Guild Wars 2

AcidicVision.5498:

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

It’s a ridiculous amount of money, but can the same end result not be achieved with the other recipe listed in the first post? The only difference is getting the snowflake back 80% of the time versus running out of crafting materials faster with the shoulder armor. With the shoulders you’re still getting back more money (in ecto) than you are putting in, so you can just buy more materials and keep going. The snowflake ring is just more efficient at it. Is doing the exact same thing faster an exploit?

When I was leveling jeweler on my thief, and even after this while making/salvaging gear for leveling characters, I freqently re-used the gem/upgrade items. I had an 80% chance to retrieve them, so I got them back quite often.

The ONLY difference between what I did, and the snowflake recipe is the amount of ecto put in vs the amount to possibly get back. The mechanics are exactly the same, so why on earth is this considered an exploit while the other is not? The other example given by the OP doesn’t even take ecto at all, but produces ecto.

If you want to ban people for “damaging the economy”, you might as well start banning every player that buys and resells items for profit. Especially the ones buying up the whole supply of high-end items (like precursors) and re-listing them at higher prices.

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I’ve had this before, but it seemed to stop (mostly) after a previous update (in November, I think). I still see a difference in the cave, but was a massive drop before. Went from 70+ FPS outside to under 20fps inside. And it wasn’t always that way, I had completed that map on several characters between August and November, and did not have this issue till sometime in Oct/Nov.

If you’re in combat you can’t view a vista. Even if the enemy is no longer attacking you, you can still be close enough to keep yourself in combat, this will last till you move farther away or the enemy dies. Seems more likely to happen in event areas, I’ve had to move totally outside of the marked area on a few.

SteepledHat.1345:

The quote someone above found…
“Legendary Weapons are the end result of an epic adventure in Guild Wars 2. You’ll travel all over, collecting items and amassing materials to build your Legendary Weapon.”

That’s what I remember being sold on. Not this. That’s why I’m upset.

I don’t recall seeing that one (other than the above post here), but that’s definitely the idea I got from pre-release info. That is true for the gift of mastery, which might be enough to claim that statement still holds truth if the end products weren’t tradable.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Honestly, it seems to be a slap in the face to only those who can’t afford to buy or craft it in a short time frame.

It’s a slap in the face of the concept/idea of immersion, which has nothing to do with jealousy or the inability to craft/buy something in the game. It’s the most immersion-shattering to the person that is buying it with cash/RMT gold, although these players are likely less concerned with immersion.

Honestly, I thought/said from day one that it would be a long while before I got any legendary weapons. This was before I even had any idea they were tradable, and knowing very well that people were going to rush from day one to craft one as soon as possible. I could have done this myself, I could have bought and sold piles of gems to assist in this goal. I decided against breaking immersion and achieving instant gratification on a supposed long-term goal. I saw no point in wasting a large amount of real money on getting everything I wanted in the game, which in the end would done nothing but remove future goals and leave myself with less incentive to play. Granted I would still be playing (I played GW1 long after I had everything I wanted), but I find it better when there is something to work toward.

So, no. It’s not all about jealousy. I’m not really sure why you feel the need to keep insisting on this idea, but it’s getting a bit old. You need to accept the fact that some of us care more about the game itself, than whatever shiny thing the other guy has. You’ll probably be a lot happier when you stop worrying about having something to make others jealous, because we really don’t care that you have it.

Narkosys.5173:

Sorry I went to university and make a lot of money but that still doesnt entitle me to purchase the most prestigious weapon in the game. And the fact is what did they do to deserve it? Nothing they spent Real Money on it. Big deal I could do that at any time.

A major part of the appeal of video games is their ability to pull you into their worlds and stories. The most in-depth/involving games are designed to be an escape from reality. Tethering them back to the real world with in-game currency you can buy with cash is completely counter-productive to this. It’s a total slap in the face to the entire concept of immersion in games.

SteepledHat.1345:

Clearly I’m the only person with this view. Or perhaps, everyone that agrees with me is just tired of arguing with market players. I think I’ll take a queue from those people.

I think there’s room in the game for epic shinies that you have to earn and epic shinies that you can just buy if you want to. There will always be someone unhappy when the item they want requires the method they don’t like. People playing the market will be much more likely to want everything tradable, because they are doing the most effective thing to earn money. People not playing the powertrading game are somewhat cut off from the high-end market, but might be more likely to do a long adventur/scavenger hunt to acquire a weapon. They might eventually build up money, but it’s an uphill battle against inflation/rising prices.

The problem is that right now the only gear we do have that is earn-only is dungeon gear, which is still fairly easy to get. Even crafting a legendary is most efficient by buying ingredients like a precursor instead of gambling to get your own. This leaves the scavenger hunt crowd partially at the mercy of the powertrading crowd, so maybe we could use something to show a little love to that side? I know legendaries were supposed to take “all/many aspects of the game” to craft, but that trading section of the game might have too much power over the process.

I agree with pretty much all the OP’s suggestions. There are a couple that I don’t feel strongly either way on, but still agree with. I don’t really care about magic find, but I do think it was a bad idea to have that as a stat. I would probably support it’s removal more if I actually played with pug/random groups. The same applies to party search options. It would be a nice addition, but I would likely never use it.

I actually came across this thread by searching for opinions on the town clothes/costumes. I definitely think we need something like GW1’s costume-maker. If Anet expects us to buy more copies of a custome for alt characters (a ridiculous tactic of some free-to-plays), then a storage option (similar to the pvp locker) would be a decent solution. Currently, they just take up too much space. I bought every costume GW1 had, but in GW2 I have to decide whether I like it enough to sacrifice 5-6 storage slots to have it. The wintersday costume didn’t make that cut, so I didn’t buy it. If I had storage space or an NPC to retrieve it from later, I would have bought it the day it was added.

I like to keep enough gold to be able to outfit a char when they hit 80, or to get a new set of armor/runes/jewelry of a different stat if I want to try a different build. Constantly leveling up alts has kept my cash and materials supply kinda low, though. Both can start building up after I get the remaining professions to 80.

I figure that once I have a decent amount of the materials for all the legendary gifts, I can buy whatever is left, along with a precursor.

Yeah, it’s still quite a goal to craft, especially if you avoid buying as much as possible. When I get around to crafting Sunrise or Twilight, I have no plans of doing anything other than equipping it on my guardian (Sunrise) or mesmer (Twilight). The only items I want that come close to that value are those two swords…which I will already have one of. So selling it would be dumb.

My theory with gold is that if I have more gold that it would take to buy the gear/items I want, I’ve wasted my time in making that amount…after I have the stuff, a pile money is pointless. I guess anything we do in the game is making money, but I’m not going to focus on money-making unless I have something to spend it on.

Ohoni.6057:

One thing I do believe is that the achievement tied to Legendaries should be based on the crafting, not the equipping. If you CRAFT a Legendary, you should get the shiny icon on the front page and the little achievement in your hero panel. If you buy a Twilight, you can run around with a glowy skybox sword and look cool, but you should not get the internal achievements for it.

I like that idea. Putting a difference between crafting and buying would be great. It could even be two seperate achievements, which would be encouragement to keep the weapon versus selling it.

Either way, you shouldn’t just your own sense of worth over it by what others think about you, that’s just unhealthy.

It’s hard for anyone without some issues to disagree with that. Having a sense of accomplishment, even over something in a game, is fine. But if the only thing you care about is what that accomplishment makes others think about you, it might be time to step away from the game and back into the real world.

edit: (some afterthoughts)
In my experience with some aquaintances (not people I would consider friends) in other games (a lot in GW1), the people holding the highest merit to rare items were the ones that were buying gold or using exploitative farming methods. Some were people I knew for a long time that outright told me they bought gold, some were friends of friends that passed that info my way. The one thing they all had in common, was they always tried to show off what they had bought and attempt to insult others because they weren’t ‘rich enough’ to have it. It was really pathetic and very annoying. I’d say this has definitely influenced my opinion on earning versus buying legendaries, just because it keeps idiots like that out of their imaginary ‘leet status’. Not that their opinion is worth anything to me, but anything that works to prevent them from acting that way is good. The ones I had the displeasure of meeting were not the type to actually work towards crafting a legendary weapon, so if they couldn’t just buy one with with a Visa or exploit/bot for gold, they would just leave.

Ohoni.6057:

Why? Why does it matter? Why would having items that can only be acquired through effort lead to more people playing the game for longer? For the person who would buy a Legendary, would they have likely played long enough to craft it themselves otherwise? And if so, then why wouldn’t they play equally as long without a legendary being in the distance? For a player that crafts their own legendary, are they less likely to do so knowing that it’s available for an obscene amount of gold instead? If so, why are they playing a game when they only seem to care about status? If they are more concerned about status than having fun then playing a game is a complete waste of their time. Such people would be far better served getting a real job and earning real status that people will recognize off the server. If you’re going to play a game, play.

I like having something that is goal/accomplishment oriented rather than just doing (grinding) whatever activity piles up gold fastest. Even the process of crafting a legendary is far from this. It’s far easier/faster to buy T6 fine mats and precursors than it is to try and acquire them on your own. But, in my opinion, it’s a dull and much less interesting process than this ‘scavenger hunt’ style of legendary crafting we’ve been told about.

[qoute]But I got all that stuff over a month ago, and I’m still playing, even though I’m not making any significant progress towards a Legendary, nor towards Fractal rewards at the moment. I would suggest getting an alt, they are a lot of fun.[/quote]

I’m in about the same spot as you. I have a couple characters in full exotic gear, and another in partial (although some is the level 78 map-reward armor). I’m slowly acquiring things I’ll need later to craft one of the legendary greatswords (I can’t even decide which I want). Most of my time has been spent on alts, since I’m usually an alt-a-holic. I would suggest that anyone with the time try out any other professions you have a slight interest in, at least to level 30.

Ohoni.6057:

I’d like to see WvW and PvE separated further in future updates. I don’t think players should have to be accomplished in both to gain ultimate-tier rewards. And note that when I say that I mean it both ways, I think these rewards should be available entirely through WvW if that’s the playstyle you enjoy, but I think that even the fairly limited WvW requirements of current Legendary recipes are more than there should be.

I wouldn’t mind more separation between pve and wvw either. Not sure if it’s possible with the game mechanics, but would be nice to have the spvp skills/gear system applies to wvw while still allowing you to gain experience toward pve level. What I really don’t like with the current setup is wvw counting for exploration. My server has been green for weeks, but thankfully I had most of the other team color areas done before this started. My guild was initially on Henge of Denravi, and after Titan Alliance bailed, getting exploration done was simply impossible as HoD did not even own its own borderlands. Jumping puzzles are another area that could use some work. I don’t think they should reward badges, which are normally limited to combat rewards. It’s also a bit irritating to have people asking for portals or backup to clear campers when we are undermanned at a keep/tower being defended.

Really though I just reject this whole idea of gear “saying something” about the player. The only thing gear should “say” about a player is what their style sense is, can they coordinate a good outfit using the tools available. There should not be “hood ornaments” that a player can just slap on and say “Look at the package I’m swinging here!,” because the whole idea of doing that in a game is just ridiculous. Legendary weapons are just really cool weapons. They look really cool, and they should take some work to get, but there should be no indication, implied or otherwise, that the holder of those weapons is in any way superior to those around him. There’s no point to that sort of attitude.

Anet should have went route from the start, if they intended on them being available on the TP. They created the idea of legendaries meaning something more than just a weapon you buy with gold, and of them being the ‘ultimate prestige" items in the game. I don’t think any of us would be here discussing this right now if they had just presented them as “rare weapons that look really cool”. As much as I like the idea of something you can’t just buy, I would have no problem with everything being tradable if Anet hadn’t put up this idea that (at least some of) GW2’s prestige items were not buyable.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

It’s the jealousy that someone can afford the good stuff.

But as I said before, Anet limits the amount of Gems a single person can purchase. So at the moment, there’s no possible way for someone to buy enough Gems to convert to the high amount of Gold to purchase a Legendary on the TP. The only people who can afford the current prices are the hardcore day traders.

Or the people buying gold for a lot less from illegitimate sources. There are a lot of people that will take whatever route they can to get an item to show off in a game. Usually the type that stands around acting like having it makes them better than everyone, and accusing them all of being jealous of it.

To me, jealousy has nothing to do with any of this, except for these people that need to think that others are jealous of them. If someone is actually jealous of a legendary weapon, they would feel that way whether or not they were on the TP, so that is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Trying to accuse everyone of being jealous is immature and ingorant of the actual points of this issue that have been clearly laid out. I could just as easily accuse you of wanting legendaries on the TP so you could buy everything without actually playing the game.

Legendary weapons were supposed to be weapons that say something about the wielder, that they put out a lot of effort in many aspects of the game to get it. There are two key points where legendaries are currently failing at this.

1) They can be bought, which says nothing more than mastery of gold farming, power trading, or use of a credit card.

2) The process to craft them is far from the game-wide scavenger hunt that was previously described. Right now, even without the end product on the TP, some of the crafting requirements (precursor and T6 mat) can just be bought. Hopefully upcoming changes will rework a lot of the crafting requirements and make a shift toward this.

I would love to see legendary weapons take nothing but account bound items to craft, require things from every aspect of the game (except for maybe sPvP, since it is treated as a whole other game already), and are bound themselves when crafted. I like this mainly because that was the originally announced intent for these weapons. It also keeps the gem (and 3rd party) gold market out of the legendary process completely, which is still going along with the original concept that “you can’t just buy a legendary”.

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah, but I don’t think those items actually exist, they just got glitched onto the TP listings. If Legendaries are not Account/Soulbound (and they are not) then there’s no reason you can’t list them. Anything you can’t list is typically account-bound.

Quite a few of the cooking ingredients were items that account bound when harvested or bought from karma vendors. Despite the fact that you could still right click them, have a “buy more”, and even create listings, they were never actually tradable. Right before legendary weapons took the top value list on the TP, it was full of ridiculous 600g+ offers for things like lemons and bananas. This appears to have been corrected now, as the context menu option is gone, and I can find no listings on the TP for them.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Now on to the “Gem to Gold” argument. Do realize that Anet has a limit on how many Gems one player can purchase? There’s a built in limit to reduce the damage a single person can inflict by doing creditcard fraud/chargebacks. So if you want to buy 300,000 Gems to convert to 3,000 raw Gold, you can’t do it all at the same time. It would probably take you months to purchase that many Gems, which you could argue is a Legendary feat itself. You’d be better off just playing the game, and making your own Legendary weapon.

Out of curiosity, have they stated what the limit is? I know I heard about one person buying 100,000 gems in the name of researching legendary recipes, but I believe at least some of the gems were purchased during beta, and I have no idea what timeframe (if any) the purchase(s) was spread throughout.

The more damaging aspect to the economy would be the illegitimate gold selling market. We know it’s there, and we know it offers a lot better dollar-to-gold ratio. They are already effecting the crafting end of the legendary market by botting materials and pushing Anet to make changes to the loot/drop rates to combat them. Of course, this will happen whether or not legendaries can be bought gold, but having what Anet designed to be the most sought after items in the game available for gold gives more incentive to buy this “cheap gold”. This will likely end in an account termination (and the total loss of a legendary weapon that a legit buyer could have purchased), but people still do it.

It’s been quite obvious that this is happening for a while now. And it’s not just precursors, there is quite a bit of it in minipets as well. A guildmate noticed a few weeks ago that some corrupted weapon prices had mysteriously shot up by over 20g, while the cost of the lodestones/precursor weapons had not changed. I believe prices have restabilizd since, but we assumed some market manipulation was invovled in the price jump.

The market setup in GW2 just makes it way too easy for a single person to control 100% of the supply of a rare item. With a few clicks, every available item is now yours. And any new listings put up are most likely going to match your price or undercut it by a tiny amount in order to be listed first.

Ohoni.6057:

Look, I get it, you’d really like for Legendaries to not be purchasable, so you’re scrambling for any sort of flimsy logical justification as to why they shouldn’t be (beyond just your personal preference on the matter), but you should really just come to accept that they can be bought and sold if the players choose to do so.

I would hardly consider statements made by the developers, and the fact that other ingame items acquired by using bound items are themselves bound, as “flimsy logic”. There have been so many items listed on the TP that should not be there. From karma-only cooking ingredients, to items that don’t even exist ingame, but were left in the TP database. To my knowledge we have no official word on whether legendaries being tradable is intentional or not, but the only info/evidence/examples we do have point to them not being sellable.

In thinking about this whole situation…why can’t I sell dungeon gear, or cultural gear? I did the difficult part to get it, so by the same logic that legendaries are tradable, these weapons should be tradable.

Why not indeed? Now that’s a much better argument, you should run with that one instead, you’ll find a lot more support for it.

Rhetorical question…I was actually thinking the exact opposite. And I’m not interested in going with whatever side has a few more people supporting it, I’m sticking with what makes sense and with what we were previously told by developers.

I do have one question, though. Were they always able to be listed on the TP? We suddenly have buy orders popping up, but I’m fairly sure no one had bothered to place one till very recently. I would expect that there be at least a few ridiculously low buy orders listed since shortly after release. Perhaps I recall this incorrectly, but did searches for legendary weapons (by name) not return 0 results previously? This should at least give a listing of the item with 0 avaiable, right?

Edit:
I had missed the other similar thread in this forum (blame finding this one in an unrelated search) where there was an Anet response describing these as legitimate sales. But this information from the support liason still goes against previous information from game designers. The reaction of such a number of players to these items suddenly appearing for sale is an indication that we were given the impression that this was not supposed to happen. Other than owning one yourself, closely reading the tool-tip text of a linked weapon, or digging for data on a very incomplete wiki, what we were told months ago is the best source of info (or at least should be, if it was actually true) on the topic.

Ohoni.6057:

And again, why not? They’ve made the weapon difficult to CRAFT, that’s the goal and the current model achieves it. Making the components tradable would make the weapon easier to craft and would result in more Legendary weapons entering the game world, making them far more common, and therefore far cheaper. That you can sell them on the TP implies that they don’t have any problem with that, if you want to acquire yours through the expense of ludicrous amounts of gold rather than ludicrous amounts of varied tasks, then why not? It’s like complaining that they allow people to sell Oric crafted gear on the TP, rather than forcing them to level their own crafting skills up to 400, buying the karma recipes, and making them themselves.

It’s nothing like selling crafted gear, because crafted gear doesn’t take any bound items to make, other than the insignia recipes that are extremely cheap. Doing 2-3 dynamic events get you enough karma to buy one. Getting a crafting profession to 400 is also rather easy. In contrast, legendary weapons take many account bound items to craft, including several that are only acquired by completing specific tasks in the game. If ori, T6 fines, and other materials required to craft exotic gear were bound on acquire, then I would say those items should not be tradable either.

Even if the gift items to craft a legendary were tradable, it still takes the same amount of materials to craft the weapon. The easier to make gifts will be higher in supply from players trying to turn a faster profit on them, but the more difficult to obtain ones will still be lacking in supply. And if this does increase supply and lower the cost of a legendary, so what? They can already be bought for gold, which you can get by doing nothing more than spending hours standing at the Trade Post NPC.

I’m not saying these things should happen, I think it’s a terrible idea. Exotic gear is supposed to be accessible to everyone via multiple channels, and legendaries are supposed to require a “large concerted effort” to acquire. But as is, the accomplishment associated with legendary weapons is already gone, so why not?

edit:
In thinking about this whole situation…why can’t I sell dungeon gear, or cultural gear? I did the difficult part to get it, so by the same logic that legendaries are tradable, these weapons should be tradable. But they aren’t, because they were designed to be earned via ingame accomplishments, not bought. The same was supposed to be true for legendaries, but for whatever reason (I’m assuming this is a bug until officially stated otherwise) they ended up being tradable anyway.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Legendary Weapons are only bound AFTER you equip them. So if you decide to make one, and then later decide to sell it or give it away, that’s the player’s choice. If you equip it, it’s yours forever.

People are getting so mad that you can buy a Legendary weapon, making it seem as though it’s that easy. Tell me, how many Legendaries have you purchased? You must have many since they’ve become widely available.

I’m aware of this, and this is what I’m saying is the oversight. Given the nature of the crafting requirements, and statements made by Anet concerning Legendary weapons, it makes sense that they should be bound on acquire.

And they are, in fact, easy to obtain if you sell gems for gold. Earning the gold to buy one is an accomplishment itself, although I would consider grinding/trading your way to a pile of gold as less of one than the process of actually crafting a legendary weapon. However, using your credit card to get the gold just nullifies any accomplishment at all.

If you must know, I don’t have a legendary weapon yet. I will craft one at some point (my guess would be well before the end of the coming year), but current offerings don’t appeal to me enough to focus on rushing to get one.

And please feel free to stop accusing everyone that doesn’t agree with you of being mad/angry/etc. I would rather see this continue as a civil discussion instead of degrading into a troll war that gets closed. Inflammatory statements, such as your final one, are only conductive to the latter.

Ohoni.6057:

The current system ensures that a single player needs to be able to do ALL of those things. It just in no way requires that this particular single player is the one who owns the resulting weapon in the end.

But doesn’t this defeat the purpose of this weapon being hard to get, instead of just being expensive? If the final product can simply be bought, why can’t the components? You do have a point, but the end result is the same either way…a legendary weapon you can acquire with nothing but gold.

I can think of a few other instances in GW2 where people combining bound/karma-purchased items in the Mystic Forge has resulted in bans. I do have to say that I do not support these bans, but the fact is that they happened. That sets a clear picture of Anet’s views on using the MF to convert bound items into profit. Everything about this just looks like a massive oversight, not how it was intended to work.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

mrstealth.6701:

Kacigarka.5176:

AREANET NEVER stated that Legendary weapons cant be bought on TP or Traded. Players are just making up stuff… Awesome

Actually, they did say this. I even brought this up on the previous page of this thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Y-YBsK17j6I
Go to the 7 minute mark in this video.

Just use some basic logic here. The gifts (and some of the other items) required to craft these weapons are account bound. It doesn’t make any sense for the end product to not be at least account bound.

Sorry, you’re wrong. Eric Flannum never said Legendaries can’t be bought. Go listen to the video again. He mentioned that there were some components that can’t be bought. Nothing about the ability to sell the weapon later.

That said, if you’re so mad that we’re selling a Legendary, please don’t buy it. I think that would make you less mad at me if you just ignored the items completely. I don’t want to make enemies of people over jealously.

First off, I’m not mad or jealous over anything. So you can just stop even trying to go down that road. That will be more likely to get you labelled as a troll, than do anything to help the point you’re attempting to make.

And to quote the video I linked earlier, “Legendary weapons are basically weapons thats take…I’d guess you’d say…a really really specific large concerted effort from the user in order to get them”. He doesn’t say to craft them, he says to get them. While one could argue that acquiring a large amount of gold is a “large effort”, it’s not that would would be “concerted”, nor “specific”. You can attempt to start arguments over semantics, but anyone able to think logically should be able to see that a weapon they went to so much trouble to make sure you had to aquire the components for yourself, was probably not intended to be tradable. If it was intended to be traded, then the entire process of getting a pile of bound materials to craft it is just absurd and completely pointless.

Kacigarka.5176:

AREANET NEVER stated that Legendary weapons cant be bought on TP or Traded. Players are just making up stuff… Awesome

Actually, they did say this. I even brought this up on the previous page of this thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Y-YBsK17j6I
Go to the 7 minute mark in this video.

Just use some basic logic here. The gifts (and some of the other items) required to craft these weapons are account bound. It doesn’t make any sense for the end product to not be at least account bound.

Calae.1738:

The fact that a Legendary can be sold for money makes it worthless in my eyes. It is no longer worthy of its status; Legendary. It’s just a rare and expensive piece of jewelry. In a game world, this piece of jewelry is totally worthless.

Instead of showing to players around you that you’re a great and powerful warrior that has surmounted great challenges; you’re just gold buyer or a item farmer.

This is how I see it. While gold buyers would still exist without the gem trading system (hard to find an MMO where 3rd party RMT doesn’t happen), a game developer condoning this, and even facilitating it, only works toward further cheapening items and accomplishments.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I’m glad you are ok with Anet allowing us to sell our items on the TP. But please don’t be mad that I decide to sell something (which took a lot of time and effort) for a profit. If you can’t afford to purchase my items, you can always try to get your own. I’m not twisting your arm to spend money on my stuff.

You’re still missing the point. One problem with the concept of legendaries being tradable is the fact that we were told pre-release that they were to be earned in-game and could not just be bought. The issue many of us in this thread have is that legendary weapons being available on the TP means that anyone can just buy it with cash, without even playing the game at all. Of course, you don’t buy it directly with cash, but cash is easily transferred into gems with a few clicks, then to gold with a few more. Someone could by a legendary weapon on their first character before they even got out of the tutorial instance, and all it takes is a credit card and a few minutes of their time.

I wouldn’t say most Orr is too hard. There are some areas in it that need some serious work because of insane respawns (5 seconds or less) and mobs that are way too close together to ever fight alone, including a few areas where attempting combat will land you in a fight with 2-3 veterans in addition to other mobs. The majority of Orr is just boring (no mob diversity) and poorly designed, but not overly difficult.

The risen do have a lot more HP than most other enemies, which does nothing but make every fight last longer, and increase the chances of respawns becoming a problem. The CC is pretty bad with a group of them, especially when you get a respawn/patrol aggro’ing from off-screen. Rather difficult (or impossible) to dodge a pull you can’t see coming. This is usually when the problems start, because this gets you pulled into more aggro.

If you do manage to aggro more than 3 of them, you’re pretty much dead unless you happen to be a warrior or guardian. And because someone always makes the comment about learning to dodge…our pathetic 2 dodges doesn’t really mean a thing versus 5 mobs. No matter how good you are at doding the big hits, you’re still going to get hit…a lot. If one of the Brutes manages to get a knockdown on you, you can expect to be on the ground for a long time when the others take this opportunity to chain KD you. If you don’t wear heavy armor or have an invulnerablity skill you can use while KDd, you’re going to die in the 8-10 seconds you’re on the ground.

If you can avoid over-aggro, which is possible in most of Orr, you can do fine solo. It’s still a lot easier to get into a no-win sitation here than in almost any other part of the game. However, being aware of your surroundings and looking at the nearby mobs before leaping into a fight can help avoid most bad situations, outside of those caused by the broken respawn rates. Fast respawns (far less than the supposed 30 sec min) are probably the cause of most of my deaths in Orr. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the same mob respawn before I’ve had a chance to loot the previous spawn.

The only risen mob that I would say is completely broken and overpowered is the infamous Veteran Risen Abomination. I’m actually appalled that someone thought putting in story quests where you have to fight two of these creatures simultaneously was a good game design idea. There are a few quests like this, and some of them do start off with having NPC help, but the abominations kill them in 1-2 hits with AoE swings that can wipe a group of 5 NPC allies in a few seconds. The only way to actually “fight” them is by constantly running away, only turning around to cast a single attack, then dodging away to regain a distance gap…followed by another 10-20 seconds of running away while your endurance/energy recharges. This isn’t a skillful way to deal with a challenging mob, it’s a dull, tedious, and broken way of dealing with a horribly designed mob/quest.

Short answer to the OP: No, you’re not the only one. I, and every friend I play with, hate the risen. Every story quest after level 25 is full of nothing but them, and we are all tired of fighting the same creatures at every step. I can complete my daily kill variety easily in any map in the game…except for Orr (Southsun, too…but there is no reason to ever go there)

Smooth Penguin.5294:

But it has no impact on your gameplay to begin with. Exotic weapons are the same stats as Legendaries at the moment. If you’re picky like me, and you want it for looks, then you chose that path to take. And for costs, you can get Exotic weapons with similar stats via Badges or Tokens for cheaper.

So if you desire to craft specific gear that uses the T6 mats, the prices for those are determined by us players and the market demand. Then it becomes a choice between Cost, Appearance, and Functionality. If you want that Infinite Light for the look, it’s your choice. If you just want something high end, you have other options.

The impact it has on exotics is the market impact on the prices of materials, which effects everyone. Sure players set the prices, but those price are based on supply/demand, which every item requiring these materials is effecting. Every legendary item crafted means stacks of theT6 mats supply are used up. These mats are the primary means of getting exotic gear, so that tier is definitely effected.

The alternative methods for getting exotic gear are simply not as viable or accessible as crafting. Dungeons require over 1500 tokens for a set of armor and a single weapon set. That’s 23-25 runs through a dungeon that require you to have a party of 4 other players. Each dungeon also has only 3 stats available, so you are limited to the few that offer the desired stat. Not to mention that with the effort required, most will limit this even further to a style they like. Invader/WvW gear has a similar requirement for badges, but only offers a single stat choice, as well as an even more tedious/lengthy process of actually earning the badges. The easiest alternative to crafting would be the karma armor available from the shrines in Orr, but the limited stat selection is a still a major limitation here.

The simplest/fastest/easiest way to get exotic gear is through crafting. It offers the widest selection of stats, and requires no special activity outside of simply playing the game. There is no focus on a certain dungeon or wvw to earn tokens. Anything you do ingame is progress toward getting armor this way. Why should high-end vanity items and real money trading be able to have an impact on these “basic max” items?

In my opinion, legendary and ascended items are seperate tiers of gear and should have seperate tiers of materials to craft them. Exotic and ascended aren’t progessions before getting a legendary, they are speedbumps in the road that are slowing down getting that weapon. T6 fine materials are too rare to have 3 tiers of gear using them. Let exotics have their materials without higher tiers effecting prices. It even works the other way, with exotics taking up materials and working to drive the cost of legendaries higher. Stop the cycle and let each tier stand on its own.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Satakal.6971:

If Arenanet is okay with selling legendaries

Calae.1738:

Arena Net sells gold.
Are you really surprised that they are selling Legendaries?

You guys fail to realize that Anet doesn’t sell Legendaries. It’s us players who do.

And to put it simply, if you don’t like the fact that we have these for sale, don’t buy them. We aren’t forcing you to do anything against your free will.

It’s not that simple. It would be if legendaries had a completely unique set of crafting materials, but they do not. They share materials with exotic and ascended gear, so even if you don’t want a legendary weapon they still impact your gameplay. A great example of this would be the tier 6 fine material price increases when ascended gear was added. This had a huge impact on the cost of crafting exotic gear, even though no changes were made to the exotic tier.

Satakal.6971:

Ask yourself why is botting wrong?

Not just for influence of the market, why is botting different (worse) from someone “manually” running in circles for 8 hours a day and farming?

What does botting have to do with legendaries? Time and fairness. As Runescape devs put it, botting disrespects the time “regular” players put in the game. And buying a legendary off the TP disrespects the time of players who have crafted it themselves. And with what it takes to make one, that’s a big deal.

If Arenanet is okay with selling legendaries they should be okay with botting.

It’s not that simple of a comparison between the two, but you have a point. It can be the same thing, if the gold was obtained using real money. Some of the first legendary weapons crafted (just weeks after release) were the products of people spending large amounts of cash (thousands of dollars) to obtain the materials required to craft. This is a prime example of what you describe, and of the damage real money trading can do to the integrity of a game and its economy.

RMT would, and still does, exist without the dev-sanctioned gem trading. There will always be a section of the community that chooses this route, and a lot of this group is likely still choosing the illegitimate RMT methods because the rate of dollars-to-gold is better. We know these sites still exist, so someone must be buying from them. The gem trading system ingame is only providing a legitimate alternative, and encouragement, for players that would not buy gold otherwise. Third party, bot and theft driven, RMT will continue to be an issue for MMOs no matter what measures devs take to compete or offer legit alternatives. I’m not suggesting to give up and let them continue their business uncontested, but dropping to their level and trying to compete directly is not going to stop them or help the state of the game economy.

GW2 maintains a balance in this only because legendary weapons are no better stat-wise than fairly easy to obtain exotics. This balance might fail depending on how the addition of ascended weapons and future level 80+ weapons are handled. The only known aspect if these coming changes is that legendary weapons will have their stats increased so they are always equal in power to the highest rarity items.

AmagicalFishy.6935:

AmagicalFishy

No, he has a problem with a person’s IRL income directly affecting their status in an in-game world. He has a problem with people having more immediate access to the aspects of a game he bought—not because of anything they did in game, but because they shelled out a bunch of cash.

I think the childish part is seeming totally oblivious to why people dislike being able to trade IRL cash for in-game progress.

This is an extension of the massive discussion on gw2guru when the gem<>gold exchange was announced. The intent of this exchange and certain gemstore items like xp/karma boosts was to enable casual players to “catch up” to players that had devoted more time, or had more free time, to play GW2. Of course, humans will be humans, and try to use this system to gain an advantage outside of this intended purpose.

The problem pointed out all those months ago was the fact that you will get players that “double dip” the system. Players that devote large amounts of time to the game, but also devote real cash in order to gain more wealth ingame. Everyone else can’t catch up to their buying power in the high-end market without doing the same. The entire high-end/super-rare market has the potential to end up solely in the hands of this “double dipping” group of players. I do understand that the high-end market by its very nature will always be controlled by the select few rich players, but the issue is whether real world money should be a factor in this.

Legendary weapons being tradable pushes this problem a long a bit farther because they aren’t just a random drop. Anyone can get a lucky random drop, and get a chunk of this wealth spread outside of the small group of rich players. But legendary weapons take a concentrated effort, and a lot other items to make. Other items that can have their own prices effected by the cost of legendary weapons. The materials used for these weapons are also used for exotic and ascended gear. Legendary weapons have enough effect on the economy by requiring these tradable items, having the end product as a profitable investment lays the foundation for further market playing/control and damage to the market of other items requiring the same materials.

If someone is offering to by Sunrise for 2500g, and I already have a large portion of the materials to make it, I can buy Dawn for 400g in order to fill this order. I don’t know the cost/profit numbers on this, but I’m sure if there is a profit to be made, someone will do it. What will this do to the demand/price of Dawn? Will the price of Sunrise rise along with its precursor, or will increased supply lower it’s price? What about the supply of exotic weapons being wasted in the Forge?

There is a near-endless stream of questions that could be asked. In the end, the entire economic situation comes down to what people choose to do. It’s not something purely scientific that we can predict, especially with a wild card like gem selling in the mix. A double-dipper could ‘spread’ their wealth by buying someone’s lucky precursor drop, but instantly regain that wealth by using their credit card. All we can really do is wait and see where this goes, but I don’t see the combination of real money trading and tradable legendaries as doing anything good for the game’s economy.

I encountered 2 non-solo-able events in Kessex Hills today while leveling an alt. Both should be solo-able by a level 80 character, but are certainly not solo-able by an appropriately leveled character.

The first was a pack bull escort event from Delanian Waypoint/Black Haven to Kessex Haven Waypoint. Just across the first bridge near the start point, 2 groups of bandits with 3 enemies each, attacks the pack bull from opposite sides. You can aggro one group and kill them, but the other 3 will kill the bull and fail the event before you are done with them. It’s possible that a necro or ele could use a combination of AoE damage and CC (particulary blinding), but it’s still race against the clock to kill 6 enemies focused on a single NPC.

The other event in Kessex is at the quaggan village Moogooloo in Viathan Lake to clear the area of krait slavers. The problem with the event is the respawn rate of the krait. I found the event with 7 krait “remaining”, and seconds after killing a single krait the number would rise back to 7. I started fighting them 2 at a time, and after getting the number to 5 and starting to work 2 more, it would rise back to 7. This trend continued after another player arrived to help. We had slightly better results, getting the “remaining krait” down to 2 a few times before respawns drove it back up to 5-7. It eventually took a total of 4 players to complete this event, and this was only after the 4 of us killed 20-30 krait to drop the number from 7 to 0. We had to split off into 2 groups and aggro 2-3 at a time in order to prevent respawns from happening before we could kill all 7 krait.

There are plenty of other events similar to the krait one with similar respawn issues. You simply cannot solo the events unless you aggro and kill every required enemy at the same time. This is an easy task for level 80 characters in low-level areas because you kill mobs in 2-3 hits, but characters at the intended level for the area/event are usually not able to do this.

I understand that the pvp games like Snowball Mayhem and similar game from Halloween need to be random parties in order to keep things balanced. That or have seperate arenas for random players and formed parties. But Toypocalypse, and to lesser extent the Bell Choir, are treated as pvp for no reason. Bell Choir is competitive but are you not directly against another player. Toypocalypse is just flat out pve content vs pve foes, but set in a pvp arena. Not being able to do Toypocalypse with my friends put off any desire to participate in that part of the event.

LFk.1408:

Latorn.4209:

Regardless of whether or not it’s horizontal progression or vertical progression, buying legendaries off the TP is Pay2Win.

What do you win? A costume contest?

There is no pay2win, currently. Legendaries are just a skin for now. It’s a known fact that sometime in the future, Legendaries will get a bump up to ‘ascended’ stat level, making them on-par with ascended and better than exotic. What we don’t know is how we will obtain these ascended weapons. If ascended weapons are bound on acquire, then tradable Legendaries will have a pay2win factor.

As for lengendary weapons be ok to sell/buy on the TP. No. It is absolutely not ok for them to be tradable. The entire advertised point of Legendary weapons was that they were something you have to make yourself. They require items which are all account bound, and obsidian shards were originally character bound. It doesn’t make any sense that a pile of account bound items are able to craft a tradable weapon. This is either a massive oversight of the bound status of the weapons or a large step away from the originally advertised aspects of Legendary items.

For reference, the info for “originally intended/advertised” acquisition of Legendaries if from this Q&A video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Y-YBsK17j6I#t=401s It is made very clear that Legendaries are not(or were not) supposed to be something you can just buy on the TP.

I understand the time for siege placed in the open or used temporarily for an assault, but anything inside a tower/keep needs to stay for a lot longer. It’s just ridiculous to expect someone to have the job of walking around using/tagging siege every 20 minutes so it doesn’t despawn. A fully sieged/defending keep is not going to have every piece manned all day, you’re going to have enough there to hold off small attacks and alert for larger ones. The small defense crew doesn’t need someone off their post and running around tagging siege because of unneeded game mechanics.

sammael.7136:

Case in point: I reported 3 stuck events 2 days ago, guess what has been fixed in the new build (amongst many other things)? Yep, the 3 events I reported

Were the events you reported listed in the patch notes, or just currently working ingame?

Updates cause all the events to reset, so things are usually working for a while after each patch. There have been a lot of Orr events like this since release, even some breaking after being fixed due to multiple bugs causing the problem, while only some of them were actually fixed. The event chain that unlocks the Arah dungeon has been rather notorious for this. If you didn’t get it done in the day or so after an udpate, you had to wait for the next patch to get inside.

I’ve had the same thing for a while. I did mention it in a thread about another widespread audio issue (the “woo woo” ringing/alarm replacing all sound), but I’ve not heard any other complaints about it.

It’s like a huge portion of the audio just doesn’t play. It’s similar to listening to a 5.1/7.1 surround sound system and disconnecting one of the front 3 speaker channels. Some sounds will still play, but lacking a part of the body of the effect. Like a sword impact only being the metal clash sound, missing the airy sound of the swing, or the boom/thud of the skill itself.

I’m not sure if this is actually related/the cause, but I’ve noticed this happening a more when I play thief, or if I’m playing with a guildie that’s on a thief. I can play on my own or with others for hours without a problem, but if a thief joins, my sound will break within minutes.

You said you had this issue on a notebook, I’ll assume you’re using whatever audio chipset it has integrated. I’m using a SoundBlaster X-Fi Elite Pro (PCI version), so I don’t think it’s a hardware-specific problem.

Oh yes, I’ve been having fun with the “enhanced” bandits. They are pretty amusing for a level 80, but not so much for the low levels trying to deal with them at zone-appropriate level. Checking on the bandits in the cave is actually how I discovered the improved performance there. Those particular bandits don’t seem to be effected by the bugs, though. At least in the first chamber near the level 5 heart, they only have Steal listed as their ability, and aren’t spamming high damage or CC skills.

Diessa Plateau and Snowden Drifts should be safe 15-25 zones to level in. I don’t think there are any bandit areas there. Fairly sure Snowden has none at all, but I don’t recall about Diessa. I did check the separatists in Diessa, and they do not appear to be effected.

For those that have not been to these areas, Diessa is out the northern portal of the Black Citadel (near the Lion’s Arch <> Citadal Asura gate).

Snowden is northwest of the Norn starter zone (Wayfarer Foothills). You will have to leave Hoelbrak (eastern portal) and walk to the northwest corner to find the portal into Snowden. The main road north through Wayfarer also leads you there.

The Asura gate in your racial capital city will send you to the gate hub in Lion’s Arch where you can instantly access Hoelbrak or the Citadel.

I’ve noticed an improvement in at least a couple areas. Most notably in the bandit cavern on the west side of Queensdale. I had noticed a while ago (probably sometime in October) that my frame rate tanked in the cave. I was getting 15-20 fps inside it, but 75+ fps outside of the cave, where before there was not a huge difference. This was without a driver update or other changes to my PC. It persisted over a couple driver updates, including one just last week, but today’s game update seems to have returned normal game performance inside the Bandithaunt Caverns.

The title is a bit specific, but this thread covers the same issue that was first reported in other zones. It seems to be effecting pretty much all bandits, I’ve seen it for myself in Kessex, Brisban, and Harathi.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Blunderbuss-Weilding-Bandits-in-Brisban

Vangy.7403:

we know about the multiple teams..we just think that they should enhance or even give all the man power at their disposal to the bug fixing team before they focus on ANYTHING else…. or at least leave the other teams limited as possible…

I agree. Your ability/manpower to create new content needs to be exceeded by the ability/manpower to identify and fix the bugs/problems, hopefully getting most of this done before releasing the content. But I don’t expect new content to be completely bug free. That would be nice, but as games get more complex it becomes harder to accomplish. What can be minimized is adding new game-breaking bugs before the old ones are fixed.

Like right now, there is a part of the bug fixing team dedicated to fixing the FotM reconnect problems so players don’t have to do unneeded repeats of Fractals. These people could be working on fixing the broken personal story quests faster so we don’t have to do unneeded repeats of story quests. I realize, and I’m thankful for, these story bugs getting fixed, but the process could be faster if part of the team was not given a new higher-profile problem to fix before that job was done.

Stormleaf.1769:

I’ve always felt this way about bugs, even before I knew anything about ArenaNet. Bugs are sometimes annoying, often fun, in every game ever, and almost never and big deal. So you can’t jump accurately for a few hours? Adapt, deal with it, realize that it really does not matter. You’ll enjoy the game more.

But hey, I know that’s not going to change your mind. It’s a shame you let such minor things destroy your enjoyment of an incredibly massive and well-crafted game, though.

Many of the bugs we’ve had around since release are not fun, and are certainly a big deal. Bugs can be funny, but they aren’t fun when the bug does nothing but block progress and prevent you from doing something in the game. Having your character’s upper body get stuck in a silly pose is funny (I’ve had this a few times), but having half of your traits do nothing (ranger’s multiple Opening Strike related traits were bugged for months) leaves you with a gameplay disadvantage.

The Arah event chain, the one that unlocks the dungeons, has been broken since release making the dungeon (and personal story completion) impossible to do outside of a small window after each update/reset before it breaks again. Hopefully today’s updates have fixed it, as some bug fixes in Orr events were mentioned, but it’s too early to know for sure.

lynspottery.6529:

aha…so that is why I was having issues. But I still do not think it has been fixed because I missed my leap just shortly before 11:30pm EST while attempting an easy one.

The update to fix the jump problems didn’t happen till around 12:30 EST, so you were still running the bugged build at 11:30.

GummiBear.2756:

for the people saying it still don’t know, make sure you are NOT in overflow, wvw bonuses don’t work in overflow(not saying it is not possible something still could be bugged ofc, merely ensuring you are at your own actual server where the bonuses apply)

Mine is still bugged. Went to LA and loaded in overflow with 17,915 hp. Moved to the normal server when it was ready, and still had 17,915. I was even in WvW earlier, still with 17,915. I should have gotten a 5% bonus according to my listed WvW stats.

Gwendabell.8479:

Thank you for fixing this quickly =)

Yep, that seems to have fixed it from what I’ve seen just hopping around and jumping off of ledges.

Zorath.8642:

Oh and the vet bandit event mob behind the town with 2 guards bled me with 20 stacks in 2 secs i went down in 2 hit. Lvl 73 guardian tank build, i felt like a lvl 1 attacking a lvl 80.

I think you’re talking about the event near Black Haven(PoI in the small fort) that ends with killing “Mickey the Stool Pigeon”. He wasn’t focused on me for most of the fight, but I picked up 6 stacks of bleeding from 2 hits of his AoE, and enough direct damage from the group to make me have to dodge out and heal.

If they’re doing this to a level 80 in exotic gear, I feel bad for the level 15-20s that are probably in blue/green gear a few levels behind them.

Zorath.8642:

Ok new bug, had a bandit scout lvl 16 hit me for 1235 dmg in 3 hits. Fireball seems to have scaled to a much higher lvl. 3 hits 382 480 and 373 and they were one right after the other…

I’ll second this one. I had one hitting me for over 300 per hit, and using nothing but this skill. The damage might be right with their normal infrequent use of it, but spamming nothing but Fireball is certainly not. The Fireball spamming cutpurse and another melee attacking bandit quickly put my level 80 guardian to 50% HP. And that’s with nearly 2800 armor and 18k hp (before scaling drops it to 400ar/1900hp)

It’s just the Cutpurse with the rifle that I’ve seen this issue with. The Bandit Rifleman didn’t seem to use his melee knockback (assuming it’s the warrior skill Rifle Butt) any more often than usual. But the rifle-wielding Cutpurse (they seem to use a range of weapons) does this with nearly every attack. It took some trying to kill them with my level 80 guardian. Lots of dodging and using aegis to block attacks just to get close enough to hit him.

There are a couple other bandit mobs that have “Stuns” listed in their descriptions, and they are doing the same thing. The caster ones (not sure of the name) use an air magic/lightning skill to spam a stun every 1-2 seconds. They can keep you stunned about 50% of the time.

Condition inflicting bandits might be effected, too. I did see this mentioned in another thread, and they seem to add condition stacks faster than before.

Looking at the bug section of the forum makes it clear that the jumping problems are not the only bugs added today. There are at least two other major issues. Mesmer phantasm behavior is very bugged, and elementalists lose all traits/stats from trait points while using transforms. There are at least a couple visual/cosmetic bug threads for today’s patch, as well.