Guild Wars 2

Strorm.4987:

Really the ONLY drawback is the town clothes stuff, everything else about the wardrobe is awesome. There wouldn’t be as much complaint if they hadn’t revealed they’d be messing up the mix-and-matching of the town clothes.

Actually, the fact that 3 transmutation stones will equal 1 charge for changing the appearance of an items drastically reduces the value of transmutation stones, and some people did pay actual money for those. If you like to keep a character’s look consistent as they’re leveling, it will now cost you 3 times as much in terms of how many stones you had saved up.

The fact that unidentified dyes will no longer drop as loot means that anyone trying to make the Bifrost is going to have some real trouble with it, as they’re going to become really expensive. In fact, the dyes being so expensive will impact everyone who doesn’t have a bunch of alts that they want fancy colors on— and generally, the people who have a bunch of alts and want a bunch of dyes for those alts are also the people who like to be able to mix and match town clothes, so they can’t get one thing without having another taken away.

I can understand wanting to make crystals worth more than stones in the transition to charges, but shouldn’t that just mean that crystals are worth more, not that stones are worth less? I can understand making dyes rarer because people won’t need so many of them, but is it necessary to remove them as random drops entirely instead of just increasing their rarity?

I mean, a lot of the stuff about the wardrobe is great. It’s just that there are still some pretty substantial problems with it.

To answer the original question of this thread: people initially didn’t realize what some of the changes would mean. It’s easy to be excited about a wardrobe because we’ve been wanting one for ages, but it took a bit of time to realize “wait… now I can’t wear my Wintersday outfit with my Quaggan hat? It’s my favorite outfit! Wait… my transmutation stones will be worth how much?” and so on.

Is clipping really being quoted as an excuse here? Clipping!? My Asura’s helmets don’t have ear-holes but my ears clip right through them! My weapons clip through my ubiquitous-Medium-armor-trench-coats! Charr tails don’t just clip through the fabric of their armor; they clip through the fabric of reality itself!

All observable data point to the conclusion that the GW2 player base does not mind clipping all that much.

displacedTitan.6897:

Highly doubtful, also its seven pages OF THE SAME PEOPLE talking back and forth. This is such a small segment of the playerbase that I doubt they would notice if everyone in it quit today.

Perhaps a small segment of the playerbase, but a large segment of the payerbase, if you will. ANet makes money through microtransactions without making the game pay-to-win by charging for 1) extra convenience/efficiency and 2) cosmetic items. Crippling the function of the cosmetic items makes absolutely no sense, as I doubt they’re going to subsist on endless harvesting tools and boosters (does anyone actually buy boosters, aside from communal bonfires?) alone. While the new wardrobe system initially seems to make the cosmetic aspect of things better, the pitiful exchange rate of transmutation stones to “charges” and the problems with town clothes actually cause big problems for the cosmetic side of their profit margin.

Also, do give people more than half a day to respond before you start talking about how few people are responding. The forums are a hive of scum and villainy that many of us prefer to avoid if possible, after all.

So does this mean that endless tonics will become stackable?

Because otherwise, this completely removes the ability to stack the halo and devil horn tonics, very recent items, with the new town clothes, since you can only have one endless tonic active at a time. You would think that they might have thought of this while creating the halo and horns…

What baffles me is that apparently this system has been in development since the account wallet was introduced, and they didn’t think there would be a backlash about it? Nobody could come up with a better solution? Or did they literally just have the one poor guy working on it that whole time with nobody to make helpful comments or suggestions, no feedback at all?

Maybe the only people giving feedback were players with at least a dozen alts (therefore less affected by the drastic increase in dye price) who are all level 80 (therefore unaffected by transmutation stones being worth less) who never wear town clothes or costume brawl (therefore unaffected by the severe nerfing of our ability to look good in town clothes and the fact that toys will take up inventory space— yeah, the space thing will be offset by the new wardrobe, but who implements a feature only to make it less useful because now something ELSE is taking up space instead!?) or at least who only ever play Sylvari women (because those town clothes look good as a set) and NEVER play Charr (because those town clothes have okay-looking pants but awful-looking everything else and do NOT look good as a set).

My boyfriend’s Guardian had a hilarious glitch where, on my screen, he was breathing an endless stream of blue fire. I took waaay too many screenshots of him doing every possible emote while spewing flames from his face, but this is still my favorite one of the bunch.

A very silly one. To the tune of Jonathan Coulton’s “Mandelbrot Set.” And then put it on Youtube, because I haven’t put enough things I’ll regret later on the Internet for public consumption yet.

Jikk was one of my favorite minor NPCs, and I have fond memories of hanging out at his bar. I dealt with my emotions regarding his untimely demise by warping a JoCo song that was originally about a significant mathematical concept into an ode to a conglomeration of pixels. (Now if he ever shows up in the Fractals of the Mist, it’ll all have come full circle…)

Here’s the link to the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDjwTTaX9-I&

And if you don’t feel like listening, or can’t parse my sucky diction, here are the lyrics in text form: http://pastebin.com/pKQEkPXY

So let’s raise a coconut to our favorite Alcoholemancer!

Kal Spiro.9745:

That’s silly, there is only one Hero of Lion’s Arch, and that is a tiny ovoid golem.

If I can’t be the one to deal Scarlet the death blow… I want it to be Hero-Tron who does.

I guess I just figure that if they’re gonna add extra lines of dialogue somewhere, here would definitely be a good place. The dialogues with the speed boost NPCs within Lion’s Arch really don’t have to be two responses long, for example— in fact, both gameplay- and fluff-wise, it really makes more sense for an NPC to yell at you “Here, take a speed boost, now go save people!” than for your character to have a little conversation about it and justify his/er reasoning while Aetherblades zap you or Toxic Courtiers layer torment on you the whole time. I can understand the need for a bit more conversation for the Vigil/Priory/Whispers boost vendors, because that involves deciding whether or not to spend silver, but the speed boosts are free (I think?) and they’re also, well, all about speed.

That’s just an example, but maybe what really needs to happen is better prioritization of responses depending on which characters one’s likely to pay the most attention to. Especially right after doing the event for the first time, people were going around talking to all the NPCs in the refugee camps trying to glean information about the story, with enough time to actually focus on the responses; whereas the speed boost conversation is just a means to an end under a time limit— something you click through quickly, not something you pay attention to. (Then again, maybe it was more efficient to code the speed boost conversation that way because other ones like it in other cities are also two-step-or-more conversations? I’m not sure.)

Ah, I thought dialogue would take up relatively little space and effort; then again, I majored in English and only took Computer Science 101, so…

That said, even slightly less-mean-sounding generic responses would add a lot, I think.

Normally, I find ANet’s small-scale writing— incidental NPC dialogues, character conversations with NPCs, etc.— to be really high-quality, one of the things I like most about the game; and everyone I’ve spoken with about the game agrees. That’s why I found it really odd that the character’s options for responding to the refugees from Lion’s Arch, a place many players have become very emotionally connected to, are really very cold and distant in many cases. Kae Mayumi says, “I spent six years building my store. It’s all gone;” and my only available reaction is, “Good-bye.”

Also, many people have noted that the Charm/Dignity/Ferocity personality types are highly underused. So why not use them to provide different ways of responding to the poor miserable NPCs in the various refugee camps? Complimenting their resilience with Charm, inspiring them with a bit of Dignified motivational speechifying, using Ferocity to appeal to their fighting spirit?

I understand that in a huge Living Story event like this, there’s a lot of dialogue to write and little things like this are not the highest priority, but it’s also the little things that make a Living Story feel real, complete, that really integrate it with the existing fabric of the game’s narrative. Having the ability to respond more sympathetically to the refugees, especially if that ties in with your character’s personality type, would be a relatively small effort with huge returns in adding cohesiveness and immersion.

Heck, enough players are emotionally involved in the fate of these characters (note the thread about Raisin-Face, and I’ve personally spoken to many people who are interested in the fate of Trader Jikk) that it might serve as an interesting base for the creation of a Collaborative Writing thing similar to the Collaborative Development project but on a much smaller and more concrete scale. If there’s any way for players to contribute along these lines in a way that doesn’t create problems with copyright and suchlike unpleasant realities, I’d put all my Charm and Ferocity (and what little Dignity I can muster) into pulling it off, because I’d hate to see one of the facets of this game that so many people love suffer due to an event that’s so ambitious in other ways.

I’ve been looking all over for Trader Jikk, myself. I found an unnamed Lionguard Belongings Collector who looks like Jikk, and have been telling myself it’s him and he’s been volunteering to help the Lionguard by collecting belongings (and putting them in coconut shells and adding tiny paper umbrellas before returning them to their rightful owners). Even though he has a fairly common skin and I’m probably just deluding myself…

Maybe Jikk and Raisin-face are safe together somewhere ;_;

I love my Sclerite Karka Shell, and honestly, I feel bad when people ask where I got it and I have to tell them they can’t get one themselves. I’m all for bringing back opportunities like that. Maybe it would be better if it weren’t random but were instead the result of a lot of effort, such as a difficult quest line (perhaps involving fractals resembling past Living Stories?); but in general I think it’s a good thing to give new players a chance at things they never would have been able to have otherwise.

Also, I never got a monocle from Aetherblade Retreat because various circumstances (instance owner DCing, etc.) led to my party never being able to complete it despite getting to the final boss three times; and it was a random drop anyway, so there’s no guarantee I would have gotten it. The chance to get it again, or at least the lowering of the price on the Trading Post, is really more fair than you’d think in that position.

It’s not like I’m not being hurt by this either. I’ve been holding on to some Dragon Bash food waiting to sell it at a high price and didn’t get around to it; now that people are getting Dragon Coffers, that means a lower price for that food, and I lose out. But that’s my fault, and if more people can have pretty weapon skins, I’m totally okay with that.

Finally, all these things are still INCREDIBLY rare drops from bags that require a lot of coordinated effort to get. If they started giving out limited backpieces willy-nilly, then sure, I’d have a problem with that; but they’re not. The prices of these things are still in the hundreds of gold, even if they have dropped from what they once were.

And what about people who can’t play the game because real life gets in the way? Illness, military deployment, volunteering somewhere without Internet, etc.? Are we to punish them for being away for two weeks? With the fast pace of Living Story updates, it can get really hard to get the rewards for participating if you’re not wealthy in both money and free time.

tl;dr Apology accepted, but apologizing for it doesn’t make you not elitist, and being favored by RNG and having a lot of free time isn’t even something you should be being elitist about in the first place.

Hm, I should have thought of checking Twitter. Many thanks!

Hopefully this post is in the right place; I couldn’t figure out a better place to ask.

The rules say it’s okay to modify the song, record lyrics over the song, etc., but that it’s not okay to use a different song. What I need clarified is whether it’s okay to re-record the song with different instruments, or as an a capella version, so that has all the same notes but not necessarily the same sounds— or does the original recording itself have to be involved somehow?

I read all the contest rules and it didn’t seem to mention anything that could answer my question, so I’m hoping someone with the relevant authority will see this and respond. I don’t want to put a bunch of work into it only to find myself disqualified!

From TheSqueakingSkritt.blogs.tyria:

Well folks, looks like the Reformed Church of Dwayna has given popcorn-lovers across Tyria an early Wintersday gift! This Tixx the Toymaker debacle has been full of buttery goodness as it is, but my fellow drama addicts will be pleased to learn that the Reformed Church of Dwayna (well-known across Tyria for being neither reformed, nor much of a “church,” nor really having anything to do with Dwayna) has decided to weigh in on the matter in its own special way.

In a missive entitled “DWAYNA HATES TYRIA” (emphasis not mine), “church” leader Shirley Yujest wrote that “that little brat got what she deserved.” Apparently the little tyke’s crime was “disrespect[ing] the name of Dwayna with [her] sinful materialism,” and the incident was only the beginning of a series of “punishments” that Dwayna will wreak upon the populace for “corrupting Wintersday with heathen rites.” Wrote Shirley, “The day has come when sinners will be struck down by their own willful ignorance of Dwayna’s Word! Rejoice, ye who are righteous, and let us stand by and laugh at them!”

Apparently they’re planning on picketing outside the little girl’s house, or at least what’s left of it. In response, a source from the Blood Legion Motorgolem Brigade told me, the Brigade plans on forming a Motorgolem blockade to prevent them from getting there, and playing Wintersday music to drown out the “church’s” yelling. “We have SO MANY choir bells,” he told me. “Like, you have NO IDEA.”

Whatever ends up happening, it’s sure to create a drama-fest that will keep our taste for popcorn satisfied well into the New Year.

Out for now,
The Squeaking Skritt

I don’t wish to appear ungrateful when you guys obviously work very hard on communicating with the users of the site. However, I’ve been on the wrong end of some vague communications regarding dates lately, and it miffs me a bit. The stated time of the announcement of the diorama contest winners was “on or around November 5th,” and I have still seen no results yet. I understand that you’re busy, but it is a little bit frustrating. What frustrates me more is that it was stated that Halloween items would be available in the Gem Store “until November 7th.” I assumed this to mean that they would still be available ON November 7th, at least before noon PST, which seems to be a fairly sensible deadline (as it was the deadline for the diorama contest). But the Halloween items aren’t there, and I don’t know at what time they were taken off— only that it was done before I was finally able to scrape together the extra money to buy myself some gems. (Also, the Gem Store isn’t working properly, either, although I assume you already know that, and anyways this isn’t the place for that complaint.)

I understand that it’s likely that these two different deadlines are controlled by two different departments, but sticking fast to deadlines that deprive players of an opportunity to buy things while playing fast and loose with deadlines that grant players some peace of mind is both a little unpleasant and seems like a good way to deprive yourself of their money when they find they can’t buy things with gems they thought they still could.

P.S.: I apologize if the fact that I posted waaaaaay too many pictures with my diorama contest entry due to indecision made it more difficult and time-consuming for you to process them. Feel free to disregard my entry entirely if this is the case.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I had a couple of questions about the contest, actually. Are we allowed to use pre-fabricated elements, like miniature chairs bought from the craft store? Also, the rules say to submit “a picture,” but what if your entry is complex enough that you don’t feel like you can show it in one picture, or if it looks different in light and dark environments?

Anyhoo, I am indeed super-excited. I’ve always loved making little models with Sculpey, and for my favorite game to have a competition of one of my favorite things is awesome