Guild Wars 2

If it’s anything like previous events, once the event is over the dragon coffers will stop dropping and the rich dragon coffers will be removed from the gem store, but you’ll probably still be able to get them from the TP (though as supply diminishes it’s probable that they’ll increase in price) until they’re all used, same with holo wings (you can still buy the SAB skins on the TP, for example).

The jade weapons vendor will most likely stick for a long time, though, probably at least as long as someone has the chance to get one (as in, as long as there are still unopened coffers in circulation). After all, the vendor for the christmas skins is still there, for example.

I got a jade weapon ticket last night off a holographic mob. Is there any way to check how many coffers you’ve opened?

I’ve mostly been playing like usual (1 to 3 hours a night, most nights of the week but not all) and not farming the holograms but killing any I see on the map, my achievement so far is 73/300 holographic enemies killed and I’d estimate I’ve gotten about twice as many from regular mobs, so I’d guesstimate somewhere between 150 and 200 regular coffers opened. Haven’t gotten anything else other than candy, food or fireworks, so no minis or anything like that.

Hello there..

I prefer the way they are now. The way they were before several times I was running towards one right in front of me, see it being activated and dying before I could even get a shot in, and activating one myself (usually after waiting a little to see if anyone was around) I could kill them using the guardian’s GW swirly attack even before they attacked once.

Now I can still solo them, though I have to be more careful, see which ones it spawned so I know what will they attack with and actually dodge when fighting them, even in high level areas (my guardian was soloing them in frostgorge sound last night, for example) and if someone else activated them, it gave me time to actually get there and hit them before dying.

And while they are much harder, at least my level 23 warrior in a level 25 area (NE corner of brisban wildlands) had no trouble soling them last night either. I did die once in one of the projectors before killing the 4th mob, but a quick run from a nearby waypoint and I killed it right away and looted all 4.

Personally I think they hit the sweet spot, they’re harder than regular mobs so you don’t rush in blindly, just barely easy enough to be soloable yet hard enough to encourage groups (and to give time for someone to arrive after activating), and not as frustrating as the christmas ones when you got princesses.

Since it’s just a skin you need an actual item to apply it to before you can use it.

Here’s how a regular transmutation works, you click on the stone and the transmutation window open, you place two items there (one for the stats, one for the look), then you select what you want for each one. Clicking on the first box will select the look from one item, for example, the second box selects the stats you want, third box the upgrade (rune, signet, etc), once you’ve picked one of each 3 boxes, you can hit the transmute option and you get an item with the look and stats you want.

Since these are skins, most likely will work like the SAB skins or the heritage set, you click on them then click on a compatible item (back piece in this case) and it’ll automatically select the look from the skins and stats from your existing item.

kokocabana.8153:

ANet has provided alternatives to everyone. You can farm the 100k taffies, loot the wings from coffers, buy the wings off TP, or a mix of farming and buying taffies from TP.

Or just eat the taffies and buy the wings if you have 20g or whatever is it now (it was 22 last night)..

Uther Deathhand.1570:

BaronSolace.6831:

It’s not a bug, since when have you ever seen a dragon with broken wings fly properly. it fits the item perfectly. the wings are broken and shattered to hell and back why WOULD they look even and move correctly

Umm have you ever fought the shatterer? Pretty sure he flys properly.

flies properly?… he keeps crashing and breaking those crystals anytime he shows up..

1.- You can craft exotics, but the way crafting is now it’ll be much cheaper to buy them directly off the trading post. Stats distribution varies but no exotic is more powerful than other, the price usually reflects the looks of the item, so you can gear up quickly at 80.
2.- Yellow items are for areas above 35, IIRC. You’ll always get an item of the highest quality you can get at the area level. Map completion in orr, for example, gives you exotics.
3.- You need a crafting profesion at 400 (max level) for one of the materials needed. Crafting a legendary, if you’re interested, is a very long term thing, though, because there are LOTS of materials to get and the precursor needed is very hard or expensive to get.
4.- My rule in general is white – salvage, blue and green – sell to vendor, yellow (rare) – if I’m not going to use it, check TP for how much it sales, if it sells for less than 25s or so, salvage with a good salvage kit, sell a glob of ectoplasm if I get one or more on TP as well as the signet/rune and orange (exotic) – if not going to use, check TP for how much it sells, check for how much the signet/rune sells (some are more expensive than the items), and then decide whether to sell or salvage. Usually they’re better to salvage unless it’s some specific skin, or if you’re incredibly lucky, a precursor.
5.- In-game not that I know of other than checking on map chat for guilds recruiting. You can also check this forum and http://www.gunnars-hold.eu/
6.- what kokocabana said..

Aberrant.6749:

Welp, next time be careful what you wish for. People will quickly lose interest in these and you’ll be soloing the groups. Glad I have all my stuff finished already. Quickly falling TP prices + this =‘s means I and many others won’t be farming them anymore.

But if players don’t farm them anymore, then supply will diminish, and TP prices will start to rise, which will drive people back to farming, which will increase supply, which will drive TP prices down, which will make players not farm them anymore… ok, my head hurts now..

Are they constantly flapping like the regular ones?. I was thinking of getting them for my guardian, but if they’re constantly flapping I think I’ll pass.

One phrase comes to mind here.. “Careful what you wish for…”..

Doubt it’ll happen, unless it’s added as a gem store item.

All MMO games I’ve played work the same than GW2, once a new rune is in a piece of armor, it’s there permanently until it’s replaced by a new one (at least GW1 and 2 give you a chance to recover it, though it destroys the armor). I guess it’s done as a gold sink, so you have to buy them anytime you get new armor.

Agree with the op.

One thing we have to understand here. We, the forum community, while we are very passionate at times and very vocal, are neither a big nor representative of the game community as a whole (I’d even go ahead and say that I bet most of the game community doesn’t even know or care there are forums). While I’m sure they do take feedback from the forums, I bet that the biggest source of feedback arenanet looks at is what are people doing in the game.

Which leads us to this thread, people in the forums are mostly against RNG boxes, myself included, but unless that outcry against them isn’t accompanied by NOT buying them in the first place it’s useless, from their point of view ends up as a “do as I say, not as I do” situation.

So what can we do, other than complain?… well just stop buying them, and after two bouts of RNG boxes (sclerite and flame and frost) the “I though I might get a ticket easier” isn’t an excuse by now, even if you bought the gems with gold (from anet POV is the same, the gems were still paid by someone, and it’s even better because a healthy exchange market encourages people to buy more gems to exchange for gold and serves as a gold sink as well), and encourage your friends and guildies not to buy them either.

And also, if you have enough disposable income of course, buy any skin introduced that you might be interested into. To get them to stop using RNG we have to show them two things, first, that using RNG boxes isn’t profitable enough, and second, that selling skins directly or other alternate methods IS profitable.

Stinson.5972:

I agree with OP, but would go one further. I think they should do away with gold to gems. Don’t grab the pitchforks.

From Anet’s perspective, if they add content into the game, they have to price it knowing that people can obtain it by running CoF a ton and converting the gold to gems. Therefore, they

1. Have to set the price of items very high to make doing that inconvenient and
2. Make much of the content temporary so that people need gold on hand to convert in gems, rather than have months to grind for the thing they want and
3. Introduce RNG into every way of obtaining items to obscure the very high price. (Besides being annoying, that’s all RNG really is – it’s a way to make someone spend $1 one hundred times and make the thing feel cheaper, rather than charge $100 outright.)

What I mean is that if Anet knew when they put items in the gemstore that people would pay CASH for those items, not grind gold and convert it to gems, they could put weapon skins in the store and expect to do well from it.

As is, however, the existence of people with huge gold stores who play the game (read, run CoF) all the time but therefore don’t need to buy gems is built into the price of every item. This is why the sclerite skins were basically only obtainable by burning piles of money at the RNG altar. That makes the prices for regular players, who wouldn’t mind buying a skin for say two or three dollars, much higher than they would otherwise be.

There should be a wall between what can be purchased with money and what can be purchased with gold. Let those two economies exist separately, and most people will be better off.

Again, that’s not how the gem exchange work. Every single gem in the exchange was paid with cash, there are no free gems, when you exchange gold for gems means that you get the gems for free, but someone else paid the cash to buy those gems and exchange them for gold. Whether you buy the gems with your own cash or gring gold and exchange for gems has no bearing on RNG or anything else because arenanet gets the money either way.

Situation A: you buy 4000 gems with 50$ – NCSoft and Arenanet get 50$.
Situation B: you grind 120 gold, buy 4000 gems – Player B had to buy 4000 gems with 50$, sell them for about 80g (there’s a tax of about 35% in gem exchange) – NCSoft and Arenanet get 40g (and actually I believe they’d prefer this way because now there are also 40g removed from the economy).

So:

From Anet’s perspective, if they add content into the game, they have to price it knowing that people can obtain it by running CoF a ton and converting the gold to gems. Therefore, they

1. Have to set the price of items very high to make doing that inconvenient and
2. Make much of the content temporary so that people need gold on hand to convert in gems, rather than have months to grind for the thing they want and

Not true, because as much as you grind gold there are no free gems, each gem was paid by some player in RL money, which is why the price fluctuates depending on gem supply and demand. Actually farming gold like crazy and buying gems won’t suddenly make more free gems appear, it’ll drive the demand up driving the price of gems up as well.

3. Introduce RNG into every way of obtaining items to obscure the very high price. (Besides being annoying, that’s all RNG really is – it’s a way to make someone spend $1 one hundred times and make the thing feel cheaper, rather than charge $100 outright.)

And this is the reason, they put skins on the store, people buy them once, they put them behind a RNG box, people buy them in the hundreds (just look at all the threads saying how much they hate them… but after opening tens or even hundreds of them).

And unfortunately it’ll be like that for as long as people keep buying them. It’s a case of “do what I say, not what I do”.. these forums are a valid source of feedback for them, but I’d honestly say considering that the forum community, while is very vocal, is neither a majority nor representative of the community as a whole, the main feedback source is what people are doing in game, and if they see that people are buying them in droves, they can only conclude that the community (or at least part of it) does like and want more RNG boxes.

This is my strategy so far about moa racing..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=NHWjlCaIrQo#t=213s

(also applies to RNG boxes bought with gems, at least for me, as much as I don’t like them I respect whoever buys them aware that they might not get anything)

Zacchary.6183:

1. Get rid of Gem <—> Gold.
2. Make everything on Gem Store reasonably priced.
3. Add more convenience items.

Problem solved.

Why would they do that?… I’d be willing to bet that one of the big reasons people buy gems is to convert to gold. Arenanet doesn’t care whether you get your gems with a credit card or with gold, each and every gem sold in exchange is sold and paid in RL by players, whether you get your gems with credit card or gold, those gems at one point were paid with RL, Anet gets their money either way.

You’re welcome..

(first rule of betting, never bet more than you’re willing to lose in the first place)..

Arcanis.2437:

munkiman.3068:

How about just letting us buy the skins for gems? What good would having yet another currency do but maybe add more confusion? Just get rid of them or let us buy em outright.

The problem is:

If they put the skins for Normal Gems, people will just convert gold and buy them, instead of gambling on RNG.

This would make ArenaNet lose way to much money.

If you put them for Red Gems people would be forced to buy them for Cash.
They would still be able to buy the skins from Gold or Normal Gems, but would be 2x more expensive.

Like 4000 normal gems, 2000 Red gems.

This makes ArenaNet more profitable, while making us more happy.

You can still always play on RNG.

It doesn’t make them more profitable because Arenanet doesn’t care about whether you buy your gems with money or gold, they just want gems sold.

Arenanet does not supply gems for the exchange, each and every gem sold trough there means that someone purchased the gems with real money and exchanged it for gold on the exchange. Arenanet doesn’t care whether the gems you bought the gems you’re using with gold or real money, either way someone at one point paid real money for them. There are no gems in circulation in the game that weren’t paid with real money in the first place.

Which is why the price fluctuates, because it depends on how many gems are being offered for sale at any given time Vs. how many are being bought.

Step 1 – report (take screenshot just in case)
Step 2 – block both his and his friend’s account (so they can’t contact you)
Step 3 – write it off as a bad pug and find another group or something else to do.

Being rude to other players and cursing at them are suspension worthy, and so is kicking at last boss on dungeons before getting the rewards. First warning is a 3 days suspension to get him to cool down, with permanent ban for repeated warnings.

They do exist in Diessa Plateau, but so far the only areas I’ve been for a while without finding one are orr and southsun (but still several areas I haven’t visited since the patch). Other than fireheart and forstgorge I’ve also seen them in Diessa and sparkfly fen.

FinalPatriot.8034:

That’s the problem. I played the free trial of GW1 and never continued after that. Is there no way for GW2 only player to get those points necessary?

Nope.. the only way to get them is to own GW1

Or whisper them to yourself, use /w your name codes. That’s what I usually do.

Yes, you can still get the heritage armor set, and particularly the coat is very easy.

If you have GW1 you get 3 points for linking your GW1 and GW2 accounts (not sure if you need the eye of the north expansion for those 3 points, though, you need it for other points since that’s where you dedicate things in your hall of monuments), 3 points is enough for the shoes, legs and chest armor.

If you already did that and want to check if you got your 3 points, either go here: http://hom.guildwars2.com/en/#page=welcome (you’ll need to input the name of any of your GW1 characters) or if you didn’t get it in the first place, go to an NPC in the pirate market underground area of LA that “sells” the HoM stone for free and go there to see if you have anything available to you (you have to go to the pool area and talk to the NPC there).

They spawn on high level areas as well (well, maybe except orr, haven’t seen one yet) and their HP is adjustes there, so they take more than a 100b or swirly to die, even with more than one person there.

Hope not this year, I already spent my internet allowance on a new cell phone (I can’t legally spend more than $400 a year online because of some venezuelan laws), plus I still have a lot yet to do in the game.

Blue or red gems wouldn’t really make a difference for Anet. They really don’t care whether you buy gems with gold or with real money, if you buy gems with real money, they get their money from the gems, if you buy the gems with gold, well, someone must have bought the gems in the first place to sell them for gold, so they got their money as well, from their point of view both is the same, so don’t really see what they would win by complicating the system like that.

I won’t spend money on RNG either (or even gold bought gems), but it’s not ArenaNet that needs to open their eyes, it’s us (as in, the game population as a whole). They have offered weapon skins for sale before (christmas, flame and frost) and for much lower prices, the fact that they’ve done RNG boxes for the last three events makes me think that they’re selling MUCH more than the skins did. If people really put their wallet where their mouth is (at least where it seems to be according to forums, that isn’t a majority nor representative of the community as a whole), and stopped buying the RNG boxes, and bought the skins offered for direct sale, I bet we’d see more direct sales and less RNG boxes in the future.

And yes, I’m sure you’d spend $200 on all the skins, but I doubt most people would (I wouldn’t, but for other reasons that aren’t relevant)… and makes more business sense to have, instead of a product where 3 people will spend $200, one where you have 10 people spend $50 each (the equivalent cost of 50 rich coffers in this case).

Getting tickets from laurels would lead to a whole lot of more complains because of the temporary nature of the events (if the tickets sellers were to become permanent, I’d agree to it).

For an alternate system to be added it still needs to be somewhat profitable for anet (and ncsoft) so the rich coffers (AKA the gem store ones) still need to be attractive to purchase. The way I’d do it is to make the rich coffers to drop vouchers if they don’t contain a ticket, and if the ticket chance is 1:50, for example, place a vendor that sells the tickets for 50 vouchers.

To keep the coffers attractive to purchase, either keep them as they are, or lower their voucher drop rate to like 10% or so.

CapN Biku.6024:

Nope, still wont work, transmuted items automatically become soulbound. Or at least I remember hearing about that, think it was a recent update

You could try though, I might be wrong

The trick in general is that you have to transmute first to a white item (whites don’t get soulbound, unless they fixed it in this last patch), then use your other char to transmute that item.

Gabby.3205:

Wait, how did you get it already?

Seems lots of people got them already because of a glitch, you’re not supposed to get it until the weekend

No idea so far, we don’t even know whether it’ll be an actual item that you’d need the transmutation crystals (like the back items of the southsun event) or an actual skin like the regular holographic dragon wings that you need to apply to an item (like the SAB weapon skins or the heritage ones).

Some people claim to have opened 75 rich coffers and got two tickets, other say that opened about 200 and no ticket, so really it’s all speculation at this point, I know of 3 people in guild that bought 25, 1 got a ticket, the other two didn’t.

As for the regular ones, there’s some drop rate research here:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dragon_Coffer/drop_rate

According to it the weapon skin ticket drop rate from them is about 0.02%

Personally I like the grid lines, but I hate the fact that the wings are constantly flapping. I’d rather them be still and maybe flap only when you jump or from time to time.

A quick comment here.

When these skins hit the gem store, if you like them and have the means, please buy them, for as many characters as you could use them.

Everyone talks about offering skins directly for X gems being better than hiding them behind RNG boxes…. well, for that to happen, we must show Anet, and above all, NCSoft that that is true, and for them to see that two things must happen… first, people should stop buying as many rich dragon coffers (the regular ones are ok since they’re not getting money directly from those) and skins offered as direct sale must be a huge success to show them we prefer getting them that way.

It’ll probably even last past the ending of the dragon bash. After all, you can still today redeem christmas weapon skins and fused weapon tickets.

I’ll wait and see the male versions, but first impression is that I’d wish the gear shoulderpads were medium, just so that engineers could use them.

Temporarely fixed, mango pies were disabled until they do a more permanent fix.

You were supposed to get them on the weekend, I guess some people got them already as a glitch.

It’s just an emergency measure until the minigame is sorted out. Health regen food got disables across the board until they make a fix to the minigame to prevent their use, I’d expect them to be back soon.

Short answer, no.

Long answer, it’s not server power that makes them use culling, it’s bandwith. If you have 100 players around the server not only needs to keep track of them (which it already does, culling or not), but also communicate to your client everything about each of those players (race, looks, gear, what are they doing and so on). Since bandwith is limited, specially on the last stretch (your home connection), the server reduces its usage by guessing which players are the most relevant to you (the nearest ones, for example, who is attacking the same target, who is in party, and so on) and sending only the information about them at any given time, which is why you tend to see people close to you, and they dissapear and appear as you move.

Cloud computing might give them more server power, but would do nothing about the available bandwith.

Sorry, but that’s exactly the reason why they continue this RNG madness.

They might be just pixels, but each of those skins has a tangible cost associated to it. An artist spent paid company time creating them that didn’t use on other projects, the executives spent paid time reviewing and aproving/requesting changes, testers spent paid time trying them and so on. If people just stopped buying the RNG boxes so they wouldn’t make that cost back, they’d just stop using them in the first place.

For example, they’ve sold skins directly in the past, I remember braham’s mace and shield and rox’s quiver and bow getting excellent reviews and praises about their design… but I’m yet to see anyone wearing one in game, and I know two people in my guild that bought them (at 600 gems each)… yet just logging today for a few mins at noon there were at least 3 people talking about how they had bought at least 25 crates each (2000 gems each) less than a couple hours since they went live, and if you check the forums it’s full of people buying tons of them, and sorry to say, but you’re a perfect example… you got burned with 100 BL chests, 50 southsun chests, and you go ahead and buy 500 crates on the first day of the new event… that’s why they keep doing them.

Heck, from their point of view, if I had a store, and selling items directly sold good enough, but selling them in random mystery boxes resulted in some people protesting outside my store but the lines to buy them to go around the corner and they sell faster than I can stock them… well… I wouldn’t think much about what to do either.

You need to do 10 out of 14 events. It’s not doable right now because there aren’t enough events active as it is, later on more events will become active (kinda like what happened in southsun) and will be achievable.

There’s a small guide about it on dulfy already.

There’s a thread about it already, in the spanish translation she’s called “Polly”.

Morrigan.2809:

Arisal.9740:

Its sad that they keep doing this. Easily one of the largest oversights in the gem store. They need to just allow you to buy tickets for gems. THE END of RNG please!!!

So many people would actually spend money for this over not spending ANY money.
Its a no-brainer and I can’t believe they have not picked up on this yet.

Yes I would easily have bought several of the skins with real money , I love them, unlike the F& F and Sclerite skins.

People have different tastes, let them buy what they like!

I cannot believe Anet makes more money selling RNG than selling actual skins.
This blows my mind

Well, I know the plural of anecdote isn’t statistics, but for what it’s worth I’m in a very large guild and I know of one person that bought a skin off the TP (Braham’s shield, 600 gems worth)… while just logging at noon for a few mins there were 3 people on guild chat that bought 25 rich coffers each (6000 gems worth total), one of them got a ticket and planned to buy more later if he didn’t have luck with the regular ones, the other two didn’t get a ticket, one said he wasn’t going to buy more, the other one was planning on buying some more later to get a ticket, so from my very limited point of view, I’d say RNG sells a LOT more than just selling skins.

And note that this is after people already had experience with the flame and frost weapons and the southsun crates, so there’s really no excuse of “I didn’t knew I could get the boxes and not get a ticket” by now.

Hechicera.9816:

And before the Pajero there was the Chevy Nova.

That’s an urban legent, the Chevy Nova was sold under the original name in latinamerican countries. Source: my father owned one. The word Nova is more likely to be associated in spanish with “New” (Nuevo) or with a Nova star than the “No Va” the urban legend claims.

It’s just how things are. Lots of people were complaining about the dusts being too hard to get, so they fixed it (or attempted to fix it, we’ll see how it goes in the longer term). Just like in RL if you buy something and it turns out to go on a sale the next day, or in the stock market if you purchase lots of stock in a company and the next day there’s a big scandal driving the share price down.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I’m told in Spanish, the doll has been re-named to Polly, our LOC team as usual was one step ahead. Me encanta localization!

Aaaaw… but think of the jokes, man!!! We lost some good jokes there!!!..

Delete him!!!!..

(meant to be read in Mortal Kombat’s “finish him” voice)..

Another example, Miyazaki’s movie “Laputa: Castle in the Sky” was changed in some spanish dubbings as “Lapuntu”, because Laputa sounds just like La puta, that in spanish means the… eeer… woman that charges for some intimate services (so it doesn’t get kittened)..

I bet there will be many jokes on that… unfortunately sometimes it’s hard to find names that don’t mean something or other in all languages.. 8^)

Polla, for those that don’t know, in spanish literally means female chick, it’s used as slang in Spain for kitten, in other countries have different meanings, though. In Mexico it’s an alcoholic drink, in Ecuador polla is a cheat sheet using in exams, in other countries it’s used to refer to young girls. It’s most likely pronounced as “Pola”, that is a name in spanish.

That wouldn’t be the first time things like that happens… The Mitsubishi Pajero, for example, was changed to Montero for spanish speaking countries, since in several countries the word “Pajero” literally means “kitten” (that will probably end up as kitten, though).

Aeonblade.8709:

Astral Projections.7320:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

The Rich Dragon Coffer is now available in the Consumable category of the Gem Store for 100 gems each, or 5 for 400 gems and 25 for 2,000 gems. This special festival box always contains Dragon Bash candy and also has a chance to contain fireworks, a Mini Holographic Risen Knight, and rarely a Dragon’s Jade Weapon Skin Ticket. Rich Dragon Coffers contain all the same items as the Dragon Coffers* *that drop commonly from Dragon Bash enemies, but have better chances at rare items.

sigh I foresee more threads from people who opened a bunch of coffers and didn’t get a ticket. It’s never ending.

It wouldn’t be never ending if they fixed the problem. Just saying.

What problem?.. they get more money, people buy them by the 100’s showing them that there is an audience that loves these kind of things… it’s not a problem from their point of view…

Of course, it is a problem for us that hate the RNG system for that, I was looking forward to get some of those weapons (had already bought some gems with gold just in case price goes up with this), but I’ll wait until the inevitable “bought 100 (or other large number) boxes, here are the contents” posts here and on reddit to see what the actual chances are.

At least I’ll get the dragon helmet, and I’ll try for the shattered wings as well..