuming anyone who speaks English will prefer the American way or that only the European servers will want to see numbers in the European style.

If you don’t like the chests, don’t use the chests. It’s a psychology game, and from your attitude it appears that Anet has nearly beaten you with it. It’s like the lottery – the only way to win is not to play, and the only consistent winner is the house.

Save them up until you have a stack of 250 in your bank or until they announce a new special item in them. Then put it up on the trading post. Consider each one a copper, instead of a random chance to win big, and you’ll have beaten their game. Destroy them when they take up the space of more valuable loot in your bags.

@ShadowbaneX – That is not a valid way to judge the matter. One of the sorting options on the Trading Post is for tools. The only items that the trading post categorizes like that are salvage kits – all of which are account bound. The trading post will also happily let you search for other account-bound items. Legendaries being on the trading post means nothing in and of itself.

That said, it’ll be interesting to see how they decided to handle the matter.

As far as I know, we don’t really have enough information on either of those recipes to provide solid advice on what the best method of obtaining clovers is.

The huge unknown is the 10x item recipe. The 1x recipe appears to produce clovers 1/3 of the time, according to The Internet. We don’t really know what the drop rate is on the 10x recipe (or, if anyone knows, they aren’t willing to say yet – information might be more forthcoming after everyone has the world-firsts out of their systems).

If we assume that the rate of clover creation is the same for both recipes, then on average it doesn’t matter which recipe you use. The expectation value is the same for both recipes (with the obvious caveat that, if you use the 10x recipe, you will want to get to 70 clovers then swap to the 1x recipe since you only need 77 clovers, not 80).

However, there will be variance from the average. That’s why, assuming the drop rates on clovers are identical for both recipes, most people suggest you stick to the 1x recipe. It’s a risk vs. reward problem. If you use the 10x recipe, you have a higher risk of using much more material should you be “unlucky”. If you use the 1x recipe, you have a much lower chance of a reward should you be “lucky.” Essentially 10x would be high risk and higher potential for a reward, while 1x is lower risk and lower potential for a reward.

I’d say it depends on your personal risk tolerance and how you will feel about your progress increments. On average it shouldn’t much matter, and I personally will probably do lots of 10x if the rate remains in question because it won’t bother me to get a bad streak. Most people get really angry if they use up a lot of money to try to make something and then get no progress towards their goal. If you are one of those people, or you can’t handle the risk of wasted materials, then you should stick to the 1×.

When a server has a queue for all four WvW maps, give them the option of participating in WvW on a different server. This other server should be chosen by the game and not the player, preferably not the lead server in its bracket, and never be one of the two servers that you are competing against (as in, never a server that is in your bracket). This suggestion draws very heavily from your implementation of overflow servers for PVE zones. Players who join such a WvW map should be queued into one of their own server’s battlegrounds while playing on this “semi-overflow” WvW. Unlike the PVE overflow servers, when your queue pops, you should have only two choices: join in your world’s WvW, or be kicked to Lion’s Arch.

It might be necessary to add further debuffs or limitations to such players to dissuade them from purposely and perpetually playing on these semi-servers. Perhaps they wouldn’t be able to talk in chat. Perhaps they wouldn’t benefit from orb bonuses. Perhaps they couldn’t build siege or perhaps they wouldn’t be able to loot badges. Likely, you’d have to require that they join only borderlands games, not eternal battleground games.

I put this suggestion forward with great hesitation, as it breaks one of the big design goals of WvW – the battle between different, distinct worlds. The reason I even bother putting it forward at all is because I think that it doesn’t completely destroy this design goal. The free server transfers currently undermine this design goal more, and when those transfers start to cost money there will still be server transfers for no other reason than WvW status. Limitations should be in place to encourage playing on your own server to keep this design goal prominent but not absolute.

I put this suggestion forward with the premise that it supports a higher design goal – fun WvW. It would let people participate in WvW even if their server has huge queues. It could be employed to balance out team sizes, if Anet wishes. It could lead to more active borderlands. It would lead, overall, to more PVP. It might encourage players to consider other servers with shorter queues that they otherwise wouldn’t consider transferring to.

There are downsides. It doesn’t really solve the huge queues on some servers. It won’t appeal to all WvW players. It can’t easily accommodate a large, organized guild group. It would probably negatively influence the scoring system that is currently used to rank servers. Depending on how it is implemented, it would likely reduce mobility between the WvW brackets. Servers who suspect that the opposing teams are benefiting more from overflow players will complain, regardless of how it is implemented. I personally think that these downsides are counteracted by the potential benefits, but I can understand how many would disagree.

The two exchange rates differ on purpose. They want to strongly discourage speculation in the gem market because it would ruin their free to play model. The two rates are still correlated – when there’s a lot of people buying gems with gold, then the people doing the opposite (converting gems to gold) will benefit from a better conversion rate.

Phrased differently, they really do not want you to buy a bunch of gems with in-game gold, hold them for a week or a month, and then sell them for gold for a profit. That’s why there’s a large difference in the two conversion rates, and there always will be. If they didn’t maintain this difference between the two rates, then those gold sells you see in map chat could game the system to make the official rate of cash to gold terrible, so that more people would come to them to buy gold instead of to Anet. Similarly, malicious or bored players (or groups of players) would be able to game the system.

Ask a friend or someone to look at the maps for you (don’t give out your account info, I mean have someone look at it over your shoulder in real life).

You probably just can’t see it because your brain is running all the tallies together and is flustered / fatigued. This is very common. It’s part of why writers need editors and accountants need auditors. You practically become blind to the information – your brain will tell you what you expect to see instead of what’s really there.

Having someone else look it over will, at minimum, allow you to write down the zones that you really do have completed. At best, your friend will find the missing POI or confirm that you really do suffer a bug.

Server transfers are free. You could’ve transferred, done the thing, and been back to your original server several times over by now.

If you cannot bear to server transfer but think you’re dedicated enough to farm all that karma and whatnot, then there’s other ways to do it. Work on it early in the WvW cycles when your world owns approximately 1/3 of the map and people haven’t lost interest yet – the colors rotate with new match ups, so in ~3 weeks this will get you all the difficult points and vistas.

Or, log in at off hours and do it when the maps are mostly empty in your bracket (if your world is crap at WvW then it’s hard to imagine your opponents have a significant night presence). Set your alarm to ~5 AM and do it before work. Do it on a sick day. Something other than whining about how hard it is!

I’m crap at PVP and it’s unlikely I’ll ever farm up the other stuff needed for a legendary. However, I managed to get through enough PVP using these techniques to get all 4 PVP maps on one character and most of the PVP maps on an alt. My characters aren’t even 80 yet. I say to you – you aren’t even trying and with this attitude you won’t get the rest of the legendary requirements either.

While your friend is well-intentioned, this seems like a bad idea. He could hypothetically buy some gold, pets, or similar non-account-bound items in the gem store and then mail them to you, but there’s going to be some loss from the exchange rate if you try to convert that gold back into gems.

You should tell your friend that you appreciate the offer, but maybe he’d be willing to buy you a coffee / ice cream / whatever instead for your birthday. Technically, it would be bad manners to ask for cash that you could then use to buy gems yourself.

You can buy and learn the recipes at any time. If you come across a karma vendor that sells recipes, and you like collecting recipes or suspect the recipe will be useful to your profession, just buy it.

You don’t even need to be trained in the appropriate crafting skill to learn the recipe. Also, you can give the recipes to alts if you prefer since they’re account-bound now.

None of the leveling karma recipes are so spectacular that they are must-have items of phenomenal cosmic power. They’re just neat optional rewards for completing a heart – exactly like the other rewards on heart karma vendors.

You’re not allowed to use a bot to gather crafting materials. That generally means you can’t use a program that automates part or all of the game.

You can go gather stuff as much as you like. You can kill mobs for loot as much as you like.

After a little while, if you sit there and kill the same bunch of mobs in the same spot, some in-game code will kick in that will cause you to get a diminishing amount of loot from those mobs. We don’t know exactly what triggers this set of diminishing returns. Most people report that if they make some minimal effort to rotate what they are killing and to wander around the zone, then the effects of the anti-farm diminishing returns are minimal. If you sit around and farm one event, the code kicks in quite fast.

You aren’t going to get banned for normal play with the intent of harvesting craft materials. You will likely get banned if you use a bot program or an exploit. You won’t be banned if you trigger the diminishing returns code through normal play, you’ll just get less loot.

You might as well post a pink lolcat to your Facebook page, you trendy activists.

This kind of nonsense helps no one. It doesn’t help people with cancer. It doesn’t help people who might get cancer. It doesn’t help people pay for cancer treatment. It doesn’t help people get screened for cancer.

The idea behind breast cancer awareness campaigns is to get people who are at risk for it to screenings, so that they get better outcomes. It’s to fund efforts to treat cancer. It’s not to make a bunch of 20-something college white boys feel like hipster social activists for wearing a certain color.

If you want to do something meaningful about breast cancer, go talk to your mother about breast cancer. Your mother (women age 55+) is the demographic most at risk for breast cancer – it’s also a demographic with very little representation in MMOs. Make sure she’s going to the doctor regularly and getting screened once she’s past 55. For that matter, go to the doctor yourself yearly.

Instead of spending $10 on gems this month, donate that $10 to cancer research or to organizations that help breast cancer survivors. You don’t need to drain your savings account to make a difference – small donations add up. You do need to do something more than buy a pink dye in a video game, though.

Sounds like most people who play support builds tend to go for survivability (vitality and toughness) over healing power.

The tests that I have seen on healing power indicate that the coefficient is not consistent for all spells. It ranges from 0.1 to ~1, with most spells getting coefficients closer to 0.1 than to 1. I’ve seen one report of a healing spell with a coefficient as high as 1.28, but I haven’t sat down for myself to find out.

Part of the problem will also be that it’s hard to tell whether your heals are helpful or not in many group play situations, whereas you get more immediate results from other stats. WvW, for example, doesn’t lend itself well to an easy analysis of how effective your healing contribution was. In sPVP, you might get a chance to ask your fellow team mates whether they notice a difference or not.

I suggest you try out different sets of (relatively cheap!) gear and get a feel for how it impacts your play style. I myself was grateful for every iota of healing I had on a couple of tough boss fights, but didn’t really like how it felt in WvW.

That’s an awful long post to try to justify why the Goons lost to TC. I suppose this means that your members are deserting quite fast for the better WvW servers.

Quit treating your wife like an idiot. Sheesh. Treat her with respect, give her a bit of time to figure things out. Running towards mobs isn’t hard, and your character auto-turns to face anything you attack. Explain mechanics as she asks and encourage her to look at the keybindings. If I ever caught my mate talking about me the way you’re talking about her, I’d drop him like a sack of rocks. Most people with genuine mental or physical disabilities can manage the basics of MMO combat just fine – treating your wife like a bumbling toddler is not going to make her enjoy this game any.

If she likes the game, she can AoE at events and get all the kill credits, just like everyone else. If she doesn’t like the game, then you’ll have to find someone else to play with and she’ll apparently feign stupidity to get out of sharing your hobby. If she doesn’t like events or prefers single-target weapon set ups, then she’ll be better off not doing popular events. Fortunately, there is WvW, sPVP, hearts, jump puzzles, crafting, and gathering as options where she doesn’t have to AoE to get the most out of the game.

Maybe there just needs to be some creative thinking to make defense more interesting or rewarding. I don’t think it should be a free AFK source of income, but perhaps there are ways to make it more appealing to some section of the player base. Maybe boost the faction reward to attract the people who are trying to collect legendary weapons. Maybe make NPCs attack regularly, so that undefended points are lost to any and all sides. Maybe put some dynamic events at defense that are rewarding and require at least as much effort as a normal PVE event, so you aren’t just waiting idly for an attack.

This would also give servers a strategic method to attack heavily-defended points. Time your offensive push against the castle to coincide with an Uber Giant attack event against the castle. More reason for defense and offense to be there, more players fighting players, even if NPCs drew both sides to the same area.

I think they should add an item to the gem store that lets you move faster, but doesn’t work in sPVP or WvW. Long duration swiftness. Akin to the auto-res items. Let’s sort out who wants to move faster and who just likes collecting things and can’t get their mind around the concept of collecting a different kind of vanity item.

For the vanity collectors – there are plenty of options available to you. Pets, dyes, item skins, transformation elixirs. Why specifically do you want to collect mounts? Because they are big and hard to miss when you want everyone to pay attention to you? Wait a little bit and they’ll add “big” collection items like costumes and more tonics. There were plenty of ways to show off in GW1 – they’re just slightly more subtle than the WoW manner of showing off and they’re more in the style of the rest of the Guild Wars universe. If you want to vanity collect mounts, please come up with a bit more of an explanation of what aspect of mounts make them a more appealing collectible than anything else.

Midnightjade.3520:

I think the reason they don’t have it is because of the chances of exploitation by blots. I played Final Fantasy XI for years and Fishing was the #1 way that bots exploited the game. They sat AFK in out-of-the-way places and just spammed away until their inventory was full, then sent the catch to a goldfarmer for sale on the TP to cooks. When it’s 1 bot, it’s not a problem, but at the time it was hundreds, many of which were stolen accounts.

I’d like to see Fishing too but it is more complicated for the economy than you might think.

I think that there are ways to counteract this. Fishing could be a more involved mini-game. It could have relatively poor loot. It could function exactly like the other gathering options, with nodes and fishing poles that function similarly to the mining picks and axes. It could be located only in areas where there are veterans to fight, like many of the “rich X veins.” It could produce only account-bound items. I’m sure there are other creative ways to deal with it as well. It could produce nothing more substantial than achievements.

Your complaint is certainly valid, but I don’t think fishing necessarily has to be something bots dominate. I think a lack of imagination and foresight contributes heavily to fishing being botted in many online games.

Whenever an item says that a certain crafting profession can use that item, it means that the crafting profession can use that item for a discovery, specifically.

I think they might’ve been a little inconsistent in this labeling practice, which has lead to confusion over it, but this is the stated design intent from an earlier forum post. Items that are used by a profession simply for default recipes but no discoveries are not supposed to have that profession listed on them.

For artificing, you generally use oddball items to make potions – this includes the silver nuggets, the filigree pearls (not their proper name), carrots, and unrefined leather, for example.

Paulus magintie.7432:

To be honest I have bought gems with in game silver before for just 1 key, but im trying not to spend my money on them because so far im level 42 with only 90 silver.

I don’t have the IRL cash or in game cash to keep buying keys and I don’t want to sell them knowing they have good items in them.

This is what they’re counting on. Eventually, people like you will buy the keys, either with cash or gold.

You will always get more chests in-game than keys. That’s the idea. None of the items in the chests are essential. Either you buy the keys, or you sell the chests on the TP. There’s not other options.

I suspect, if they follow a similar pattern as GW1, in several months or in a year they’ll roll out special weeks and weekends where the key drops are much higher than normal. Never high enough to meet the chest drop rate, but high enough to remind you what cool stuff is in the chests.

I think it would be a neat way to “gather” cloth and leather, actually. Make one of the possible drops into salvage items that are zone-level appropriate. It would alleviate lots of people’s frustrations with obtaining jute.

Also on my wish list: Fishing tournaments and fishing events. I bet they could design a fishing tournament that’s more fun than the old WoW design. I hated those tastyfish so much! Never did get the salty title….

@grizzly grandma

All the harvest nodes (including ore, wood) change up when servers get restarted. They shuffle around the map. They had a good streak where servers didn’t get restarted for a few days, so you had a few days where node locations were static.

It’s not a very obvious effect unless you start going to exactly the same node very frequently for several days. I imagine it’s anti-bot code, to throw off the bots frequently but irregularly.

You get the recipe for feasts from the Mystic Forge.

You’ll need the food that you wish to convert into a feast recipe (grilled portobello mushrooms, for you). You’ll also need elonian wine, mystic coins, and arcane crystals. The wiki suggests that you’ll need one of the mushrooms, 17 wine bottles, 50 coins, and 20 crystals, but please check for yourself before you buy all of that. I haven’t made a feast recipe myself yet, so I can’t vouch for the quantities.

I think the big problem is that most people took a long time to realize that every heart point is also a vendor after you complete it. That doesn’t help in the highest level zones, admittedly.

However, it’s pretty obvious that using the trading post as temporary storage space is a habit that people get into at the very beginning of the game and then continue with as they level.

I think the best way to deal with it would be to remove the floor pricing on the trading post. Then the prices of these items could meet the demand price, and people might just realize that it’s usually better to find a vendor (or use a waypoint to reach one) than it is to post this stuff to the trading post.

I’d really rather not see everyone get a 85% vendor anywhere in the game – though that might drive more people to buy the Black Lion portable items on the gem store.

Sociology studies are always difficult to do well.

I have a suggestion to improve future polls:

You need to give everyone a basis for the scale. Some people look at a question like that and a 1-10 scale and take it in an “absolute” kind of way, while others will take it in what I’d call a pragmatic way (I’m biased, I admit it).

The absolutists will consider a 10 to be the best moment in their life, and 1 to be death’s door. They may give you a 7.5 to classify their general satisfaction with life when playing video games, and consider most leisure activity to fall into a small range.

The pragmatists will guess at the purpose for your survey as a comparison of happiness within the game among different types of players. They will have a variety of approaches to scaling happiness. They may consider 1 to be a completely broken game, or they may consider 1 to be “continuously camped in WvW” or they may consider 1 to be “I’m quitting once we get through with this survey.” They may give a 10 simply when they are having lots of fun, or when they are having the most fun they’ve ever had in a game, or when they’ve just gotten a string of luck with drop rates.

So give people some guidelines to go by. Spell out what 1, 5, and 10 mean at minimum, probably along with some middle values. You’ll get a bigger spread across your scale. This is a problem with any question where you ask people to rate something on a scale, no matter how well you phrase the question.

Trading post. Buy bags off the trading post. If the bags aren’t cheaper than their component runes, then wait a little longer. There is nothing that actively removes bags from the economy, so they’ll slowly pile up and become worth less than even the rune it costs to make them.

Mainly, they ought to display your carried currency somewhere on the bank tab so you know how much you can deposit.

You get double items off a single swing. You don’t get extra swings. Wood and herb-gathering work the same way. The wood displays a bit differently, with the extra piece showing up on the right hand side as a distinct item. In mining, for some reason, it displays as a x2 next to the item instead. I’ve gotten tons of x2 hits on ore nodes.

NoOneShotU.3479:

The bag space thing, while traipsing across the world trying to find a herb I don’t have yet is nuts. It’s not as bad as other crafts because I know I’m only going to use 6-7 Helms, but these 40 bowl of ruox I’m sitting on waiting to unlock the next pattern for them sucks.

Look, if you made 40 bowls of roux you’re doing it wrong. Or, at least, weird.

It’s one thing to have a single roux around to try to do discovery with. It’s another thing to mass produce an item that you have no use for. In the huntsman profession, you don’t make 40 bow strings all by themselves with no plan to use them. You don’t make 40 torch handles without a plan for them. In armor-based crafts, you don’t make 40 shoulderpad linings without a plan for them. The same goes for cooking!

Don’t make items that you can’t use and have no plan for. If you have only 1 roux sitting around, then you can easily use it in a known recipe if you find it isn’t useful for discovery for many levels. Alternatively, you don’t suffer a huge loss if you end up discarding the roux in favor of something more interesting to keep in your bank. If you have 40 roux sitting around, you’ve hurt yourself just as senselessly as making 40 shoulderpad linings.

I don’t see how it could possibly help you out. There isn’t anything to find. It’s a definite item from a definite recipe.

There’s a crafting XP booster that you might want to use instead.