Guild Wars 2

I had replied to another thread with this idea and since it falls neatly into Guild Management decided to add it here as a possible consideration. The Guild Vault should be built around a merit system. A person can only take out of the guild vault up to the value of the items he placed into the guild vault. In that way no one person could empty a Guild vault and run off with the loot. The only ones that would be exempt from this would be the Guild Officers so they could assist new members with items from the vault.

Two people working together can do all the map points in Orr, even when contested. The wife and I just did so last week on our new set of level 80’s. Some are tricky and require a bit of work but all were doable.

If you have to buy the dust forget about it. if you want to farm the dust good luck with that as well, the drop rate has been cut to just about .000000001%. It appears that the more you require an item the lower they set the drop rate. For example I have the tier 6 leather slots in my bank close to being maxed as they drop the most. However very little of that leather is needed.

Finished my May monthly yesterday and got my laurels.

The wife and I have found that even some of the jumps heading up to vistas are difficult on large characters such as Norn and Char and even at times Asuran. We have had no difficulty with our Human or Sylvari characters.

Here is one possible solution. There is already one jump puzzle where your character size changes as you progress through the puzzle, I cannot remember which one it is but if once you reach the starting point on any JP a dialog box pops up allowing you to change the size of your character to small, medium or large then it would not entail having to reset cameras etc. It would also allow a person to select the size of character he/she is most comfortable doing JP’s with. Once the end of the JP has been reached you revert to your normal size.

Edit: I see my slow typing skills has allowed someone else to beat me to the punch

This has gone on in any game I have ever played that had guild vaults. I have long proposed the idea of a merit type system where the more value people place into a shared vault the more they are allowed to remove from the vault. In that way one person could never empty out a guild vault unless they are the ones that put every last item into it. Guild officers would be exempt from the merit system so they could assist new members from the guild stash.

With 5 level 80s so far and some more on the way I understand where the OP is coming from. My suggestion is to make some of these rewards such as laurels shared across the account but with restrictions.

1) Laurels earned by one character are also earned by alts on the account but only alts that are max level. If my level 80 earned his laurel per day any other level 80 on my account would also get that laurel yet that laurel the alt gets is his only to spend. By restricting it to level 80 for sharing in this manner you also prevent overpowering low level alts. All level 80s therefore would be able to upgrade at the same pace yet not any faster then people with only 1 character.

2) Have dyes shared in the same manner. Only the level 80’s on the account get to share the dye pool. All dyes found by each character are placed into a common pool once they reach level 80 and any level 80 has access to this pool.

I have never had a key drop from outside the story line. In fact even within the story the wife seems to be luckier then me and gets more keys.

I agree as well. On days when I just want to kill a bit of time until the better half logs in and we can go level another set of alts I farm for materials required to outfit them when they reach level 80. Sadly the DR seems to be totally random and with 171% MF there are times when I can farm for a full hour (2 omnom bars worth) before I get nothing but spikes and other times when the DR seems to kick in after only 15 minutes and even after switching maps/mobs I still get nothing.

Way back when I played a bbs game via a public dial port. That game was script based only but it would inform you when you hit your mark and had to move to a different mob and even how many different mobs you had to kill before your “cache” was cleared and you could go back farming the original mob. Now that was 30 years ago, have we regressed that far?

gimmethegepgun.1284:

You don’t understand the difference. Being slowed down is not the problem. It’s the reason for being slowed down.
They are slowing the group down entirely for selfish reasons.
So the better representation of the qualification is thus: I don’t want to group with MF users because they slow us down on purpose.
And if you take issue with that then I must assume that you have no problem with true leechers, those who do nothing in order to mooch off of the rewards. Because they are slowing you down by doing nothing, and they are doing it on purpose.[/quote]

But how do I know, without the slightest bit of doubt, that they are doing it on purpose to slow me down and therefore deserve to be labelled? There is no way to know that unless you are sitting in that person’s head, especially in an internet game where you cannot see and interact with that person face to face. Just keep the labels out of your arguments. Labels that describe others game choices are a poor way to promote a discussion. I resent for example the term “noob”. “We failed that dungeon run because that noob did not do such and such”. We were all “noobs” at one time just as we all have our own selfish wants and desires.

So with your above example on leechers I would simply tell that person, “sorry your game play style slows me down, I cannot accept you in my group and I wish to get through this dungeon quickly” versus “You cannot come with me on this dungeon run because you are a leecher and slow me down on purpose”.

I will reiterate my main point once more. Nobody has the right in this game to label people as selfish and greedy because you believe your play style and choices are better then theirs.

If you state simply “I do not want to group with people that wear magic find gear in a dungeon” and leave it as such then there is no problem. Stacking a “because they are selfish and greedy” qualifier at the end of that statement is nothing more then adding a label to promote your style of game play and putting others below you which adds nothing except to make you look shallow and unacceptable of the choices that others may make.

If you wish to qualify why you will not run with someone wearing magic find then place the onus on yourself by stating “because they slow me down” and do not place a label on others by stating “they are selfish and greedy”.

Understand where I am coming from?

I run with the Ancient Karka Shell which has a 3% inherent magic find. I also have Lunaria, Circle of the Moon with an inherent 4% magic find. That is on 2 of my dungeon pieces. Oh my bad, I must be greedy and selfish to run dungeons with those pieces equipped! Can anyone tell me how less effective I am in a dungeon because of that 7% mf? I am good at math but I must be missing a decimal point or two to get people so wound up, right? How much MF am I allowed before you boot me from your group and call me selfish? 0%, 10%? How many minutes would I slow you down by having mf on those 2 pieces? If you allow those two pieces or other ascended gear with an inherent mf does that make you hypocritical or do you arbitrarily set a limit with each dungeon run? Perhaps you should tell me exactly what type of gear I should be running? Better yet, perhaps you should play my game for me! After all it seems that is what you are doing!

Seems a bit harsh doesn’t it? However calling people selfish because they want to enjoy a game their way (after all they did pay for it) is just as bad. I do not care if you want to run dungeons with no mf in the party, your choice, you paid for the game. What bothers me to no end is you feel you have the right to label people selfish and greedy because of your own personal desires.

By the way. when farming I swap those 2 pieces out out for 2 pieces with 7% mf each and with only my gear and 25 stacks of luck I run with 121% mf and can boost it to over 200%

Einlanzer.1627:

Like many people in this thread, you are not correctly diagnosing the problem. The problem is the stat itself, not how well so-and-so can still do with it.[/quote]

No the problem is with gearcentric people thinking their way to play is the only way to play. I am diagnosing the problem quite well as I dig further to find a root cause and the root cause is not mf wearing people. The root cause is expecting everyone to be as good as the next person to insure that COF run can be done in record time so it can be posted on you tube and bragged about.

I have a question for those that are against people using magic find gear in a dungeon setting. Let us assume that you were the only person out of 5 not wearing magic find gear, the other 4 were. Would you still accuse the other 4 of not doing their fair share? How do you determine what is a fair share anyways? That part is highly subjective. Is it by DPS only? Perhaps whoever survives the longest?

I ask this as we had a group of 5 not 3 days ago running the Living Story dungeon. On the final 2 bosses we wiped the first two times until we figured out the patterns and on our last attempt we succeeded. The ironic thing is the one person that survived long enough to rez the others happened to be wearing magic find gear. She was a Ranger and her pet kept the last boss standing busy long enough for her to get the others up. However according to many here that person would not have been valuable to their group and a waste of a spot as she was wearing mf gear.

Once again I will reiterate what many have tried to say here. It is not the gear that makes a person valuable to the group and the value of the gear is highly overrated when DPS numbers take precedence over everything else the person has to offer.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

And your statement can easily be turned around against MF as well.
“in the end it is about the other persons enjoyment of the game” except when someone runs MF they aren’t thinking about the other persons’ enjoyment, they’re thinking about themselves. They’re wasting their groupmates’ time, which for most people is not enjoyable.

And so I stated I do not care. If I elect to run a dungeon in my optimal armour and someone else wants to wear their MF gear, I DO NOT CARE! I am not one who goes “by the numbers”, spends sleepless nights counting up his DPS, insists on having a gear check before every run, must have the right food stuff. etc. Once you start sweating over how someone else is not keeping up to your dps level, you are being the selfish, greedy, elitist one, not someone wearing magic find.

Although I have two sets of exotics, one with MF, and I do not use my MF gear when running dungeons or fractals I do take offense at calling people that do selfish. Think about this carefully. You want people to wear optimal gear so you can complete a dungeon run as fast as possible so you have time to do it again. We have people insisting only zerker gear be used on these runs, we have people requiring gear checks and denying anyone with magic find.

These people are being just as selfish as those that want to wear mf gear. They want it their way or the highway and I would run a dungeon with somebody that wished to wear their mf gear over elitist snobs like that any day of the week because in the end it is about the other persons enjoyment of the game and I do not, nor does anyone else, have the right to dictate how other people enjoy their game. If it takes longer to run the dungeon so what? As long as everyone enjoys the game in the manner they want to. Only those with their own selfish agendas would insist everyone be outfitted the way they are.

Those “gearcentric” people are by far the more selfish people.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Some fun ideas in here, we’re also actively discussing ways on how we’d best like to alleviate having to make players choose between having better stats, or using magic find. It’s not a choice that’s great for game play and there isn’t really anything that fun about it, even more so when group composition is taken into account. Ideally we’d also like to keep the ability to slowly build your magic find over time, but doing this at the cost of using better stats isn’t the right way to do that.

No ETA on any changes here, just want to point out we agree there is an issue here that goes against what we want Gw2 to be, and is something we want to address.

The way Magic find is currently applied has been part of the game and many people have invested heavily in time and money to put together a set of magic find gear. If you are going to change the method on how magic find is applied/built up/earned please keep this in mind. Even such Ascended items such as Lunaria have magic find in them. If a person invested into such gear because of mf care will have to be taken on how it is changed or you will have some upset people on your hands.

I have two full sets of exotic armour and accessories on my main, my dungeon/group play set and my solo/farming set. If you make the change so mf is no longer a valid stat on the mf gear it would essentially make that set of gear worthless.

I carry both sets of gear with me and rotate my farming between different areas and different mobs. The above example does have a small sample size but I have farmed enough with and without MF to state without a doubt that I make more with magic find equipped.

I beg to differ with you but I will use a full set of MF when I am farming Mobs. Without the MF I may be able to kill faster but I would never make the same amount of profit as I do when I use MF. Prime example, I farmed Sparks for an hour with my regular armour, no MF and found an assortment of junk with the best being a green. I then ramped up to 171% MF and in the next hour found 3 charged lodestones and 2 rares and yet that second hour should have been when DR kicked in, yet I made well over 7 gold in profit. I would not run dungeons in mf gear, even though my mf gear is exotic but when farming for profit it is the only way to go.

I have no problems dealing with the average thief in WvW with my Guardian when they use stealth. More often then not they will die or run away. For those that are really good at playing a stealth thief I have one surefire counter, I log in my thief and go stealth as well. Once you are aware of what it takes to play a d/d stealth thief it is quite easy to counter 90% of them. Of all the classes (and I play them all and have 5 different class level 80s currently) the stealth thief is the most difficult to play as your timings have to be right on the mark to be good at it. If your timing is off as a stealth thief you usually end up dead.

For what it is worth, with 171% MF I managed to find 3 charged lodestones today before my second omnomberry bar wore off. Was I a happy camper!

Missing on Henge as well. No dead drops on the Diessa Plateau.

Edit: Thanks for the tip on Sea of Sorrows…managed to complete it!

I have a few questions. If Orr has just risen from the bottom of the sea that would explain all the Risen on land as regular creatures have not yet moved onto the “new” land. However why would the sea be infested with Risen and have no regular mobs? Have the Risen underwater killed all the normal creatures? As well, the land based Risen are also found in the water. So were they all Risen before the land rose above the surface of the sea? At what point does the lore state they actually rose from the dead?

There is something amiss with the counter or with the method used to total MF however I am going to do a bit more testing before I report it as a bug. Using a MF booster, a full set of MF gear, a sigil of luck, a Guild MF banner and omnom bars I got different numbers at different times reported in the hero panel. I started with over 200% total MF and when I refreshed the guild banner (before the timer was up) I had well under 200%. To get the 200 plus number to appear again I had to refresh the buffs again.

However as stated I noticed this one time only so far and am going to be watching a bit more closely on the number reported to the hero panel.

Onshidesigns.1069:

How does Arenanet control the different drop rates of different items in BLC? If it really was a roll of the dice. Tonics would drop at the same rate as the skins.

Well I am not a computer programmer but I can surmise how the system works.

Every mob has a list of possible drops. If Mob 1 has the possibility in their loot table to drop 20 different items then the RNG should return an equal number of each item with a large enough sampling of rolls on a 20 sided dice. That would be simple RNG. However each of those 20 items would have to have a modifier attached to it which would determine how many times out of a given number of rolls a specific item would drop. So if #20 on the list was a Vorpal Sword that had a 1 in 100 chance of dropping (drop rate) every time 20 was rolled an additional roll of a 100 sided dice is made. If 100 is rolled you get the Vorpal sword, if not you get something else from a list of possibilities. Then another modifier is added, that thing called DR. You rolled that 100 for that vorpal sword but DR says uh uh buddy, you have been in this area for too long so you get nothing.

So if it were just a simple rng it would work well enough so people would not begin to think there is some sort of conspiracy working against them. It is the 2 modifiers that would make the difference, the drop rate weighting of each item and diminishing returns.

The one to look at in my opinion would be the DR (diminishing returns) modifier for mob related drops. How is that timer/modifier set? Is that modifier consistent in all cases or does it vary from area to area? Does it work by the map you are on or by the type of mob you are farming? There are too many variables here to even begin to guess and the more variables added the larger the chance there could be something amiss.

For bosses and chests DR would not be applied so the thing to adjust in those cases would be the drop rate.

In a previous game I played the random number generator was broken. If one of your stats (and it has been awhile and I cannot remember the particulars) was an odd number you were hosed. You always had to insure that you increased your stats by even numbers.

That stated I have been farming Dredge heavy loot bags for a bit now and noticed that DR is hosed. There are days when it does not kick in for an hour or longer and other days when the drops dry up in half an hour. I stacked myself today with MF and with 216% I found 10 heavy bags in an hour. Now I am not sure if MF factors into heavy loot bags but the previous day with only 113% MF I found 30 heavy bags in an hour.

Some days RNG loves me, some days RNG hates me but DR ALWAYS has a hate on for me!

As Devon mentioned there has always been a timer on dropped siege. If you do not place supply into it every 5 minutes until built, it despawns. That timer has existed as long as I have been in WvW with the only problem is sometimes it would work and other times it would not. If I am correct the only portion that is changed is the now two minute window on freshly dropped siege. It looks like they lowered that part of the timer from 5 to 2 minutes.

The rest is as it was.

I wonder…. build a catapult on an obscure portion of wall, hit the wall for 20-25 seconds, should be able to get several shots in, and then stop until after the 30 second update. Would the swords still show? It would be interesting to try that out as a lone person could break into a Garrison without anyone being the wiser, place a mesmer and boom!

Back in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons ACME had perfected the portable hole. I suggest that for Asuran Engineers only, a class skill to create a portable worm hole. It however, like all ACME products has one critical flaw. The user of the portable worm hole is teleported to some random spot on the map they are currently in.

One of our towers was getting attacked and the wife and myself were the first ones there. We made it into the tower and the wife immediately got on an AC when she was hit by a mesmer clone that had followed her through the closed gate into the tower. A few seconds later a hunter’s pet came in through the same closed gate and put her into a downed state. I have noticed that these instances are becoming more common over the past while and am wondering if anyone else has made these observations?

Sloppy play ET. I had a good laugh in the late late hours when you captured Redlake tower while we were all busy at Bluebrier. You took the tower and immediately raced off to capture the southern camp completely ignoring the 3 catapults that we had used when we took the tower back an hour before. I was watching from the shoreline as you ran right past them on the way to the camp. By the time you returned one lone thief on the cat had taken your wall down to 25%.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy but thanks for the chuckles.

The other game I currently play is LoTRO which is way more graphically detailed then GW2 is. I can play that game with my graphics maxed out and still get up to 200fps when there is nobody around or a respectable 80 fps when the area is crowded with people. In fact I used to be able to load two clients at once and still get 100 fps with max graphics. (I say used to because my new ISP just cannot handle the load of 4 games at once…2 mine and 2 the better halfs).

In GW2 my max frame rate is 60fps and in crowds I have to lower my settings to medium across the board in order to maintain that frame rate. However LoTRO uses Direct X 11.

The profanity filter is there to protect ANET from people who are offended by foul language. They can simply say that there was a filter in the game and that you have the option to turn it on so they are not legally obligated because someone is offended by such language. The existence of the filter does not give you carte blanche to swear. Offensive language is still frowned upon and is punishable. It is not there to protect an individual from seeing profanity just to protect the company from any repercussions as a result of that profanity.

It always makes me wonder however when people try to defend the use of cuss words in a game by stating “I have a foul mouth and swear all the time in real life”. There is a difference however. If I hit my thumb with a hammer you would probably here an expletive deletive coming from me, but that is an involuntary response to pain or another stimulus. Swearing in a computer game, using a type chat interface (not a voice chat) is no longer an involutary response. You have to make a conscious effort to type that swear word in which is why you have no defense when you get banned for using profanity, as it takes a conscious effort to use it and is not an involuntary response.

Being slightly addicted to WvWvW I have been thinking of a possible redesign and had posted the basic vision awhile back. Things have been turning over in my head and so I now post a more detailed version for disscusion purposes.
Currently we have 4 maps to play on so for simplicities sake let us say that each map can hold 250 people from each server for a total of 1000 players. The redesign has to take this number into consideration. I propose adding 4 more maps to the scenario and the setup would be as follows.

Map Setup
Homelands
Each server has a Homeland which would consist of a castle, towers and keeps much the way the Eternal Battlegrounds is currently set up. Each homeland would have its own theme and one would be plains/grasslands, another hills/forests and the third desert/oasis. There are no direct connections from one homeland to another.

Borderlands
Each Homeland would connect to three borderland maps. There will be a total of 4 of these maps so connections would be as follows;
A 1,2,4
B 1,2,3
C 2,3,4
All four Borderlands would have the same theme which would be foothills and low mountains/mountain passes with rivers and lakes. Each Borderland would have Keeps and Towers but they would be spaced far enough apart that you would not be able to attack one from another. You would have to use open ground siege. By doing it this way each server still has the initial 4 starting maps, the Homeland and 3 Borderland maps to spread out across.

Stonemist
In the center of all of this would lie another map called Stonemist. Being true to its name Stonemist would be a massive castle high in the mountains. Numerous twisting paths lead to this castle and bridges, valleys, ravines and gorges would provide choke points and places to place siege weapons in order to attack the castle. There would be 3 keeps, one for each server to call a base and several outpost towers.

Supply

Supply would be different then it is now. All supply would come from the Homelands maps. To be able to upgrade in the Borderlands one of the first things to do would be to build “Supply Lines” to each of the borderlands in much the same way as waypoints are built now and in fact would double as Waypoints once built. The supply lines in the borderlands therefore would take longer to build as homeland supply lines have to be built first which would funnel supply to the home castle and then to the borderlands. Once the Supply line/waypoint is built in a Borderland Keep the next in line to receive supply would be the Stonemist Keeps. Once that happens then the Stonemist map is opened for warfare but Stonemist cannot be captured/attacked until supply is present so people would be stripped of Supply when changing maps. PvDoor would not work, siege would have to be used to take down a door/gate wall.
So in the Homelands there would be many supply lines leading to the castle. There would be fewer in the Borderlands and only one from the Stonemist Keeps to Stonemist Castle. Protecting the towers/keeps with established supply lines would now be important if a server wishes to take Stonemist.

Attacking Enemy Homelands

Once a supply line has been established to a Borderland it would also open an Outpost in the enemy Homelands that it connects to. These Outposts would be similar to the Border Waypoints that currently exist except they would also have supply. Once supply is in these Outposts a server would be able to attack another Servers Homeland as again no Supply can be carried between maps. Supply rates from camps would be set so the demand for supply in the form of upgrades, supply lines to borderlands, supply lines to Stonemist and enemy Homelands all become critical. A percentage threshold of total supply at any tower/keep/castle would be set aside for moving up the line. The rest would be for upgrades/siege/etc.
So if a tower has a 1000 supply capacity 100 or 10% or 5% (this is where they would have to manipulate in order to maintain balance) would funnel forward leaving 900 for upgrades. Upgrading structures now becomes important as those upgrades allow for more supply capacity such as it is now.

Matches

Rather then the current setup the above system would spread people out over more maps which should lessen queue times. Since it would slow down rushes on reset night the matches could be extended to two weeks or even a month before a reset. On reset Servers would start on a different map. Map completions would be required in Homelands and Borderlands but not in Stonemist.

At any rate as I mentioned this has been brewing in my head for sometime now but I think it would make WvWvW alot more interesting.

For the most part I do not mind picking up bags but I do have a couple of reservations on the current system. The first is you put up a valiant defense against overwhelming odds, bags are all over at your feet, even the occasional chest but alas you go down against sheer numbers and the objective is flipped. Those bags and chests are now gone. I had 3 bags and a chest at my feet after defending a camp which eventually was lost. It was painful knowing that whatever was in them was gone.

The second point is as someone already mentioned, where and when they drop. Fighting a zerg if you damage an enemy and then pull back to allow heals to recycle before rejoining the fray those bags could be anywhere along your path if someone else kills the enemy you tagged. Even recalling and running back to the fight you have bags dropping at your feet forcing you to stop, turn around to pick it up and continue.

Anet should make it so you have to link your accounts. Only the primary account would have access to WvW. Problem solved.

Hod.6751:

One thing I would like to see changed alittle is the ease it is for players to destroy siege on the wall without using siege. Due to the width of the walls, Ele/Necro just destroy any well placed siege setup at a tower.

I totally agree with the above point. If you place siege on the walls where it is useful during an attack it is easily destroyed by AoE. If you place the siege further back you are unable to target anyone with that siege. Prime example is the ballista. A ballista is almost useless to place on a wall as the LoS on a ball makes it impossible to shoot over the wall lip to the ground unless the enemy is away from the wall. Well if they are that far back they are not doing much damage are they?

LoS issues have to be fixed. Enemy can shoot me on the wall but my view of the same target that is firing at me is “obstructed”. And that “obstruction” is so inconsistent that it makes it difficult for any new player to WvW to survive until they learn that they can stand “here” but if they move two steps “there” they will get killed.

Walls should be wider, perhaps a wide inside ledge that would allow for siege placement out of AoE range. Remove the outer ledge completely. You stand there and you can easily target ground enemies but you are also fair game yourself. Force attackers to use siege to take down siege and not a zerg ball of AoE artists that can stand in one spot so only 5 can be hit while wiping out any siege that could possibly do them harm.

It would take me all of 10 minutes to find, download and install a hack that would allow me to zoom out further then otherwise possible, port all over the map, climb walls, defy gravity, fly and walk through walls. It is being used, it is quite easily spotted in the game from farming nodes to destroying siege in WvW to gaining map completion while you go have lunch. The latest release advertises that it is “undetectable” and with the number of reports, sightings and instances in game that are impossible under normal gameplay situations I have to wonder if ANET can detect it.

Example. Two days ago while the wife and myself were levelling alts in Dredgehaunt Cliffs we witnessed 2 people drop from the sky onto a point of interest and then immediately vanish. ANET does not seem to have the capability of detecting when packets are being intercepted and altered to allow such cheats, they are relying on people to report hackers then have to go through a long drawn out process to catch them.

There has to be a better way ANET.

They are not quite as bad as all those people that buy a Commander badge and never step into WvW. You see them at dragon events, you see them in Lions Arch, you see them all over the PvE maps but never do you see them in WvW.

Then if they do happen to enter WvW for the first time they think they can take over and start giving orders because they have a Commander’s badge! Some take time to learn the ropes first but they should badge down until they do. The system is so broken it is laughable.

Fenikkusu.1569:

What about hod

Seriously. No bias from me. I want to see who the best commanders are.

Some of the best Commanders on HoD do not even have a badge. If you play often you get to know who those people are.

Edit: Or in the those immortal words from “Blazing Saddles”…“Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”

Fenikkusu.1569:

Lol hod doesn’t have anyone who knows what they’re doing at this time.

Why? It’s usually me commanding. XD I feel sorta bad for going to NSP where they don’t want me either

I was going to refrain from commenting on this fiasco but the comment above Selene burns me up. Many nights until the wee small hours of the morning I could count on one hand the number of people we had in our BL defending it and you were not amongst them. Did any of us have a Commander tag? No. Did we NEED a Commander tag? No. We know what we are doing with or without a Commander tag that any rich kid with moms’ credit card can buy.

It takes more then the tag and the knowledge of game mechanics to make a good Commander. Were you a good Commander? In part yes although you made your fair share of mistakes but then everyone does, nobody is perfect. Were you or are you the best Commander? No, there are better and worse then you on HoD.

It takes one other factor to make a good Commander and that is the respect and loyalty of the foot soldiers. Well with that comment above you have lost this foot soldiers respect and now you are no more than someone who could afford to drop 100 gold to buy a badge.

Well tonight I came across 3 level 80 thieves taking out one of our supply camps in WvW. They had the supervisor down and the only npcs left were a guard and a scout. I took them all out with my Guardian. However I know how to handle thieves as I have a level 80 thief of my own. The easiest way to find the weakness of a particular class is to play that class.

dinominator.9862:

What’s a PoV modifier?

Point of view modifier. There are hacks out there that allow a person to see and therefore target areas that he could not see without the hack. In effect it allows you to zoom out further or look over walls. It is quite noticeable in WvW if you are defending your keep/tower and have red area of effect circles where they should and cannot be under normal circumstances.

In the particular case I reported on there was one person in the attacking group that was using such a hack for although many in the group were using aoe only one circle appeared inside the tower on the arrow cart I was using at the time. The arrow cart was far enough back from the gate that such an effect should have been impossible under normal circumstances but by altering his point of view someone was able to target and damage the ac.

I am not going to get into specifics but I recently witnessed a clear case of hacking, using a PoV modifier, in WvW. After taking several screenshots showing where the attackers were standing and what was occurring I went to submit a ticket. Since I could not submit that ticket while the attack was actually going on (I would have been dead long before I hit the submit button) I posted it after the fight but had to jump through hoops and call it something totally different then what it was, an actual case of cheating.

Please give us the option to report cheaters, along with the ability to upload the screenshots and call it what it is. Cheating. Not gameplay issues, not account issues, not dancing with the quaggans on a hot summer night issues, but CHEATING.

The issue is not how much money you can make but rather that there is no way possible at the moment to ensure everyone carries the same cost burden for upgrades and siege. That is why having a coin cost for upgrades along with the supply cost is onerous for some but not even noticeable for others as those “others” will never order upgrades. To Fortify a Keep will pull 1 gold 50 silver from ONE persons’ pocket and not from everybody on that server.

1,784 hours logged between all my characters and I have never seen a BLC key drop. I have purchased keys but the cost/reward ratio is just not worth that expenditure so they currently just stack up in the vault.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Just because you come out ahead in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean it’s not a money sink. I mean, I make money on the TP all of the time, but it still sinks a ton of my gold out of the market regardless. The same is true of WvW, though to a much lesser degree.

As an aside, if the gold earned in WvW were tripled, you would scarcely see a change in the value of gold due to how much more of it is earned elsewhere in the game.

I agree with your last statement. Increasing the amount of gold earned in WvW is not the answer. Those that will spend their money on upgrades will still spend it, those that never spend coin on upgrades would just be getting richer.

Hickeroar.9734:

I never…EVER lose money in WvW. Most of the time running for a couple hours earns me around a gold. Granted that’s nothing compared to what CoF speed runs will get you, but calling it a money sink tells me that you’re doing it very, very wrong.

I can see money being sunk in for people who like to buy expensive siege with cash instead of badges, but that’s the only exception to the rule.

As I stated above, if I ran with the zerg karma train I could make money in WvW but I would not be spending my time and my coin ordering upgrades and placing siege. If I decide not to spend my coin making cash is easy in WvW but someone has to spend the money.

Vol.5241:

WvW is not a money sink unless you are a commander or you waste siege.

I am not a Commander but I routinely upgrade towers/keeps/supply camps and I am constantly placing siege where needed and ensuring that that siege gets recycled on a regular basis. On a low population server you cannot depend on Commanders to do all the work and being a Commander makes you no different in responsibility for siege and upgrades then the next person.

That stated I can easily drop a couple of gold over a few hours making the rounds of towers and keeps. The problem arises from the simple fact that many are reluctant to spend money on upgrades or siege and wait until the next guy does it and that includes Commanders. It is like going out drinking and waiting until someone else volunteers to buy a round while keeping your hand tight on your wallet. You can get drunk at anothers expense without spending a dime. The other people however can refuse to buy you a drink, that option is not available in WvW as the upgrades still have to happen.

What can be done? I had proposed earlier that the local populace be “taxed” for their protection. Upgrade a supply camp/tower/keep that tax money goes to the Quartermaster for upgrades so upgrades cannot begin immediately, one would have to hold onto the asset to allow the tax money to build up to enable the next upgrade to be queued. However after thinking about it I realized that this is already done by using supply as the “tax money”. So why then is there a requirement to spend additional coin on upgrades? The money cost is a redundant and costly burden for those that are more the defender then those that want to run with the zerg karma train.

Anet you are costing us alot of coin and plenty of grief with the updates. At times we get back into the game only to find out that all of our siege has despawned. Now whether this is a product of the update or because the the half hour timer on siege being up during the update, either way it is expensive and hugely annoying. If you are in the process for example of building a superior trebuchet you can kiss it goodbye when you see the announcement “There will be a server reset within the hour”. Today for example, the message popped up and a couple minutes later we were in Lion’s Arch with no time to cycle siege.

Please put a freeze on all siege despawns if you pull the servers down for an update/reset. It would be appreciated.

One other thing I have noticed recently is that Sentry posts have been reverting to neutral after a reset. Is this intended?