So Anet is all this and all that just because each and every one of you doesn’t get exactly what you want? They took an extra step to give you another chance, it’s called gambling for a reason.
The above sums up my opinion. I think some of you guys are judging a bit harshly….this is only act 1. We have no idea what rewards/content the other 3 acts have to offer.
There shouldn’t be this type of gambling in a holiday event at all and it doesn’t matter what the other acts will offer because they can’t exactly turn around and make these skins easily obtainable now cause that would just be shooting us in the face. They should had never been in the BLC to begin with but instead been a individual item you could buy from the shop, a item from a karma merchant or even a random reward from a jumping puzzle in lions arch. Hell they could had even made it a costume brawler champion reward. There were so many other GOOD possibilities than the money hungry method they chose. It’s a bit clear that this event was more of a money maker for them than a event for the community.
I for one spent about 4k gems on keys and got nothing and then flipped all my items in the mystic forge for the about 42 new chests and still got nothing again. Thanks for a memorable Halloween and I for one will be staying clear of the rest of the events and not be buying anything from you unless I know its 100% guaranteed.
Good. If it’s not fun, don’t do it. That will be better for everyone in the end.
That’s not the point I’m making. I actually found all the events to be fun and well done. I just have a gripe with the way they went about distributing these weapon skins. They should had been easily obtainable or sold individually like the witch and mad king costume.
The witch and the mad king costume do not compete with cosmetic craftables/forgeables, which I believe was a purposeful distinction, because it has been that way since release.
I think the general rule is that anything that affects the main guild wars stat and battle cosmetic economy is going to be hard to get, while everything peripheral (like town clothes, costume potions, and dye) is going to be commonly easy and somewhat cash based.
My power supply burned out which prevented me from doing my regular dailies, mining, and now candy corn farming, and it enabled me to put it all in perspective.
Being driven by a completionist desire to maximize efficiency just complicates your life and makes your game into another job. If you just approach it more simply and do what’s fun, you can avoid making it into another life stress and use it as the source of relaxation and entertainment it was always designed to be. Thank goodness that I don’t have to subscribe to this so I can step back whenver I feel that I’m sabotaging my own break time and rejoin in the right state of mind.
If the prospect of the mystery of the holiday doesn’t excite you, if you are anxious about missing out on candy corn high/lows, and if you find yourself screaming at the screen whenever you get killed in costume brawl by some guy spouting tasteless jokes, then maybe you do need to take a step back and think about what you really want from this game. It doesn’t make you a lesser person to do so, and as you can see from all the other threads here, it happens to a substantial number of people. Being able to come back and actually enjoy playing helps you and everyone you encounter, and if you cannot do that, then at least you have improved your life by ceasing a vicious degenerative cycle.
Having a skin you are satisfied with forever sucks the life out of the cosmetic aspect of the rest of the game, considering how hard it is to get a decent skin, especially a decent weapon skin, through other avenues. Having a disproportionately easy method to get a cool looking skin would still be unfair. Hence why all gem costumes are town clothes – why bother spending 110 gold on cultural armor if you can just wait until the next holiday?
So Anet is all this and all that just because each and every one of you doesn’t get exactly what you want? They took an extra step to give you another chance, it’s called gambling for a reason.
The above sums up my opinion. I think some of you guys are judging a bit harshly….this is only act 1. We have no idea what rewards/content the other 3 acts have to offer.
There shouldn’t be this type of gambling in a holiday event at all and it doesn’t matter what the other acts will offer because they can’t exactly turn around and make these skins easily obtainable now cause that would just be shooting us in the face. They should had never been in the BLC to begin with but instead been a individual item you could buy from the shop, a item from a karma merchant or even a random reward from a jumping puzzle in lions arch. Hell they could had even made it a costume brawler champion reward. There were so many other GOOD possibilities than the money hungry method they chose. It’s a bit clear that this event was more of a money maker for them than a event for the community.
I for one spent about 4k gems on keys and got nothing and then flipped all my items in the mystic forge for the about 42 new chests and still got nothing again. Thanks for a memorable Halloween and I for one will be staying clear of the rest of the events and not be buying anything from you unless I know its 100% guaranteed.
Good. If it’s not fun, don’t do it. That will be better for everyone in the end.
The crux of the problem is that weapon skins in particular are a touchy issue because of the legendaries. The legendaries are the endgame drive, so reducing the demand for them by flooding the market with pseudolegendaries will garrotte the economy before it has a chance to stabilize. The most valuable items on the trading post are all cosmetic, so some limitation has to be made on directly purchaseable cosmetic items to at least appease the people going for those that require a high playtime investment.
For the rest, if you can’t stand walking away empty handed, never buy anything you aren’t guaranteed. It’s a good rule in real life: either have a backup plan or don’t take risks.
This is probably a good learning experience for people who have never gambled before. At least for most, not a whole lot of real money was involved.
There should also be a rule that if you spend half your savings at the casino every month then you should come out ahead every time. I’m not trying to troll you or anything, it was announced as a chance to get a skin and thats what it ended up being.
No, they plain said you could get them, RNG =/= you being able to get something.
If the probability is not zero then you are able to get whatever the lottery says you can get.
The solution to “Pay to Win” has always been to make the strategy of dumping a bank onto the cash shop unprofitable. Guild Wars 2 could modify the gem system to be more like its antecedents, but none of you would like that because it goes further in the direction of necessitating actual money purchases for items that are guaranteed to have no effect on gameplay at large. That’s the safest way to do it: make it so you have to play the game to get a decent locked base, and unlock it with real currency (no gold to gem conversion) for items guaranteed not to have an effect on gameplay.
If you don’t want to do that and want to encourage people to find ways to shortcut using lucrative playstyles or supplement the market with items that have more than a cosmetic value, then you must limit the distribution of these items to avoid invalidating the economy and making this a game where you must either earn lots of money all the time or buy gems to access any amount of content. That fosters a generation of gold farmers and loose checkbooks with no room for casuals who want to play the game at leisure and spend a set amount of money when they really feel like it.
If you are surprised by the low drop rates and the whole unlockable chest system, then this is probably your first exposure to the microtransaction revolution in general, since there have been lots of games that have perfected this system in the past that stand by these methods that people are complaining about. There is a reason that these limits exist, and it has everything to do with the player population and the integration of the real and virtual economyof the game.
Are you sure you got a glory booster from a chest? Cause people who have opened thousands of chests have 0 recorded glory boosters.
Well you patch just went live. Opened all my boxes and still didn’t get a single skin.
You do realize this type of event is supposed to be fun for everyone. Not just those with huge wallets right?
Try to look past the skins. The event IS fun. It’s unreasonable to say the event’s automatically not fun because a SKIN doesn’t magically fall into your lap.
I would seriously pay $5 for a weapon skin. What I won’t pay for is playing the lottery any longer.
Shoulda thought about that beforehand. In gambling if you’re not ready to lose, don’t start playing.
This is a game. If I’m out of money at a Casino I’m done playing. If I get tired of constantly losing at lottery garbage in this game, I’ll go play an MMO and participate in a holiday event that offers better rewards at less chance.
Good for you and good luck.
You should definitely send a report to Arena Net, as localization issues are a major cost factor for them right now.
also some fine mats are really cheap compared to others, so you can just buy them in bulk to breeze past some crafting thresholds while still getting experience for crafting weapon mods.
Let’s see him do that when there’s a queue. At any rate, the majority of player kills do not happen with players foolish enough to wander around by themselves (especially guardians, who fare much better than most classes when they have backup) but in group skirmishes, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Decide a set amount to spend on gambling (if any) and once you’ve reached that amount, don’t gamble anymore and start saving money. If you’ve saved up quite a lot of money but the precursors are out of your price range, then start doing research on drop tables to calculate how much you need to gamble to get a good chance at a precursor. Do that, and no more. If you don’t get the weapon, start the process over.
This is not a positive feedback loop here. Weapon price expansion can only continue to the point that it becomes extremely likely that the money could instead net a precursor. Once that limit is reached, or actually well before that limit is reached, there will be no demand for the overpriced weapons and people who have them will be forced to eat the posting fees and lower the prices.
Again, scour your inventory for it. You may have missed the one inventory slot that has the tonic stack.
It’s not like gold is that hard to come by.
But some of us spent our hard earned money on keys jsut for this event so it doesnt matter if gold is hard to come by or not i bought had a horribly low chance that wa so low anet put this in and then made it the tonics which i got zero of so i feel very cheated doubly so since you have to have x amount of tonics and i looted zero so yeah it is a problem to me
You should probably make a report to Arena Net that mystery tonics aren’t dropping from chests (are you sure it isn’t hidden somewhere in your inventory?) since it has absolutely been verified that they’re a mandated drop. Either that, or look for posts complaining of the same thing to see if it’s an isolated incident on your part.
But those of us who spent money on kjeys for the chests and got zero tonics we are just SOL unless we spend more money? yeha great job on this one Anet sorry but only those that got lucky and got the tonics gain anything from this the rest of us just wasted our money in my opinion
What are you talking about? All black lion chests give you 3 tonics.
Well the 7+ i op-ened dropped zero so that is inaccurate mate
Unless they recently changed the drop tables, by which I mean since yesterday, all chests give 3 mystery tonics.
It’s not like gold is that hard to come by.
But those of us who spent money on kjeys for the chests and got zero tonics we are just SOL unless we spend more money? yeha great job on this one Anet sorry but only those that got lucky and got the tonics gain anything from this the rest of us just wasted our money in my opinion
What are you talking about? All black lion chests give you 3 tonics.
What this means is that you should roll a warrior and find a bunch of guardian buddies who will perma prot regen on you
You definitely do not get back your candy corn returns with any of the costumed kids’ options.
If an item has a drop rate of 1/1000, then the chances of you striking out after opening 1000 in a row is (999/1000)^1000 or 37% chance of being unlucky. You are NOT guaranteed at all to get an item with a .1% drop rate if you roll for it 1000 times. That’s not how probability works.
If you opened 3000 bags at the same rate your chance of being extremely unlucky would be (999/1000)^3000 = 5% chance of no dice.
It’s a small chance but it exists and is significant. You should at least know this much about probability before playing lotteries.
BTW, if the drop rate is 1/10000, the probability of being the OP is (9999/10000)^23000, which is 10%. Not exactly far out there.
Did you talk to the costumed kids in lion’s arch? They take 10, 20, or 25 candy corn from you in exchange for a personalized trick or treat bag, which doesn’t give back candy corn returns but has a chance of dropping a halloween recipe. It’s a context menu option so you may have overlooked it.
Did you use the candy powered matter meter? You spend 1 candy corn every 4 charges with that thing. If you used it 400 times you’d be out 100 candy corn.
100 candy corn is actually not a lot; it’s practically half an hour’s worth if you play normally.
In the next event people will be more mindful of buying gems with gold. You should see an increase in the baseline gem price from now on as they are in more demand to prep for the next holiday event.
Seeing as I don’t do WvWvW, I couldn’t care less about seige weapons. And how exactly do XP boosters manage to ‘upgrade’ mats?
If you have stacks of mats, you can upgrade them with 1 of the next tier mat, mystic coins, and philosopher’s stones, which you buy with skill points. You get a random amount of mats for the next tier. You can also do the same with the lodestone pathways which can sometimes save some money.
Of course, this is a lot more important if you’re going for legendaries and mystic weapons, both of which need heavy cost skill point items for crafting.
Why would you toss out the XP boosters? Do you not have mats or siege weapons you want to upgrade? Levels = profit as much as anything else.
I bet lodestone difficulty will be nerfed in the future. They already took karma out, and if the increased dungeon running doesn’t drive down prices, I bet there will be action.
The people who invested in halloween items also took a chance, as decreasing rarity of items after initial presentation is not unheard of. Those who are smart and do their research definitely have an eye on the dev blog and probably liquidated all sales in the interim between this blog post and its prophecy.
It goes both ways, and the winners both times are the people who use their brains.
Guild Wars 2 early adopters get rewarded all the time. It’s still a risk, though, and here is one of the times where the risk part factored instead of the reward. If you’ve got no data about how rare the items in the chest are, then making assumptions about that is taking a risk. Do you buy in early and hope to cash in on the panicked market, or do you wait for reports to come in about drop rates before you make your decision? You should have already bought the gems pre-event because the gem spike was easy to anticipate, so in the end it’s all another risk taking game, where the people who decided to wait won out this time.
the scepter did get improved. See if you can spot the difference.
and the scepter 2 ability has always been the most damaging combo of any skill; look at the base stats.
I am concerned because healing is never by percentage of total health but is a number derived from other factors – so a guardian with 10k health and 12k max health is technically the same as a guardian with 10k health and 23k max health, that being the only factor considered. You don’t need to heal up to max health if 10k is enough, but with a 12k max guardian, you only have the ability to take 2k worth of damage before then.
However, Zeal and Honor guardians have 5 trait skills that depend on crossing the 50% health threshold, and wavering in that midline can have the benefit of laying down symbol spam and also putting on aegis, which lends itself to all kinds of options.
This goes both ways since while low vitality bars are easy to heal up past 50%, high vitality bars mean you have greater total HP: you’re safer there.
Also, there is one skill only guardians have that is only dependent on max HP: Tome of Courage 5. That is definitely more powerful to a high vitality guardian with high vitality friends. In addition, Virtue of Resolve passive and Regen don’t work that well on low vitality guardians that can easy reach their HP max.
I believe that high toughness is fine for sPvP and straight PvE, where ToC 5 is impossible and impractical, respectively. In WvW and Dungeons, though, you get condition spiked and sustain armor bypass damage way too much for toughness to be a focus stat. If you’re going to go for toughness, make a backup build for those scenarios.
So what do you do (in PvE and WvW anyway) if you factor in the Save Yourselves buff with increased boon uptime?
Not all casuals , working folk , etc agree with the gimme now gimme all crowd.
Posted by: kaffaljidhma.1496
I have never ever seen a virtual cash shop game officially disclose actual drop odds for random purchase loot. Even TF2 didn’t officially list the drop chance of unusuals when they started going on the market.
Also it would crash the exotics market while at the same time preventing people from ascending to 400 weapon/artificer to roll for legendaries.
You realize that you can buy all the pauldrons or a couple of the weapon skins with 10 gold, right?
After halloween gems will drop in price, so you can wait until then
Not all casuals , working folk , etc agree with the gimme now gimme all crowd.
Posted by: kaffaljidhma.1496
This event will see a lot of redistribution of wealth to casuals who would rather pay for gold than farm, much to the dismay of botters.
You might not want to open normal (not personalized) trick or treat bags as they are worth a lot at the moment and don’t give much special loot.
There will be an instanced halloween mission as foretold by the blog post.
Yeah it doesn’t have this air of depression and monotony that I see in a lot of holiday events reduced to accelerated loot grinding sessions.
There are NPCs in Guild Wars 2 that tell you what to do, though. The rest is interwoven into previously established game mechanics, like the mystic forge and dynamic events.
I don’t really want a situation where the draw to buy keys is so pervasive that it becomes the definitive model of how to enjoy the game. There has to be a balance struck for people who would rather not buy keys yet want to fit in with the majority of players.
There will be mini omnombar-likes that will be super cheap for a while and actual omnomfood with a great life steal stat, and there’s also a sigil that increases night damage and a rune that increases condition damage and duration (especially bleed duration). Mostly necro stuff, appropriately.
Not all casuals , working folk , etc agree with the gimme now gimme all crowd.
Posted by: kaffaljidhma.1496
I’ve got boosters cluttering the bank. I don’t enjoy random luck based rewards when there’s such a small time limit or financial risk. I’ve had enough of that from other games.
That’s good, then. You absolutely shouldn’t try to gamble on black lion chests for these or any other item if you find you can’t live without them. Focus on what you want and sell everything else that doesn’t give you a good guarantee on that goal.
Wait until after Arenanet makes a decision on what they’re going to do about regular black lion loot before biting the bullet.
The chance of opening x number of chests and finding an item with a y chance per chest is as follows:
(1-x1) * (1-x2) * (1-x3) * … * (1-xY) = (1-x)^y = chance to NOT get the item after y consecutive tries.
So opening 100 chests with a 1% chance to get an item = (1-.01)^100 = 36.6% chance to lose all 100 tries = 63% chance to get lucky at least once.
that is the simplest equation to gauge what your odds really are if all you need is one lucky break. You can do more math to assuage yourself, but you can see how this explains some of the sob stories.
Didn’t anybody tell you to talk to the big pumpkin NPC icon right on your map?
Also, did you read the official blog post for details?
Not all casuals , working folk , etc agree with the gimme now gimme all crowd.
Posted by: kaffaljidhma.1496
I thought about buying gems for keys, but after reading threads on 2 forums and ingame testimonies I’ve decided it’s not worth it. I haven’t spent a dime on the cash shop, and will continue that trend.
If you want any booster/service and are not especially picky about it, buying keys with gems is more economical than picking the item straight, even if all the gems are from gold.
Azoetia.2183
Hinoreth.5978:
It’s a lottery that you pay real cash for, and they don’t have the odds of winning detailed anywhere so that folks can make an informed decision. Isn’t that illegal in the US?
No, because they’re not paying out real money.
If they paid cash for the gems they are.
You can’t pay gems for cash.