Guild Wars 2

Hehe, nice to see that those cheaters are getting what they deserve. Too bad we don’t have Dhuum showing up to personally give ’em the banhammer like we did back in GW1.

As for the botters reporting each other, it actually wouldn’t surprise me if it were true. See, if the botters are doing it to generate gifts to sell, they’d want to block off the competition so that the price of Wintersday Gifts remains high. If everybody (or everybody who wanted the Winter’s Presence) was botting, either nobody needs to buy gifts because they botted them all themselves, or now there’s a huge glut of gifts on the market from all the botters trying to sell their ill-gotten wares, and prices collapse.

A similar bug exists for Mace 2 and Axe 5. It’s really, really annoying.

I find it’s better to just stop and kill them. They follow you a long, LONG way, and as some people have no doubt discovered, their attack is actually a ranged attack. This means that jumping up onto higher terrain isn’t always a good way to escape.

They are extremely fragile and so any kind of cleave or AoE attack should take them down nicely. On my Ele, for example, I just run right into the middle of them, drop Sandstorm, then Churning Earth, swap to Fire, Lava Font, and they should all be dead by the time Lava Font wears off.

And if all else fails, use a pet/summon to tank for you while you kill them.

There’s two ways to beat Axemaster Gwyllion:

1. You have a small group of people (5 – 10 is best), all or most of whom have Nuhoch Stealth Mastery and hard-hitting CC. At this scale, your individual CC is enough to easily break his bar, and your numbers are sufficient that if someone goes down, you can power res them quickly enough that it won’t be a problem. It’s now just a matter of following Gwyllion around and dumping all your CC onto his stop spots.

2. You bring a MASSIVE zerg of at least 30+ players. His insta-down attack caps out at about 10 or so targets, and against so many players, you can easily res everyone everytime they go down. At this scale it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to break his bar anyway; just focus on dumping AoE and cleave damage onto the Commander/Mentor tag. Inform the zerg that even though they can’t see his bar decreasing, he IS getting damaged.

I’m sure it’s been mentioned before, but the Bauxite Alchemicals meta-event in Malchor’s Leap frequently becomes bugged where the NPCs spawn somewhere inside the base instead of outside at the crash site like they’re supposed to. This makes the event impossible to progress since you can’t get at their bodies to res them as you are unable to get inside the base until the NPCs reach the external gate.

This bug blocks progress on both Twilight I and Predator I.

I think a large part of the reason why everybody was happy to chip in at first was because it hadn’t yet sunk in that (just about) everything in HoT requires either massive amounts of cash, or massive amounts of grind. There’s perhaps a handful of guildies in my own guild who I know pour in quite a lot of money and materials and have funded the vast majority of our guild upgrades. I donate what I can, but since I’m going for a lot of the shinies from HoT, donations mean that my own goals would need to be put back. And so I only end up donating stuff that I have a lot of excess of (namely, stuff like Tomes of Knowledge, Mystic Crystals, some of the HoT map currencies that I don’t need anymore), because I need to hoard everything else.

This is perhaps the single biggest flaw with the way HoT’s cost structure was designed. Players are forced to choose between their own personal goals and the goals of their guild. The unfortunate truth is that for many, many players (myself included), the guild must come second. And for the people who choose the other way around, they naturally feel quite resentful over time that “I’m doing all the work for the guild! The others are just reaping the rewards of my contributions!” And that causes strife and friction in otherwise harmonious guilds.

If the guild hall was designed as the main money and item sink, but players could acquire the stuff fairly easily (and didn’t need a lot of it personally), they’d no doubt be quite happy to put their excess towards the guild. ANet has obviously designed everything with the long-term goal of keeping players occupied for a LONG time, and perhaps 3 years down the line, this decision may prove to be the right one. But in the interim I think it’s causing a lot of player unhappiness because it feels like “everything is locked behind grind!”, and ANet should perhaps take a second look at rebalancing stuff before this discontent reaches levels where people start leaving.

Did it really cost you 27k gold to get to Scribe 340?? O.o

While Gaile (<3 you, Gaile!) did indeed give us the end date for Wintersday, I do agree that ANet really should state upfront, right in their website release page, the date on which the event finishes. That gives us time to plan and organize appropriately for collections, achievements etc. in between dealing with work and holidays and family stuff.

On a semi-related note, I REALLY wish that ANet could find a way to allow us to preserve our map participation % between maps. It’s very frustrating after you’ve spent the last hour patiently doing event chains by yourself and maybe a few others, only to suddenly get the “Map is closing” warning and then everybody jumps ship.

There shouldn’t be anywhere that spawns 5 or 6 Elite Snipers at once, unless it’s for an event and it’s WAY overscaled (in which case there should be a lot of other players around to help).

HoT definitely is a step up from the difficulty in Dry Top and Silverwastes (which were themselves a step up from the hardest open world areas like Orr), but there are ways to adapt and counter the new enemies. It might help if you actually told us what profession you’re running and what build/gear you’re using.

Basically, the items you need drop from any events at North/West/Southwatch that:

a) has a Champion or better boss, and

b) gives an “event completion” chest. This is the black/purple wiggle chest in the bottom right corner. The item has a chance to spawn in this chest.

HiggsBoson.1976:

But here’s a summary of changes I’d like to see:
1) Fix the 0:00 display bug , of course

2) Remove all collection/mastery/whatever requirements tied to Adventures, or make them super easy Bronze. LEAVE THE LEADERBOARDS ALONE.

3) No, for real, please don’t change the Leaderboard, or anything for that matter. It will probably make it worse.

4) But if you can change things without removing or ruining the Leaderboard, fix the Gold/Silver/Bronze requirements. Did I mention to please not mess up the leaderboards?

I’d actually love to know your thoughts on the list of changes I proposed in my post earlier in this thread. The heart of the changes was that I drastically reduced the requirements for attaining Bronze/Silver/Gold, thereby making it easier for players who just want the AP/Mastery points/collection stuff to get, but at the same time, it also opens up a much wider field of play for players who use Adventures as a new “competition arena”. For example, in an adventure like Floor is Lava, 25 is the highest score anyone can ever obtain, because there’s a maximum of 25 spores to collect.

By reducing the thresholds for Gold to just 15, you’re effectively narrowing down the pool of people obtaining that score, which allows for more room for people competing on score, and also on time.

IndigoSundown.5419:

I guess it’s nice to see that someone who cares about maxing performance finds some value in stat switch. Certainly to me the switch is not something I’d care about — not if it cost me a new rune set every time I wanted to change builds.

Out of curiosity, do the existing L. Weapons allow stat switch to the new stat choices?

I’ll admit that I tend to be less finicky about rune choices than most min-maxers. I tend to have favoured builds and thus I’ll stick the runes I use the most often on my Legendary/Ascended armor.

And yeah, they do allow switching to the new stat choices. I double-checked with a guildie earlier. Viper’s, Marauder’s and Commander’s were all there. It seems safe to say all the new stats are.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Legendary armor offers no stat increases over Ascended. That is what would denote a “superiority.” It does have a fringe benefit which you apparently value highly. However, Anet was referring to its stats, not the fact that it has a marginally useful prefix switch. They’re not lying, you’re taking them out of context.

While technically true, in practice the Legendary prefix switch is actually far more useful than you might think. HoT introduced new stats that so far have proven to be a lot more potent than traditional builds, especially when combined with the new Elite Specs. Thus, by going for Legendary armor now, you are actually “future-proofing” your character should ANet ever decide to introduce yet more stats in future expansions (a very high possibility). This will save you a lot of time, money and energy from having to re-craft more Ascended gear to keep up with whatever is the latest meta.

This is the primary reason why I am going for Legendary armor and backpieces myself. Otherwise, I’d have happily stuck to my Ascended gear.

EDIT: Legendary weapons are less of an issue since the weapon skills more or less dictate what sort of stats one should use on them and they aren’t likely to change as much. If an upgrade is truly needed, one can simply swap stats on that one specific weapon instead of having to change one’s entire armor.

Ugh. I had a long response written to this but the forums ate it.

But basically, fixing the exploits only treats the symptoms, not the cause. To truly break the cycle, you need to either remove the incentive for people to just mindlessly grind the same content over and over, or remove the requirements that makes people grind in the first place.

The former is always a disaster; look at the sorry state of dungeons now. Nobody really does dungeons anymore aside from people looking for AP, since it’s much faster to acquire dungeon tokens and gear from the PvP reward tracks than it is to do the dungeons themselves.

The latter, meanwhile, comes with the risk that players will simply move on once they’ve gotten their shinies, depriving ANet of numbers and potential income. However, this only happens if the shinies are the ONLY thing keeping players there. If the content is fun and enjoyable on its own merits, players will keep coming back to it for the experience alone. So far with HoT, it seems like ANet has just locked a bunch of fancy rewards behind onerous/expensive collections and grindy requirements.

Chiming in to add my agreement with the calls for a balance pass for a lot of adventures. The crux of my complaint is that the incredibly strict time limits/targets for Gold (and Silver, in some adventures) make it extremely unfair for players like myself in distant countries (Australia, in my case). A lot of the tricks and techniques I’ve seen used in Gold run videos are simply impossible to pull off with a 200+ ms connection. Gliders will always open a split second too late, bouncing mushrooms will sometimes fail to fire, skill lag or server position latency means that you have to stop and ensure you are in the right spot before activating skills lest the server think you’re firing it from a previous position, etc. etc.

Furthermore, some adventures don’t open until very late in the event chain (Shooting Gallery is the worst offender), meaning you typically only have 10 or so minutes left to actually do the adventure before you get kicked out by the meta. It’s extremely frustrating because the forced stop means you lose all that muscle memory you’ve spent the last several attempts building up.

I appreciate the sentiment StevenL has in his post, but I think his changes are a bit TOO extreme. You shouldn’t get Bronze for just starting the adventure and doing nothing at all; that said, you should qualify for Bronze with basically the minimum level of participation. Silver should be achievable by anyone once you’ve played the adventure a few times and know the path/where the doodads are etc. Gold should be achievable by players who know exactly where and when to use skills, shortcut locations OR have Masteries to give them massive advantages. Two of the best designed adventures I feel are Flying Circus and On Wings of Gold. Why? Because even if you’re not terribly good at adventures, the higher masteries make these two adventures very easy. Thus, it both incentivizes players to acquire higher masteries AND it gives them a sense of accomplishment and “increased power”, the feeling that the time they have spent training the masteries has now allowed them to overcome previously undoable challenges. This mechanic could be applied to several adventures which I’ll detail below.

Finally, I feel more emphasis needs to be put on the leaderboards as a reward in their own right and less on mastery points/AP. My redesign of the scoring below has left a lot of leeway for skilled players to carry on collecting points far beyond the threshold for Gold. Thus, the leaderboards become a true representation of skill and a place for bragging rights, and not just “how many players have reached Gold on this adventure?” which is more or less what they currently are.

I’ve yet to try the ones in Tangled Depths, but here are my thoughts for the ones in Verdant Brink and Auric Basin:

Tendril Torchers
Bronze: 1 – 30 (previously 50)
Silver: 31 – 75 (previously 75)
Gold: 75+ (previously 110)

I feel that Tendril Torchers is fairly well balanced as it is, but no harm can come of easing the requirements back a little. This is likely the very first adventure players are likely to find in HoT, and there’s no sense in scaring them off by making it too difficult.

Bugs in the Branches
Bronze: 1 – 10 (previously 10)
Silver: 11 – 20 (previously 20)
Gold: 20+ (previously 30)

This adventure isn’t too difficult, especially once you’ve unlocked the higher Glider Masteries. (Lean Techniques in particular makes it fairly straightforward to get Gold.) I toned down the requirements a bit mostly because it’s needed for Bo.

Flying Circus
Bronze: 5:00 (previously 3:00)
Silver: 4:00 (previously 2:30)
Gold: 3:00 (previously 2:00)

My impression of Flying Circus was that it was fine as it was, but again, no harm in easing the requirements up a little.

Shooting Gallery
Bronze: 1 – 15 (previously 15)
Silver: 16 – 30 (previously 30)
Gold: 30+ (previously 40)

This adventure is sorely in need of some balancing. Let’s face it, GW2 isn’t well suited to being an FPS. The targeting is clunky and server latency means that anyone with bad ping is going to find their shots shooting at where they thought they were pointing one second ago. The RNG associated with this adventure should also be removed; all the targets should be active from the start, and the player just has to shoot as many as they can. (Previously shot targets will respawn after 30 seconds.)

Salvage Pit
Bronze: 1 – 10 (previously 10)
Silver: 11 – 20 (previously 15)
Gold: 20+ (previously 30)

Salvage Pit doesn’t really need any changes since it’s pretty easy, but in keeping with the spirit of the post, Gold has been toned down a bit.

On Wings of Gold
Bronze: 1 – 10 (previously 10)
Silver: 11 – 20 (previously 20)
Gold: 20+ (previously 30)

One of my favourite adventures, and one that I always point to as an example of a very well designed adventure. As with similar adventures, I reduced the threshold for Gold so that skilled players have more room to compete with each other in how many essences they can collect within the time limit.

Sanctum Scramble
Bronze: 5:00 (previously 3:30)
Silver: 4:00 (previously 3:00)
Gold: 3:00 (previously 2:30)

A tough, but reasonably fair adventure. Again, lowered the threshold for Gold a bit to allow more leeway for players to compete on time. This adventure can also benefit from Exalted Mastery in the following new additions:

- Training Exalted Markings grants you access to two special Exalted portals scattered throughout the JP. These allow the player to bypass small parts of the adventure that involves jumping. Together they allow the player to shave off about 5 or 10 seconds from their time.
- Training Exalted Purification reduces the cooldown of all your Egg Bearer skills by 25%.

The Floor is Lava?
Bronze: 1 – 10 (previously 5)
Silver: 10 – 20 (previously 15)
Gold: 20+ (previously 25)

This is another adventure that players with worse ping struggle with. Latency can mean that spores fail to register when you kick them, or you’re a second late before it launches you back up into the air. Pinpoint gliding is also a lot trickier. Accordingly, I eased the requirements up a bit to allow more leeway.

Fallen Masks
Bronze: 1 – 10 (previously 10)
Silver: 10 – 15 (previously 15)
Gold: 15+ (previously 25)

The RNG spawning of the masks should be removed for this adventure. The adventures should be a pure contest of skill and not one that can be influenced by “lucky spawns”. As with Shooting Gallery, have all the Masks spawn at the start and then the player has to calm as many masks as they can within the time limit. Masks respawn after 30 seconds.

A Fungus Among Us
Bronze: 4:00 (previously 2:30)
Silver: 3:00 (previously 1:40)
Gold: 2:00 (previously 1:20)

This adventure needs some serious tweaking. As others have mentioned, the mushroom skills sometimes do not work properly (the jump skill fails to trigger, or it’s blocked by a ridiculously low platform that they should be able to jump over easily), and the time limit is far too unforgiving for anyone without good ping. However, as with Sanctum Scramble, I propose giving players with greater Masteries more advantages in this adventure:

- Add in a few more Speed Boost Mushrooms scattered throughout this adventure. For instance, while the [Soggy] condition states that it can be removed by Celeritas spores, there are no Speed Boost Mushrooms anywhere near the water hazard section where it could be of use.
- The Adrenal Mushrooms mastery adds an additional third “dodge” to the end of skill 1, and increases the range of skill 2’s bounce to 1500 (thus allowing them to make some truly amazing leaps that opens up new shortcuts).

If ANet just lowers/removes the requirement for crossing X league divisions as a prerequisite for the Legendary, I’m willing to let this gaffe slide. :P Everything else aside from that can be worked towards with time and dedication. But otherwise, with the rampant cheating/exploiting that’s going on, I’m NEVER going to get to Ruby. Let alone Diamond.

Sorry about your experience, but a quicker way of getting back is to simply suicide into the pit and accept the respawn, which puts you back at the door to the second room. You can then run back into the first room, and since the boss spawns at the back of the first room, you’ll be right where he is.

It will not give you a second node, no. I can’t confirm this, but I believe that if you try, it will give you the message “You already have that content unlocked”. Sell it on the TP.

Congrats on unlocking everything for your Home Instance, btw. I have mine fully decked out too, and it’s quite a nice little money maker harvesting everything in it every day.

I have to agree that Freshwater Pearls seem absurdly rare as pure “drops” from Mussels. I’ve gotten more from opening Airship Cargos than I have from harvesting them.

From what some others have mentioned here though, it sounds as if chest farming in TD is the way to go if you want to get them. It may have been an intentional design by ANet to improve the desire for people to stay in that map. (Just like how the best source for Black Diamonds is by opening the chests beneath Tarir after a successful meta.)

Bambu.4270:

This may sound elitist but don’t bring rangers. Pets r bad.

False statement. The Jade Maw no longer fires his lasers at pets of any type. This includes minions, illusions, ranger pets etc. He ALWAYS targets players. Therefore, players with pet builds are in no way jeopardizing the achievement by “wasting” lasers.

Anyway, to the OP’s question, there are a few key points to keep in mind in order to get the achievement:

1. The timer starts when someone gets close to the final platform. Therefore, WAIT for everyone to catch up (kill the jellyfish on the penultimate platform if you have to) before starting the timer. If someone is late or falls, you’re just reducing your party’s DPS for no good reason.

2. You want to get to the final phase of Jade Maw as quickly as possible (because he shoots beams the fastest during that time). So as soon as people land on the last platform, make a beeline for the two tentacles and burn them down. Call targets on any subsequent tentacles and jade colossi and kill them as fast as you can. The faster your group can kill mobs to collect crystals, the better your chances will be. (This, alas, does turn the achievement into basically a DPS test, but it is what it is.)

3. ALWAYS make sure you are within range of a crystal. As someone above mentions, you can only miss about 2 laser shots before the achievement fails due to lack of time. If you are going far to kill a tentacle, bring a crystal with you! A stunbreak to make sure you don’t get KD’d at inopportune times will help, but is not strictly necessary if you play a ranged character.

Let us SELL the Winter’s Presence skin on the TP. I think that would solve a lot of the issues. I’m currently working towards the skin myself, not because I like the look, but for the AP and collection completion. If I could make someone’s day by selling them my unwanted skin and make a nice bit of money in the process, why not?

This achievement is extremely buggy and is currently not working as intended. However, there is a workaround.

1. Avoid the two sets of traps as normal.

2. After you have powered up the map (the mission objective will read “Meet back up with your group”), go back and deliberately get hit by the 2nd set of traps.

3. Walk back into the room where you met Taimi. The achievement should trigger for some bizarre reason.

Same here. The moment I got Exalted Gathering, the very next node I went to (I think it was just a common Mithril Ore) gave me all 9 Auric Lodestones for the 9 collections at once. It was quite amusing.

Sanctum Scramble at least has the benefit of having a fairly generous time limit. I managed to achieve Gold on it playing from Australia with a minimum 200+ms ping, although only after an hour of some very fierce swearing. I had to adjust my strategy because some of the pinpoint methods used by Gold runners are simply impossible to do with that kind of ping (your glider opens a split second too late and you will ALWAYS crash into the wall or juuust miss the platform). The only thing that saved me was the fact that Sanctum Scramble has probably a good 15 – 30 second leeway for achieving Gold.

This is not the case when it comes to other difficult adventures like Floor is Lava, Fallen Masks or Shooting Gallery, which is why I still firmly believe that ANet needs to give the adventures a good balance pass. ALL players should be able to get Bronze even on their first go unless they literally don’t do anything. Silver should be achievable by anyone provided they know what the adventure’s mechanics are and where to go. Gold should be achievable if you’ve run the adventure numerous times, know where to go, know the tricks OR have Masteries that can help you. (I always point to Wings of Gold and Flying Circus as two examples of adventures that were excellently designed.)

If people still want to claim bragging rights over Gold, there’s always the leaderboard.

This bug is still occurring, and it’s an annoyingly frequent one too. I get it maybe once every 2 or 3 days. I’m still not sure what’s actually causing it, but given how the meta progression for the new cycle is strangely listed as almost done with Tier 1, I suspect that the bug is somehow pushing progression beyond the T4 completion, and that’s causing it to bug out.

Thank you so much for this update, Gaile! I can ease off a little on the minigame grinding then. XD

Agreed that VB seems like the odd one out. To make matters worse, going by averages, you end up with less Airship Parts per event completed when compared to AB or TD. You get 1 – 3 Crowbars per meta-event progression, but considering that you typically only get 3 Airship Parts per Cargo, that works out to just 9 Airship Parts for maybe 10 – 15 mins of work.

What’s more, because the Cargos don’t spawn until the meta-event progresses, you’re often forced to sidetrack away from doing the events in order to do Cargo hunts, meaning that you’re hurting the map by not participating, AND you also potentially lose participation credit in whatever event you’re doing. (The requirements for some of them are REALLY finicky. I’ve had one event where I was escorting a Pact Soldier, then got knocked off a cliff. By the time I glided back up, I’d already lost participation credit and the event finished. I got NOTHING despite the fact that I’d done 95% of the work getting the Soldier to the camp. >.<)

Basically, the way that Airship Parts are obtained encourages players to adopt a selfish and greedy playstyle, either running around the map ignoring events while hunting for Cargos (a big contributer to the fact that a lot of rally points at night go undefended, because people are off looking for Cargos as nighttime is when the majority of Cargos spawn), or stubbornly sticking to your own event for fear of losing your participation even when other events are begging for help.

xbutcherx.3861:

Glenstorm.4059:

Can we PLEASE get nodes for cloth and leather? Supply for these materials from drops/salvage can be adjusted to compensate. I just want a way to collect these out in the wild without relying on RNG. I mean, I know it’s not hard to find Silk etc. from drops, but I’d really prefer a sure-fire way to go out and harvest them, like all the other basic materials.

Leather nodes… mmm what? just put a several dead animals for harvesting? That would be funny as hell lol and also what tool would be using? a knife?

You can buy a “Basic Cloth Rack” for your home instance that randomly generates some low level cloth scraps every day. (You’re just stealing clothes off some poor guy’s clothesline.) ANet should release a “Basic Leather Rack” as well. Along with the missing nodes for Hard Wood, Iron Ore, and possibly introducing an Advanced Cloth/Leather Rack as well.

Lothirieth.3408:

Gaile Gray.6029:

(As a GW veteran and official Life of the Party and Incorrigible Ale-Hound, I’m thinking about going for the beverage thing myself. )

I’m betting you didn’t gather all those items and imbibe them in 4 weeks though….

Speaking of which, does anybody actually know when Wintersday will be ending? Gaile, I would be most grateful if you can shed some light on this!

I think the biggest thing ANet needs to clarify now is:

a) How long will Wintersday be here for? This gives us the ability to plan ahead and see if we can farm the drinks ourselves, or have to buy it.

b) Will the ability to progress the collection be available even after Wintersday? The ones tied to the Wintersday mini-games are obviously going to be gone, but drinks can be acquired all year round thanks to our personal Gift Trees. If the achievement becomes locked after a couple of weeks, that puts TREMENDOUS pressure on people who want the skin.

Does anyone know how long Wintersday will run for this year? As usual, the release page is not forthcoming with this information. :P

Mortifer.2946:

I tried bugs in branches for like 10 minutes and got gold medal however it took me exact time i had….very close…but never again i got my mastery point so bye bye… maybe silver for extra exp here and there

See? This is exactly what I mean. A lot of players just do the adventures for their Mastery point and AP, and then never come back again. The adventures are a lot of wasted potential as single-shot experiences that players aren’t even enjoying as they do them.

Also, if you want extra XP, the map meta chains give far more XP and are way more profitable.

Becka Williams.4978:

Wear white gear. There, challenge mode engaged!

^ This. I always have to shake my head a little at people demanding tougher content. If something’s too easy for you, there are lots of ways you can handicap yourself to make it tougher. Fight Lupicus naked. Play Ranked without using any of your utility slots or elite skill. Do the raid with 5 people. These, I feel, demonstrate your “skill” far better than a designed encounter that’s been built with a specific solution (whether through tactics or gear) in mind. Break the box by designing your own solution. THAT’S the true mark of a Master.

The only thing that worries me about this is how there’s a “Only available during Wintersday” line on the achievement. Does that mean we need to farm/buy all those 10k drinks within this Wintersday, or we’ll be locked out again till next year? If the collection was something we could still work towards throughout the year (since the Wintersday Gift Tree in our HI pumps out gifts all year long), it would be tedious, but acceptable. But if it’s forcing us to grind gifts within a 2 – 3 week span? That would be too much.

If any devs see this, some clarification on this would be appreciated.

The other logs are still at 3:1, but I suppose after all these years Soft Wood needs some time to catch up. :P

Thank you for this change though. It was much appreciated. Now, if only ANet would release a Basic Leather Rack and ways to harvest Hard Wood, Iron Ore, and Advanced Cloth and Leather Racks for our Home Instances… HINT HINT ANET

A good rule of thumb is that for whatever supply you see on the TP, assume that there is at least 10 times that amount hidden away in people’s banks and mat storages. Case in point; back when Ogre Wars was bugged extremely frequently, Sam cost around 500g. Then one day it got patched, and within that SAME DAY all the buy orders got filled and prices collapsed to 100g, a price at which it hovers around today. There was nowhere near enough time for enough players to mob Ogre Wars and farm Sam to have filled that many orders and increased supply in such a short amount of time. It all came from copies that people had been hoarding off the TP, then desperately tried to unload before prices collapsed.

So yes, I do expect Mystic Coin prices will jump significantly in the next week or so, but it will stabilize again once Wintersday is over.

Bring back that lone Skritt Snowball Fighter in LA who everybody just mobbed mercilessly! XD

I always support players having more choice, buuuut… I can see where people are coming from. There are now so many different skin sets in the game that it’s honestly becoming hard for me to look at someone and know what armor/weapons/outfits they’re using. Mind you, this isn’t a PROBLEM since it’s restricted to me (and the most important thing is always that the person WEARING the stuff enjoys how it looks), but it just means that my brain is starting to shut off and no longer really processing what someone else is wearing.

The Skritt attacking the Dolyak don’t count either. I finally landed a hit on one (you can tell because they lie flat instead of getting kicked away) and it didn’t progress the achievement.

Yep, found this out earlier. Fortunately it seems that simply participating in the game such as punching the crab carrier is enough to get your participation for the daily. But yeah, fix please, ANet.

I’m having problems logging in too. At first it said “you have lost connection with the game server”, and now it’s back to the classic “unable to contact the login server”. I’m in Australia, for the record.

Forums are also extremely slow.

UPDATE: Got back into the game now and while there are still the occasional lag spikes, it’s at least tolerable now.

Note that you are only able to advance the collection by laughing at a specific point. You must use the /laugh emote when Gort is standing outside his cave after the ettins have taken it over. Using it when he is inside the cave (either because the event is not active or because it was just completed) won’t work.

Like many others here, I only say “gg” if it was a fairly balanced, close match, whether as the winner or loser. If one side absolutely crushed the opposition, it’s perfectly understandable for the losers to be a bit sore about it. Likewise, saying “gg” as the winner in such a lopsided match just seems like rubbing it in.

Coulter.2315:

Also at what point would you stop nerfing adventures?
Until you can do them easily?
Until everyone playing the game can do it easily?
Do you think this will make adventures engaging for most of the player base?

Adventures will have been designed to offer some challenge but still be doable by a large portion of the player base – you might just be in the bottom % and so will struggle (you could improve with practice though).

Never assume that because something is challenging for you that it will be automaticly be challenging for others, the game needs to contain challenges to be engaging for the majority of the player base.

They’re certainly challenging, but are they FUN? So far the general consensus seems to be “No”. Aside from a few people here on the forums, I have not met anybody in game, either in my guild or on my fairly extensive Friends list, who actually ENJOYS doing the adventures, to the point where they would do them regularly.

Rather, what seems to be happening is the majority of players are skipping the adventures (I mean, I got the bare minimum for Silver on Fallen Masks the other day, and I was still ranked 947 worldwide? You mean only 946 other players in the entire world have ever gotten better than 15??). Those that DO do the adventures are doing so grudgingly, either for Mastery points or to unlock certain collections, and then never, EVER touch them again. This is a terrible situation because it means that:

a) ANet wasted a lot of development time and energy making content that only a tiny handful of players are doing.

b) Most of the players that DID do the adventures come away with a resentful, angry experience. Not the kind of memories you want to create for your game!

I don’t want to see adventures scrapped, as I think they do have their place, but I DO think they need some rebalancing. There are some adventures I can point to that I think were done perfectly. For example, On Wings of Gold or Flying Circus. These are adventures that can be tricky at first, until you either:

a) Overcome the challenge with a combination of skill and/or experience

OR

b) Train Masteries that give you a massive advantage

For the two adventures I mentioned, trying to get Silver or Gold can be nearly impossible if all you have are Updrafts, but once you unlock Lean Techniques and Advanced Gliding, completing them becomes far easier.

As others have said, Sylvari has the greatest changes as you’ll hear the voice of Mordremoth himself in several missions. Some NPCs will also react differently to you.

The other races do have slight dialogue changes (an Asura character, for example, reacts quite differently to a discovery in the Act 2 story compared to other races), but not enough to really change the tone of the mission. It’s more of a “oh cool, this is actually fitting for my race” feeling.

Adventures are doubly frustrating for those of us who aren’t in the US or Europe, because the almost non-existent margin for error, combined with our distance from the servers, means that certain techniques or methods used by people to get Gold are impossible for us to mimic. The adventures need to have enough leeway so that players who don’t have every conceivable advantage still have a fair chance at getting Gold.

Our high ping in Australia is also the #1 reason why I would like ANet to rebalance adventures to allow more time/leeway. It’s really frustrating when you see other players getting Gold by using little tricks or techniques that rely on skills firing off instantly, but which never, ever work for you because our split-second delay means that we always just miss the platform/jump etc. You KNOW you have the skill to get it if you were just on an equal playing field, but you can’t for factors out of your control.

So… What I need to do is look for an awesome pre-made team to carry my terribad PvP self because my low ranking will drag down their MMR? Thanks for the advice.

I would definitely like a bit more clarification on this, Evan. Does this mean that we will only be able to retain progress on these achievements for this year? Are there plans to reset progress each year, for instance, or to introduce different Legendary backpieces each year?

If this is something we can slowly continue to work towards (I dunno about you, but I can’t see myself going from Amber to Diamond in a year…) for as long as the game exists, then I’m happy to keep participating, but if I only have a year before everything is wiped, then I’m not going to bother continuing. I’m plowing an awful lot of hours into this, time that I could be spending on HoT, raids and other achievements/collections.