Guild Wars 2

Which means those 20 skill points will simply disappeared and won’t count toward shards? I might as well use those now? Is that that this implies?

The question still stands. It’s a yes or no question – will those 20 skill points count toward shards? That is the question which is the concern of the article!

So, in that scenario, I’ve earned 187 skill points through world completion, and 63 skills points through leveling that’s totally to 250 skill points (amazing coincidence). These 250 points SHOULD have been hero points, but that character only have 20 skill points left. So you guys are saying I will get -230 shards from that character subtracted from the total of my account?

If that’s the case I might as well delete the character!

A scenario: I have a character that full map completion, used quite a few skill scrolls, and currently has 20 skill points left. No points have been invested into any utility skills. How many skill shards will it have when the wallet comes out? How does the wallet know if that 20 skill points came from “world skills” or skill increase?

If anything, please widen the gap. It should be 10% difference to be fair.

Lytro.9305:

… big fan of magic and archery, …

Elementalist has a conjured frost bow. You can be both magic and archer
Guardian is a magic warrior and is getting long bow as a weapon in the expansion, so it’s both magic and archery.
Ranger is an archer and is getting magic as a druid in the expansion.

So, any of them would satisfy your criteria.

I thought “Dragon Knight” would be something better.

DeceiverX.8361:

Andred.1087:

Why is everybody under the impression that stats gained from traits are integral to builds? Gear already far outweighs traits in stat contribution, so I fail to see how this change will require anybody to get new armor.

Because for some people, it is an integral part of their build. Not everyone just runs berserker gear yet can maintain even better stats than meta-based berserker builds; mine being one of them. I use Valkyrie armor, which mathematically provides the best stat bonuses for my build. That said, it is not a standalone armor set; it’s border-line useless without a 6-deep investment into the precision line on top of a sigil of accuracy.

Without this, my ~4000 gold will be entirely wasted. There are other similar stat distributions which have the same problems.

I don’t think Valkyrie stat is mathematically the best stat bonus for your build. If anything it would be some combination of Berserker/Assassin/(to-be-released Ferocity primary-power-precision prefix) or Rampager/Sinister/(to-be-released Power primary-condi-precision) (once condi cap is increased)

By using Valkyrie, one purposefully decreases their damage output and replaces it with Vitality which is not necessary all PvE scenarios, which the said member would become a hindrance to the team. IIRC a full valkyrie set is only at about 70% of damage output as Berserker.

Back on topic, I hope with this trait-stat break, they need to increase the difference between Ascended and exotic – maybe about 15% to 20% stat difference like Exotic to rare. There is no gear treadmill here, Ascended has been out since the launch of the game to set the highest limit. (it was released two months after the launch – so close to it in relation to the game lifespan so one might as well consider it part of the original plan anyway)

For PvE, most eles will probably go staff all the way. That will probably be the only viable builds (unless Sword tempest has something else to say next week).

That symbolic avenger seems op, BUT some of the symbols the guardian place is pulsing which means it will interfere with ele’s fire field maybe they should clarify the mechanic of multiple fields. I don’t think it’s first in first out (the data we experimented on is pretty inconsistent). Or the meta might change to just having the warrior solo might stacking and forget about fire field hehehe.

I would vote for having a specialization that increase stats and skills for the ranger AND get rid of that pesky pet when specializing in that specialization. A lot of time the pet is a hindrance to ranger’s game play really.

OP, I sympathize with you as you unfairly got kicked, but any other system in place of this one would be worse. I wouldn’t feel too bad about it as you only got through Belka and the Champ Abo, nothing that couldn’t be done in 10-15 mins with two ppl.

There was one time I and a friend joined a guildie to help him kill tar and lupi, then we left so he could sell the instance but he ended up leaving it because he couldn’t handle running to the last boss. That WAS a disappointment XD

A party leader system is no no. No player should be able to own the group. No player should be entitled to act with immunity. That is open for so many exploits, troll and griefing. The system we have now with majority vote, though flaw, is the best that we could ever have.

Nadya.4250:

…
3 people join, 2 ele & 1 necro all under 3k ap, I let them know that I really don’t feel up to teaching the run this late at night and can they bring heavy armored classes…

Doesn’t seem very nice nor helpful to me. On the other note, he could have invited a guildie as a spot holder

tramwajarz.2369:

mtpelion.4562:

Every member of the party has an equal right to the instance. If a majority of players want to remove you from the instance, that is their right.

The “party leader” is an elitist misnomer. No one has any more right to the party or the instance than any other person.

I fully disagree. When I create a party and make requirements for it, it is my right to moderate my own party. Those people who joined me agreed to be my guests. Noone is entitled for instances or a place in a party. Those who are afraid of being guests would be able to create their own parties and be “immune” to other participants.

Instances is not open world facebook farm. There are so many people entitled to do whatever they want they don’t even care to read LFG descriptions. Those players should feel bad.

I fully disagree. Sound like an elitist dictator to me. No one has more right than any others in a group. No one is entitled to own an instance either (except his home instance). If you want to make sure ppl don’t kick you be nice and helpful.

If you don’t want your party to be taken over by ignorant ppl, get a majority and have you and your friends control the majority.

If you are the minority it’s your fault to be a jerk to be kicked.

When I sell duo Arah, I always make sure that we control the majority by putting in my alt account in the party. That way I don’t get kicked. :P

Like others have said, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Though like Pixie said, it’s possible if one is a level 80 with berserker gear, and can kill things too fast even downscaled. When I help ppl in Queensdale, I just drop them my icebow and fgs as an ele and let them do the killing ;D

Chris Cleary.8017:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Cleary’s data suggests that only a few thousand players transfer 500 gold or more per week via email. It also suggests that many more are involved in buying black market gold or selling off assets from stolen accounts. This change, therefore, should protect many more people than it inconveniences. We should all be happy about that aspect.

There are two issues with the solution that are not covered by Cleary’s post:

• How many people withdraw 500g or more from guild banks in a week? I suspect the fraction is much larger than stated, if only because I know lots of people that add/subtract a few 100g every few days; I know very few who have 500g at any given time.
• How about guild leaders managing lotteries, donations to guilds moving from other servers, or otherwise pooling guild assets?

I’ll go ahead and pitch in on these 2 points, as they seem to be the most prevalent in the discussion so far.

On the first point about guild bank withdraws.

Yes, this will impact players with personal Guild Banks storing gold. However, a majority of players here are talking about personal guild banks for storage of wealth. These are basically the same as storing gold in the old personal bank. While there some benefits to doing this, the account wallet was implemented to be a single storage point for an account. On a single account basis, this does not impact anyone’s ability to move your gold unless you still have a large quantity of gold sitting in your guild bank as of today.

When multiple personal accounts are taken into account, this has a much larger impact on the ability to move wealth between accounts. This is just going to be an unfortunate side effect of clamping down on large wealth movements, and if you have multiple personal accounts, there are many different ways to store and transfer wealth between your accounts.

On to the second point about lotteries/donations/pooling assets.

There are plenty of workarounds that can be done for almost all of these situations that are being brought up. None of these situations are actually prevented by implementing the gold restriction, they are simply slowed down. Gold transfer does not need to be performed by one person/account for guild matters, as almost all guilds that are doing these activities have a guild officer core they can rely on.

There will always be cases where multiple of thousands of gold need to be moved, just plan ahead for those events. That being said, donations of gold are probably no longer the best means of transfering wealth between guild members if you are trying to move large quantities of wealth.

1. So you are admitting to affecting people with multiple accounts and basically saying we will just need to take this intentional side effect. That says something about you don’t care about your player base.

2. On guilds. Why is there even a need to make a “work around” for something so basic in this game? Again, you PURPOSEFULLY introduce something that IMPEDE the community to do events. Do you think this is a good idea? Do you want to DESTROY our community? Do you HATE guilds? I mean this is called GUILD wars 2.

3. This does nothing to prevent the RMTs from doing business as they will just trade in valuable items instead of gold as many have mentioned in this thread.

This achieves NOTHING but to HARM the game than to help it.

This change is one of the worst decision ANET had made. The last time something is bad happened was the fix gems exchange rate where you are forced to exchanged a set amount of gems.

Let me tell you: this change will only harm the community and do nothing to stop RMT. The person who thought it was so clever that this can stop RMT is so inexperience with how the game economy works.

What would a hacker do? They would just buy lodestone / ecto / expensive items and send it to another one of their accounts instead? How does this stop anything?

What it does is it stop guilds from handling events. No more giveaway. No more Raffles. Guilds and people get punished because you SIMPLY think this will stop RMT?

People who use personal guild banks as saving accounts will also get punished.

GGGG Anet if you watch the last Trio Tournment. This move is worse than summoning spirit of Melandru during CMp2.

Because this game does not have an official gear check, for many players, AP is used by some players as a crude way to measuring competency.

Like many have said, AP is no way a sufficient requirement but many players use it for measure necessary requirement to gauge experienced players.

For me, I do both casual and semi-speed runs in dungeons, both low and high level fractals. When I do join a more casual run, I don’t care about people’s AP, but when I do a Fractal 50, I would feel rather uncomfortable to see a player with less than 2-3k AP join our group. Don’t you think that is fair?

Like Nike said when joining a “Casual group, Looking to Learn” I care more when people put in a sincere effort to learn the fight. On the other hand when I was doing my Fractal 50 to try to get that elusive fractal tonic, I don’t want it to last more than an hour and a half and have less patience to those who screw up.

I have a GW2 mentor who would join a “Death = Kick, Down = Kick” group and went ahead and succeeded in staying alive and managed to kill the original group posters in dungeon group and then proceeded, following the rule, and kicked those people. That same person would train me duoing Arah and many other things and watched me die like 40 times (per dungeon) and patiently waited for me to figure it out before we moved on. I got yelled at many times like “WTF – why are you putting down wall on melee mobs! WTF do you even have wall on your bar here!!” or “kittenwhere is my aegis?” or “Are you spamming your F1?!!! DOOO ITTT”

Looking back at last year and the year before, I am miles away from what I was at those time. I remember over a year ago when fracture was released and I joined a semi-casual group on a scale 8 fractal, there was this dude who was really rude and make all the obscene and nasty remarks on me. I went ahead an kicked and reported him thus accidentally booted the entire group after the cliffside. I was proud and thought that I was one of the better players. But now looking back, LOL, with 6k AP at the time, I was a TERRIBLE guardian back then. I still have lots of room to improve and miles to go with my training to get as good as people in my circle of friends.

So, I can see the reasoning both sides of the good and the casual players. My advise is, don’t let it discourage you. Join casual groups and try to learn the fight. Join a guild! Preferably a big one! Get on their TS/Vent/Mumble/Raidcall!!! There are many guilds out there that will help train you if you request and put in a sincere effort.

No and no. It already clusters so much of the screen. Please make it so I can DISABLE titles display. I don’t care about other people’s title.

It is actually quite fair. Simply buying more characters slot doesn’t entitle you to have double or triple the advantage over those who don’t buy. We don’t want to turn this game into a pay to win game.

Teon.5168:

That one statement alone pretty much destroys your entire argument on the matter.

Based on the above statement, your entire argument is based on your personal fears, and has absolutely nothing to do with what Mike O’Brien said.

Fear away, as noone will know what the expansion brings until it gets here.

It’s more like they are about to turn 180 degrees and do exactly the opposite of what they just said. That’s what the new article today is about: more tier to infusion, which is is a gear treadmill.

Wait and see. There will be +7 power, +9 power, +10 power (masterwork, rare, exotic) to each mighty infusion respectively.

There is a treadmill coming from the expansion. Now before you jump the gun, please read:

Mike O’Brien said at Pax South that your top gear today will be top gear tomorrow. I am afraid not.

Today blog article:

“Master Fractals: Uncover new depths in the Fractals of the Mists to gain powerful new abilities to overcome difficult fractal challenges, garner greater rewards, and unlock more powerful infusions”

So, this will make our hard earn (even more so than ascended gear) become obsolete. This is a gear treadmill.

And before you start start saying that technically the infusion is not a gear. Argue semantics all day if you want, it IS a treadmill.

A full 14 slots mighty infusion set costs about 2600 powerful blood, i.e., 1300g give or take and a few hundred more golds in passion flowers and a few hundred skill points. Please don’t tell me that it is inconsequential.

Let’s catch the treadmill now before it gets release.

I am astounded by hearing this. Good job Anet! You have stepped one foot into the grave that you’ve digged for yourselves.

After upgrading to get the deep cave, it appears on the TOP of the guild stash and treasure trove. Is this normal? In all my other guilds, it always appear at the bottom of the three.

Ok, so in AreaNet’s defense, they have some good and honest points in these advertisement.

“We ship new content and features regularly.”

They do have update every two – three weeks. Sometimes consistent twice a month for several months straight. During longer break (China’s release) we had at least once release a month.

“creating a game world that constantly grows and evolves”

The game has been growing. They added more zones, dungeons (fractals count as dungeon). The story has been evolving. We are midway through an exciting Living Story season. We had two seasons of living story and I say that the world feels like it is evolving.

“Sunken ruins”

There are quite a few “sunken” ships and areas and ruins you can explore in the ocean.

“Magnificent cities”

All 6 cities are amazing, especially Divinity Reach. Lion’s Arch will be rebuilt and that’s part of an evolving story.

“Cooperation and Exploration”

The cooperation aspect is indisputable. The new collection achievement indeed does encourage exploration again and I’m glad we have it.

Granted, they have had up and down, controversies and whatnot, but all in all, this is a great game nevertheless.

I was frustrated with the NPE for the first few days, but after giving it a few shots, it’s not that bad actually. Having Byron explained the reason behind some of these changes and replaying it with an open mind really helped me see what a beginner would have felt instead of just seeing it in the eyes of a vet.

Sorry, but your formula is incorrect. This is just basic math. It’s not even algebra. It is arithmetic.

Assume that your item sold, your revenue from an item is simply:

Revenue = 0.9 x listed price (if you don’t count the listing fee)
Realistic revenue = 0.85 x listed price (if you count the cost)

Please, new players these days get confused easily. I mean if they can’t even realize that you can pick up cow feed to feed cow, or can’t learn how to use 2-3 skills in 5 minutes and have to wait to lv 10 unlock the first 5 skills and lv 31 to be able to fully know how to use an elite skill, how can they even phantom these concepts!

Oh wait….

I mean these applies to all players in this game since if you create a new character you still don’t know how to pick up cow feed to feed cow and etc.

Can you not make more than one Enchanted Key?

Why are these not stackable? I have 20 x Enchanted Map Scrap [3/4] already.

Not going to happen for 1s per use. The black lion kit is 300 gems which is equivalent roughly to 30g for 25 uses and will guarantee a upgrade extract although destroy the item (about a little more than 1g per use).

Anet will probably release a “Gold-Feed-Extractor” following the pattern of the copper/silver salvage kit. And it will probably “eat” 1-2g per extract.

And now with no more low level champ farm, and the key farm nerf, the starter zones are basically abandoned except during the time of the world bosses (SB, Maw, Jungle).

Sure the NPE is attractive to new players at first, but when the new players hear about what happened and all the things that the veterans have unlocked effortlessly, they will get bored or jealous and quit.

Even for the veteran like me it’s pretty bad. Today I decided to give the NPE another chance and took out my level 35 charr engineer. It took me over an hour to get to lv 36 and I was doing thing pretty efficiently, hitting events as fast as I could. Sure an hour isn’t that bad yes? But it’s pretty bad if you are playing alone in empty zones. Why bother? I could just take out my 80s and play or if I want to play alone I could just fire up Skyrim.

It will be evident that the NPE is failing soon.

I think they should gate pvp. After all if a new player can’t understand how to pick up cow feed to feed cow what chance do they stand against anyone in pvp XD.

Proposal: you can only do pvp with a character that you have at lv 80 and with only the traits you unlocked with only the equipment stat you currently have.

Commander tags are now meaningless. We should implement something else for 500g maybe a sword tag or a shield tag

Maybe for 250 merits and 1 million influence with 1 month of build times. To speed up the process it would requires an extra 250 merits and 1 million to reduce it to 3 weeks. Another 250 merits and another 1 million influence to reduce it to 2 weeks to the total of 1000 merits and 4 million influence to do it immediately

Please implement VIP mode. I would like a sure way to getting a precursor instead of relying on chance.

Ayrilana.1396:

laokoko.7403:

Ayrilana.1396:

laokoko.7403:

So Mr economist. Please tell me why silk price rise in the past week.

Increased demand for ascended armor because of the collections.

so mr economist, decreasing demand wouldn’t cause a change in price. So reducing the amount of silk needed won’t cause a change in the demand of silk.

Anyway I’m done.

You may want to double-check that.

We do not know the effect demand of silk in reducing the amount of silk need. If we assume the same amount of ascended armor is demanded, then yes, it will cause a decrease in the demand of silk.

However, this change might increase the demand for ascended armor, which cancel out the other effect and won’t decrease the demand of silk anyway.

As nice as this sounds, this idea will never be implemented. Maybe it’s some art work competition that you can submit (like in gw1) so they can have their artist make the piece. Other than that I don’t see a chance of this happening from the current policy.

No please. I have too much silks. In fact I would like them to make it requires 1 stack of silk bolt = 1 silk weaving threads.

Waiting to sell those 3 stacks of damask when this happen.

sirian.4981:

I am really curious about the focus group they tested on too. We know nothing about them or who they are. I haven’t heard from anyoen who was in the focus group or what exactly they did.

Did the focus group actually test these changes out? Or was the focus group polled and Anet assumed this is the content they would enjoy based on polls?

A proof that such a focus group actually existed would be nice.

At any rate, they are not gaining (and retaining) new players with this kind of NPE.
If they do I’m glad that these newbs will be gated for a long time to us veterans.

New characters have no traits and skills even if you are buffed to level 80.

Vayne.8563:

Anet claims to have tested several variations of ways to keep people playing more. If you have evidence that their tests are wrong, I’d love to hear it.

The current entire forum for the last week and in the future constant complaints about these changes IS evident.

You don’t do THOUGHT experiment on these changes and make these changes.

There WAS NOT a CDI about these changes. That was the problem!

Maybe if they pay attention and actually do their job correctly there wouldn’t be these problems.

Yeah Vayne? Which part of the old system doesn’t work fine? You mean it’s too confusing to pick up cow feed to feed cow? Or do you mean rewarding a skill point for leveling up? Or is it too confusing to unlock a weapon skill by actually USING the said weapon Or is it too confusing to actually be able to jump straight into your personal story at level one?

You still literally gets zero skill points for level up. And can’t do personal story right away. A lot of people count on personal story exp reward as a source of level increase.

The old system works FINE. Revert ALL the changes except for the level up reward.

I feel like that guy that proposed these changes (new player experience) is actually working for another company, probably Blizzard to sabotage this game. And the fact that Colin did not catch that speaks volume about the management. And oh, don’t even mention the QA team. Did they even play it at all?

Wait, you mean the Sep 9 patch was actually a feature pack?

I thought that patch was an UN-FEATURE pack.

You won’t get any statistic because THERE AREN’T ANY!!

I have 21 characters all at lv 80 and 8 more at various levels 17-50. I don’t need a kitten tutorial!

They always try to put a twist on old things and call it new. This time, this twist has became a twister.

For example: players want a revamp on the personal story especially the final battle.

Their take: players don’t like it, maybe they are not good enough for them yet. We are going to gate it behind level walls until they are bored and never do the personal story again.