Guild Wars 2

Grommi.5634:

They’re trying to provide content and a unique alternative to how gear progression works.

Unique?

What is so unique about a new tier of gear?

It is the exact same thing as every other MMO out there. 100% identical.

You get a new tier of gear with more stats on them and a new ‘infusion’ spot.

Even if this infusion spot is onlt some sort of anti-agony-stat and not an extra VIT or PREC spot, the added base stats on the gear makes this the exact same thing as every single other MMO out there, a new tier of gear.

You may like to grind new gear. That’s your right.

But don’t call it anything else than what it is: a step into changing this game into every other MMO out there.

100% on target.

This extra tier makes this MMO like just another grind MMO, like there are already 10 MMOs.

11% stats is alot, me think.

It is what it is: another tier of must-have gear.

They changed this game from a ‘grind for cosmetics only’ MMO into just another ‘grind for stats’ MMO.

Like the other 10 MMOs out there.

/cry

Flynch.6034

Ok now i’m really confused – which part of the current angst is about grinding, and what is there that’s suddenly new that we need to grind for?

The extra stats on the new gear. Read the blog, it’s all there: new gear that a) gives you more stats in all situations and b) a new infusion slot that you must have and fill to do the new content.

They are even upgrading the legendaries to the new stats, so obviously, the new stats & slot are not insignificant.

That is the very definition of gear grinding.

Untill now it was pretty easy: you get to 80, you get the top gear wherever you want and you can do any content you want.

From now on, it will be like each and every MMO there: you get to 80, you get the first set of top gear wherever you want, then you grind AGAIN for the second tier of top gear before you can do the end-game.

You used to go 80 > buy or earn exotic > end-game content.
Now you will go 80 > buy or earn exotic > grind for ascendent & infusion > end-game content.

You can look at this any way you want, you can call it any way you want, you can make as many posts you want, this new tier of gear is simply an added grind.

Making this MMO exactly the same as all the other MMOs out there.

You are basically saying that players that are on the forums think more negatively about gear grinding than people that are not on the forums.

On what do you base this assumption?!?

Valtameri.2075:

Tell me about it, just came from Planetside 2 forum and oh my what a whinefest.
Not as bad as here tho, but still…

Well, what did you expect? That players said ‘oh, well, you told us that this would not be a grind MMO, but now you changed, no problem, Anet, we will just be quiet and grind, grind grind’?

And, no, we do not whine often. I didn’t see anyone whine in the last 3 months, except over Legendary drop rates (which Anet is now changing) and botting (which Anet is doing something about it too).

This broken no-grind-MMO promise is a serious topic, something that people feel very, very strong about.

We do not whine about the small stuff.

But we do ’’whine’’ when you break one of your core promises.

Well, the rings gives 13 extra stats, so you will need to grind out the ascended armor (and later weapons).

In other words: it turns out into the same old grind as every other MMO out there.

For the infusion slot, it’s too soon to tell. It depends on whatthe infusions will do, just compensate for the new Agony (like have a -20 to Agnony stat or something) or if they also add to stats like VIT or PREC.

If they also add stats, you will need to grind the gear AND the infusion upgrade.

Przemek.6835:

Quick and short : when I started playing I had a feeling that people are so nice and you know … “well brained”. Now when ANet tries to do something for A LOT OF PEOPLE that were just getting bored everyone else is crying about it.

We do not cry because they do something for bored people.

We cry because they make this game into just-another-MMO with the exact same grind tred mill of every other MMO out there.

Well, you got what you want… GW2 just turned into just another MMO with the exact same stat grinding than the other 10 MMOs.

This is not the way to go. At all.

It is not that we can not stand change. We do. Change is always there. Change is good when the direction is good.

But changing into just another grind MMO is not the type of change people want.

I can imagine people at Blizzard and Bioware thinking Anet for this change, because Anet gave up one of their unique selling points.

Valtameri.2075:

Stat only to be used on DEEPEST levels of the new ‘infinite’ dungeon.
People exaggerates this new stat so much…

People see it exactly for what it is: a new tier of gear that you HAVE to have to do the new end-game content.

/cry

Galandil.9641:

“…about these new items as I am!”

No, I am sooooooo not excited about these new items. At the contrary, we do NOT need another MMO with gear tiers.

You can never pay more for an item then the lowest offer.

Try it out with -say- a bid of 50c on 1 copper ore. You will only pay the 15c, the other 35c will be returned.

Also… if you are so rich that you do not know if you won or lost 8g… call me up anytime!!! :x

ebrown.8193:

Personally I’ve always wondered why Gems aren’t tradeable.

Because selling gems for $$$ is their income, plain and simple. You can’t give away this market to players, they need a sustainable income.

Personally, I am glad they allow people to buy gems with gold at all. If I had a gaming company, I am not sure I would allow this, it cuts your income by ALOT. I am sure their marketing departement did quite alot of thinking about this and decided to let people buy gems for gold anyway. But they can’t free that price entirely: one way or another, they need to make money to keep going.

Maybe you picked up the gold with another character? The TP is shared across all the characters on your account.

Cerise.9045:

Usually in statistics you treat outliers as outliers.

Yes you can salvage 10 rares in a row and get 0 ecto

But if you see this happen it means you already salvaged 200+ rares and if you include the other 190+ the ecto you got evens out.

You have only 1 chance in 1,024 to have 10 failures in a row with 50% odds.

19 new tries of 10 rares would not even out your 1 in 1,024 bad luck, not by a long shot.

IRC rares give 0 (50%),1, 2 or 3 ectos.

Does anyone knows the distribution between the 1, 2 & 3. Do you hve the same chance to get 1 ecto than 3?

I see that the item list you’re selling is the second page, items 11 to 20.

Maybe what happned is this…

Step 1. You got +/- 3g from the sales of that Exotic.
Step 2. You took the money from the TP (on this or another character, the TP is account-based).
Step 3. You sold other items totalling 2g.
Step 4. You see the 2g on the TP.

This is the only explanation i can think off, I never seen the TP taking gold like that.

Honnor.6295:

He asked commanders at differant times to Join forces for this Match with
his Alliance and push and keep CRYSTAL DERSERT off the maps.

Pfffft, what is so unfair about offering an alliance against one other server? All great wars have alliances!

The WWW point system even ACTIVELY encourages alliances because you get alot more points winning 500/500/100 than with 400/400/300.

That being said, I never heard of Little Chuck Norris, today was the very firsttime I saw him on the battlefield. Funny name though :x

Jaha.2840:

Don’t believe me? Fine. My guess is that it’s an exploit. If I’m right, then it’s only a matter of time before everyone knows about it. I’m just so angry that it happened, I had to find out if anyone has seen or heard of this. I literally watched it happen.

It’s not that we do not believe you. But when you make grave accusations like this, proof is certainly needed. And yes, I agree, if you have proof (even not the kind of air-tight-proof that would hold in court against O.J’s laywers) then we will aplogize and give the keeps back.

But you got to admit, just saying that it happened is a bit weak, even though no one doubts your honesty.

BillyGoatsGruff.4695:

the match up is a little unbalanced after TC got a huge server transfer from HoD.

That’s new to me… I’ve been on TC since forever and I certainly didn’t see that many new faces this week.

It will be a close week. PErsonally, I don’t like that we got to fight the same enemy (CD) two weeks in a row, that’s not fun.

It’s weekend, I rarely think on weekends!

But, yeah, that wouldn’t be good, no one would do it anymore.

Besides, the 15% is money sink and every game needs money sinks.

There are several things that Anet could do to improve the TP (the interface isn’t exactly user-friendly with the tabs that reset everytime and the unclear drop-down box, there are no fees on buy orders which encourages flipping, there is no switch to only see armor & weapons that you can use, you can not search for a certain statistic on armor or weapons…). But the selling fees are fine in my opinion.

HabibLoew.2590:

wAGlickoScore = (sin((wAPercent – 0.5) * Pi) + 1) * 0.5

where wAScore and wBScore are the raw scores from the end of the match.

That last transform is easiest to visualize as a graph.

That’s also intresting… capturing points is less rewarding when you already have 90% of the points than when have 0% of the points. Basically, it rewards the big losers more heavily than the big winners for doing something.

But for the middle percentages, the graphs is pretty lineair: capturing points is more or less the same rewarding when you have 20% of the points than when have 60% of the points.

I am doing that with my Mesmer. What I see is that…

1. It is impossible to do this entirely in WWW because of the skillpoints. You only have 13 skillpoints in WWW, it is impossible to play a decent WWW game with only 13 skillpoints.

2. Unless you never, ever buy a blueprint, you will loose money andneed an alt to give it to you. I always buy rams and carts, so I loose alot of money in WWW. ALOT. You will need to be very selfish and never buy any blueprint (which means you are leaching of others) to break even in WWW.

Do I understand it correct and do you calculate 6 scores :
1. A’s score from A vrs B
2. A’s score from A vrs C
3. B’s score from A vrs B
4. B’s score from B vrs C
5. C’s score from A vrs C
6. C’s score from B vrs C

This is rather odd, because from theory (I didn’t do the numbers) this would mean that A doesn’t care what B & C do: tie or not.

If A has 50% of the points, B 45% and C 5%, A will get the same ranking as when A has 50% of the points, B 25% and C 25%.

In other words: a server gets the same ranking boost for taking out the camps of the weakest enemy than they get from taking out a camp from the stronger enemy.

This would mean that the winning server shouldn’t be fightin the number 2, they should be fighting the number 3: the are weaker and taking a camp from them adds the same to their ranking.

I can not imagine that this is right, so please tell me where I am wrong

And, yes, like the previous poster said, I would certainly do ‘something’ with the population too. But that’s another discussion.

I summed your post up in nice numbered statements…

1. Legendary weapons are too expensive. Their price goes up faster then normal-playing-people can make the money.
2. Anet is not doing anything about it.
3. This drives players away.

These three points are in my opinion 100% correct.

I do not know, however, if this is intended by Anet. It may very well be that Anet wants this to happen.

Because Anet does not make money by keeping all players. No, Anet makes money by a) selling games to new players and b) selling gems to existing players.

So it may well be that their marketing departement decided that the prices for Legendaries must stay this high, because it will make a certain portion of the players buy gems to get gold.

Does their marketing departement see how many people buy gems, convert it to money and buy a Legendary?
Do they also see that the people that are leaving did not buy gems?

2.1. There are too many bots & gold sellers.
2.2. Gold sellers control the rare part of the market.
2.3. Anet is not preventing bots & gold sellers enough.
2.4. Anet drives people towards gold sellers because of the high prices.

Again, sadly, I agree 100% with you

I have reported alot of bots too. And they are still there, plain and simple.

For the price difference between Anet & goldsellers, I assume that Anet compared with other games where you can buy gold from a legal source and that they don’t find this ratio to be too high for GW2. I am fine with that, it is Anet’s choice to choice how the dollar-to-gold-price is set.

Anet has the power to set the gold price for gems. They claim that they don’t use that power and let the dollar-to-gold price be determined by the players.

Altough I have no evidence that they are lying about this, I find it very hard to believe. It is very hard for me to believe that a company that relies on legal gold selling for it’s long-term-revenue would not set that gold price themselves. VERY hard.

This discussion aside, Anet apparently approves of the current dollar-to-gold ratio. Else this ratio would change in a heart beat: this is their revenue!

3.1 I am tempted to buy from gold sellers.

This is where we STRONGLY disagree.

See, I am not tempted. I hate gold sellers. HATE. H.A.T.E. H.A.T.E. Hate is not even a strong enough word.

My knowledge of english is not good enough to express my feelings towards these people… They are parasites, leeching off gaming companies. They ruin normal player’s fun, by giving stuff to rich children that they didn’t deserve.

I agree that Anet is not doing enough to fight the bots & goldsellers.

Apparently, Anet think they have more important things to work on. I disagree, this is the single most important issue in the game. there is absolutely nothing as game-breaking as this. Nothing. Not the class imbalances. Not the lack of a bar for potions and items. Not the extremely bad TP interface. No, these people ruin the game more than anything else.

And I agree that gold selling creates problems that drives people away from the game.

But I strongly disagree with people that want to support these criminals.
It is not because the police is doing a bad job, that you should help criminals.

Joshmans.8937:

They lost their game to bots so are nerfing droprates on most overfarmed materials, lol.

I wouldn’t say that they lost the game to bots, but it seems like they can not get this problem under control.

It’s already more then a month that I hear ’we’re working on it’ or ‘the comming weeks’. All the while, the same bots that were reported 5 days ago are still in Orr, happily botting away.

Looks like Staff & Greatsword seem to be the winner!

Traits.
- Feedback (against ranged attackers)
- Nullfield (clears boons & conditions)
- Portal

Elite Traits.
- Time warp (gives AOE quickness)

- Staff
—— For Winds of Chaos (gives Boons & Conditions)
—— For Phantasm Warlock (damages enemies with conditions).
—— For Chaos Storm (combo started) & then Chaos Armor (combo finisher that gives Boons & Conditions in AOE, woot).

- Greatsword.
—— Attacking in Siege
—— Scrapper builds

And, yes, the info is certainly usefull, thank you!

Some extra questions about sieging…
1. I see some Mesmers attacking targets (players and siege equipment) on walls with illusions/phantasms. How do they do that? When I try that, I always get a Blocking error, because I don’t have a clear line of sight

2. I see Mesmers blink themselves onto walls. How do they do that? When I try it, I always end up on the same side of the wall as I was

3. I once saw a Mesmer in my group create a portal outside a wall, then created one inside and let us all come in. I suppose that was done with blinking onto the wall?

Hello, fellow Mesmerians!

I made a new Mesmer, which is level 11 now.

Can someone give me some lowbie-mesmer advice as to what weapon/skill would be good in…
- a zerg
- a 3-4 group doing supply camps

I already know how to kill veteran guards and Dolyaks on my own, but that’s about it!

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

ArenaNet can’t really reduce the price of gold. It’s controlled by them to some extent but not completely.

This is not true.

Anet and Anet alone sets the gem-to-gold and gold-to-gem prices. You do not buy gems from other players, you buy them from Anet. and you do not sell gems to other players, you sell them to Anet.

They can set the price to a fixed price 1-100. They can set the price depending on how much total gold there is in the game, to take more gold out of it. They can set the price to a carefully determined amount by their marketing departement to make as much $$$ as possible.

And sure, they can add player demand in it. But there is absolutely no transparancy at all.

There is no way for you or for me to change the price of gems, they are exclusively decided by Anet.

Pillow.9473:

But you cant spend money to get an edge over other players in terms of gear and stats

Sure you can… you buy gems with daddy’s creditcard, you sell them for gold, you buy an entire set of exotic armor, top-notch upgrades for all of them that cost more than 1g each, 3 exotic weapons with top-notch upgrades AND expensive jewelry with the best upgrades. All the stuff that other players have to work hard for to buy you can buy with $$$.

If you only manage to kill 30 people as thief in PvP, you do it wrong. You can kill EVERY single target that you pick. Each and every one. There is not one sigle class that can defend against a 80-thief that wants to kill him.

You got stealth so they don’t see you comming, you run faster blinking than anyone else ever can AND you got more burst DPS in your ‘initial’ attack than anyone has hitpoints.

If you only get 30 kills in WWW, you need to learn where to go in WWW.
Don’t jump in the middle of a zerg, kill people running around the zerg.
Don’t follow a group of 5 people around, run on your own.

You are the best 1vs1 class that there is, hands down. Use that advantage before they nerf it.

And nerf they will… your burst DPS is so unbalanced that this can not stay this way. Not a chance, you got a nerf comming, that is for sure.

No, thieves are too OP for them to post on the forums :p

They hope that if they don’t post and draw attention to themselves, Anet doesn’t nerf them!

First, PUGs are PUGs. You will meet people there that never did a dungeon and just want to have the monthly done. They have managed to level to 80 easily with a 5-signet build 100-blading everything to death. Prepare for these type of players. Or don’t PUG.

Second, your target audience are players that do not know how to play well and do not really want to learn. They don’t read the forums.

Third, the 5-signet build is the best build for people that do not know how to time their skills. You are clearly a player that understands the game well, you see the benefit of skills that you have to activate. Good for you!

But quite alot of casual players are not that way. They just want a build that is easy to play.They’ll probably never even activate the signets (except maybe the heal) so they just got to think of 6 skills.

I am convinced that if you would make metrics of 80-players, a surprisingly big group rarely uses the 5 traits and just sticks to the attacks.

Bottomline… maybe this is the best build for these players. Be glad it exists.

It is indeed purely time-driven: after half a dozen sell orders, you get the ERROR in red. It happens when I try to sell several stacks of 250 candy or empty my crafting inventory selling several stacks of 4-5-6 items. You got to wait a minute and then you can redo it.

For me, like oZii said, MF is some sort of hard mode. When you wear it, you nerf yourself. If you can farm Orr on your own with MF gear, good for you!

BUT… there should be some way to stop people from using MF in dungeons (and even for events, altough I imagine that would be harder to implement).

Players that use MF when grouped are basically selfish people that do not pull their weight in the group but rely on the strength of others to get more loot themselves.

How do these bots spread the money? They can’t send mail with 100g, that would be too suspicious. Do they use TP? Is this why some items are so insanely high-priced, to move gold around?

Is it so hard to track all money transactions? When a bot sends money to a mule and that mule sends it to a gold buyer, is it so hard to track ALL the money-tranfers from that mule and ban all gold buyers? And all bots that send money to it?

It seems like Anet doesn’t have this sort of log, because lse the botting problem would be much lower. Why not? Sure, there are alot of money transactions to track, but a log like that would certainly help the problem.

Cub Discus Gig.2176:

I bought 160 stacks of corn candy and 1500 of the yellow craftable components and 40 of the superior runes.

Surely you mean 16 stacks (of 250) and not 160? I like price betting as much as the next trader, but 40k of candy would be a liiiiiittle bit over the top!

I think that the price that the projected profit uses, wasn’t always accurate. But I haven’t seen that bug anymore the last 24 hours or so.

Lavec.8157:

Tallis.5607:

Sell it to the highest bidder on TP, then you don’t have to pay any fee out of your pocket, the fee comes from what the buyer pays for it.

Nope. I tested this by putting my gold in the bank. You can’t sell to highest bidder if you don’t have the listing fee. Sell button is greyed out.

This is bordering on a bug. At best it’s a design feature oversight.

Oh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for letting me know!

And yes, that’s odd indeed. I guess it goes on the (rather long) Tallis’ List Of Things To Improve On The Trading Post.

Yeah, the TP has some… euh… parts that leave a little bit to be desired for, me think.

I am hoping that the November 15th upgrade will do something baout it, else I think I will make some sort of ‘TP issue’ list or so.

The economy is an important part of the game for a certain group of people and although the system behind the TP is great (with buy & sell orders), the interface is not as good as it should be in my opinion.

The TP has hick-ups several times a day for me, wghere it doesn’t do anything. I just close it after 15 seconds and try again. Sometimes it takes 2-3 tries, but eventually, it works.

I would never wait 20 minutes, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, no need to wait around.

Check this out, it has the real gem prices (not just the average) since launch…

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

The BIG spike in price was the Halloween event…
The missing day (November 2nd) was when they shut the gem exchange down…

I always carry an extra stack of each tool in my inventory. Every time I am in a village, I do two things: repair and chech if I still got 3 stacks of tools. If not, I buy the missing stack(s).

WhoaItsJoe.1352:

Another option is to create a 1-man guild and buy/earn the influence to upgrade Guild Vault/Treasure Trove. Might take awhile and is not very accessible out of town, but a ton of space to store additional stuff.

I tried that, but it takes a loooooooong time to get the influence. And, well, you get lonely out there without a guild!

Instead of paying 600 gems to get a lousy 30 extra bank slots, pay 800 gems to get an extra character, buy 4 bags with 15 space and you will have a total of 80 spots for the same price than you would have 30.

Choice 1 : pay 600 gems and get 30 space.
Choice 2 : pay 800 gems + 2g for bags and get 80 space

Seems like a no brainer to me…

True, you can’t easily take & get the items from that mule, but don’t tell me you need access to ALL of the items in those 8 bank tabs ALL the time!

Does Anet ever releases meta-stats in any game?

I would love to see how much money I spent on…
- repairs in PvE
- repairs in WWW
- waypoints
- TP
- gems
- …

Does Anet ever releases info like that for other games?

I think not. The fact that Anet sells gems for gold is a GREAT money sink.

I would love to see how much gold is spend on gems, I would not be surprised if it is more than all repair bills together (for first characters anyway).

Hippocampus.8470:

Hickeroar.9734:

regarding the 4th point… The OP is completely accurate, and John is the one who is completely wrong.

How is John completely wrong? For the 4th point, John referred to Astraea’s post, which said

there are numerous factors behind this including oversupply due to the ease of learning crafting and a corresponding lack of demand. In addition, some people are willing to make a monetary loss for the XP gain they receive. Regardless of the cause, there are some items that crafters are able to make a profit on, but it’s something they have spent time and effort towards researching.

What about that is completely wrong, or even at all wrong? It’s not denying that most crafted items are unprofitable. It merely explains why that is the case and correctly points out that not all items are equally unprofitable.

John says that Astrea is wrong but Astrea is right so John is wrong!

SirMoogie.9263

If you find the vanilla beans and omnomberries you remove most of the cost of making the bread. If you only remove the vanilla bean you can still handily make a profit.

No. You can not just remove the cost of the materials that you find from the cost of the crafted item.

If you do not use the materials, you would sell them. So, they cost you just as much.

Say someone has 10s in his pocket.

He uses 3s of materials that he has, buys 5s in materials and then sells the item for 6s.

This person now has 11s.

But this person did not make 1s profit, he actually lost 2s.

Why? If he would just have sold the materials for 3s, he would have 13s in hios pocket, 2s more then when he crafted.

This is a common mistake that some type of crafters make: when calculating how much it costs to make an item, they do not count how much the materials would sell for when they did NOT craft.

Altough I never bought items from the shop, only bank upgrades, I know that 12 hours is way too long.

Delete some of your mails (even when you don’t have 10), according to several people, this apperently works sometimes.