Guild Wars 2

I take it you are new to the concept of gaming.

Here is a crash course:

Games are designed by developers who are gamers.
Games are published by publishers who are corporate suits.
Corporate suits care about the bottom line, which means increasing market share.
Increasing market share requires you to “dumb things down” in order to make the product appealing to a bigger segment of people.

This happens in all games that have a publisher.

Your options, unfortunately, are to either accept the changes or find a small game company that doesn’t use a publisher.

Give it a week.

Not a single player is traited or geared to deal with Rangers right now because there was no point in it.

All they did was make Rangers average. If you aren’t set up to deal with average it will burn you as if it was OP. Adjust your build and Rangers will go back to being a nuisance (though depending on your adjustment, some other class may now appear OP to you, which is honestly a good thing. Games that don’t force you to make a decision with regard to who you are going to counter are bad).

It isn’t on a regular schedule, if that’s what you mean. Sometimes they change it daily, sometimes weekly, and sometimes monthly.

ClaraFee.2579:

Gaile, this is uncool.

How does the purchase of 4 or more commander tags elicit a refund, but 2 does not? How is reimbursement from one scenario more fair than the other?

Guild Wars 2 has an upstanding history of reimbursing players who are left short-changed by way of a game update, and I don’t think this should be an exception to that long-running standard.

This is especially irksome for people who paid cash through the Gem Store in order to get the gold to buy an commander tag for another character on their account.

I hope you guys will reconsider your position on this. 100 gold means a lot to me, and “fair” means a lot to all of us.

If you bought 1 tag, you just got a 200g discount on your next purchase (which you won’t have to make).

If you bought 2 tags, you just got a 100g discount on your next purchase (which you also will never have to make).

If you bought 3 tags, you didn’t get a discount, but you also got unlimited “free” tags on all your other characters.

If you bought 4 or more tags, you spent 100g or more than everyone else and are thus entitled to a refund.

Bloodstealer.5978:

mtpelion.4562:

Nick.6972:

True or not, if this was the case they would certainly deny it.

Again though, it makes no sense for it to be true. Why would you pay for people to say nice things about you on your own forum where you could simply remove the not nice things?

As far as conspiracy theories go, this one fails the Occam’s Razor test by a huge margin.

Positioned posters don’t just post on their own forums…. sure you can remove things on here you don’t like.. on others sites – no so easy.

That’s the point… it would only make sense to pay “stooges” on someone else’s forums, not your own.

Nick.6972:

True or not, if this was the case they would certainly deny it.

Again though, it makes no sense for it to be true. Why would you pay for people to say nice things about you on your own forum where you could simply remove the not nice things?

As far as conspiracy theories go, this one fails the Occam’s Razor test by a huge margin.

Nutjob.9021:

The upgrade extractor costs 250 gems, which at today’s exchange rate means 31 gold. Think about that for a second. You use the extractor as an alternative to either salvaging the item with a black lion salvage chest (if the upgrade is worth more than the item) or just adding another upgrade over the first (if the item is worth more than the upgrade). At what point does 31 gold save you money?

For those having problems understanding this, let’s suppose you have a 1000 gold legendary and you want a different upgrade, but you don’t want to destroy the upgrade. The most expensive upgrade in the game that I have seen was about 14 gold. So, by spending 31 gold to extract this item unharmed, you save 14 gold at a net loss of 18 gold (31 minus 14). Wow.

Or consider the other situation. You have a 14 gold upgrade inside of a 2 gold exotic item. You can spend 31 gold and get 14 gold plus 2 gold = 16 gold for a loss of only 15 gold versus using a black lion salvage kit and only being out the cost of the 2 gold item.

In order for this item to make sense, the cost of the upgrade would have to be 31 gold or higher.

Why on earth would anyone be stupid enough to buy one of these silly, overpriced things? Does A-Net even think when they assign prices or do they just look at the graphics of the item and say, “I bet people would pay 31 gold for something that looks like that. It’s so cool!”

The cynical side of me says that the A-Net solution will be to create a new collection achievement that includes this item and rewards you with 3 achievement points, the title of “COMPLETE TOOL master” and gives you a stack of crude salvage kits. Your friends will be so envious.

Two Items:
1. Search for “infusion” on the Trading Post and check out those prices.
2. Gold to Gem exchange rate is 100% irrelevant in the pricing decisions. They base the gem price on how much REAL money it costs because the main point of gem store items is to generate REAL money.

You don’t qualify for a refund because you have not paid more than today’s price (300g).

The fact that people who only bought 1 are getting a 200g discount does not negatively impact you in any way.

People who come to the forums typically fall into one of two categories:

1. Those who have a strong opinion that they feel the world needs to know about.
2. Those who have a question and are looking for an answer.

Paying people to post on the forums would not have any impact on group 1 and would only help group 2. Of course, there are plenty of people already helping group 2 for free, so paying people to post on the forums would mean they are paying people for no reason.

ThePlanez.5871:

I think my PRL is around 15ish, so should I go eotm? What’s the rate there?

You’ll probably have a better karma rate in EOTM right now. But keep upping your PRL so that you can make the switch.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fractal#Rewards

Uuni.3561:

mtpelion.4562:

This patch is the result of R&D that told them that they would inconvenience a minority of players while making the game accessible to many, many more people.

They are not going to lose money or players (overall) as a result of this patch.

Actually the game is far less accessible and new player experience is worse than it was before. Their demographics test was obviously horribly misguided and was probably done with people outside the group of people commonly known as ‘gamers’. China had these changes made and they hated it, now NA and EU gets it and everybody hates it. Colin is trying to backpedal and blame it on bugs but it’s a harmful change regardless, removing many of the features that made GW2 so appealing to the players

That’s your opinion, which you are entitled to hold. I’m simply telling you the fact of the matter which is that their corporate data told them that they will make more money doing this.

ThePlanez.5871:

What’s the Better way to farm it? Fractals or eotm? What’s the rate for both of them? Haven’t been on for a long time, just came back, think I was in SoS before the servers merged. Now trying to get twilight, need a lot of karma.

Fractals are good if you have a fast group and a PRL that is high enough.

EOTM is good if you are lacking the above two items.

Roybe.5896:

mtpelion.4562:

This patch is the result of R&D that told them that they would inconvenience a minority of players while making the game accessible to many, many more people.

They are not going to lose money or players (overall) as a result of this patch.

OMG! Another voice in my neck of the woods! Welcome! ;p Only caveat I have on this is, as long as they interpreted their data correctly AND implemented the changes needed accurately to enable people to learn easily.

Yeah, there is always the possibility that someone made a huge mistake in R&D, but until proven otherwise it is safe to assume that they’ve plotted a course for a sound reason.

Kamui.4038:

mtpelion.4562:

Is the NPE so bad as to warrant quitting/raging? Lol No.

No? Really? How else do you propose the players send ANet a message aside from just not ever giving them a cent again? Just sitting on your hands does nothing. People are reacting the only way they can.

They’ve got your money already and they are setting the stage to get more money from a lot more players. Your decision to quit does nothing other than deprive yourself of the content you have already paid for.

You’ve let them know that you don’t like it. Continuing to post that you don’t like it does not improve your chances of being heard because that’s just you saying the same thing over an over. If enough DIFFERENT people complain, they may address the complaints.

Right now you are just crying over spilt milk which doesn’t put the milk back in the jug.

This patch is the result of R&D that told them that they would inconvenience a minority of players while making the game accessible to many, many more people.

They are not going to lose money or players (overall) as a result of this patch.

As your son has already played the game, the NEW player experience was not designed with him in mind.

Should older players be exempted from the NPE? Yes. Is the NPE so bad as to warrant quitting/raging? Lol No.

My biggest issue with the new TP is the arbitrary character limit in the search box.

Arbitrary character limits are a personal pet peeve of mine as they serve no purpose other than annoying people.

Lux.7169:

I believe I read that players who purchased more than 1 commander tag initially would be refunded the 100g (extra) for each subsequent tag they purchased. I have yet to receive this refund—is their an NPC we are supposed to talk to or do I need to submit a ticket for this?

Also, please correct me if I am getting my facts wrong.

More than 3 tags is where the refund kicks in. If you bought 3 or less, you don’t get a refund.

They will be mailing the refunds if you qualify.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/So-commander-refund/first#post4381169

They wouldn’t give me a refund of the sale price difference on a character slot I bought right before the last character slot sale (i.e. a partial refund), so the likelihood of you getting a full refund for your situation is 0.00%.

Can’t you now click on the achievement to see the list of minis included in the achieve? I could have sworn I did that last night.

Making games “easier” is more profitable than making them harder (or even leaving them as is in many cases), which is why every game company does it.

Most people like to have things spoonfed to them. It irritates those of us who don’t, but we aren’t a large enough group of people for big companies to target.

Just as an FYI, most gaming companies start out filled with people who like challenges and they make their games for other people who like challenges. It is when PUBLISHERS get involved that the games devolve into quicktime animations designed to allow every single person on the planet to achieve everything in an effort to make the game have mass appeal (and thus significantly increase revenue).

You will never be able to fight this trend because it is simply the result of human behavior.

Angelica Dream.7103:

mtpelion.4562:

Angelica Dream.7103:

To answer a few questions:
Parked:
I have five other character parked at other locations with no issue.

Again, if you park you WILL eventually run into this issue.

When you do… unpark yourself for a rotation and then go back to parking.

@mtpelion
Four other character parked at other Champs for a year with no issues. Where do you get your information I have data.

Again a rookie programming error that they form some reason refuse to fix.

Your anecdote was not missed, it just wasn’t relevant.
Having 5 other characters that work great didn’t prevent 1 of your characters from getting bugged and are thus irrelevant to your point, which is that you currently have 1 character who is bugged.

Remove your character from the map. Bug is cleared.

Go on about your business.

EDIT: I should also add that your issue has been posted about and replied too many, many times on the forums. You are free to go back over them and review them if you don’t want to follow my simple advice to correct your issue.

Angelica Dream.7103:

To answer a few questions:
Parked:
I have five other character parked at other locations with no issue.

Again, if you park you WILL eventually run into this issue.

When you do… unpark yourself for a rotation and then go back to parking.

dlonie.6547:

I’m still waiting for you to explain how this demonstrates any cruelty to the bear. You’re projecting your own disturbed imagination onto what I see as a beautiful tale of companionship and adventure.

The cruelty is unbearable!

This lays bear ArenaNet’s disrespect for the animal kingdom!

I personally can bearly contain my anger over this disgrace.

8/10.

I would read again.

Atheas.7580:

Same thing has happened to me at Karka Queen, Ulgoth and the Orr temples from time to time. It happens in a group and going solo. I’ve been told by other players it’s because I’m not doing enough damage, seriously a full zerk elemental in exotic or better can’t do enough damage? I’ve sent in numerous reports without a single answer from Support. I finally gave up on reporting and just play to play anymore, not hardly worth the effort to even complain when no answer is received. Funny thing is in EoTM I get a chest everytime even when not in a group, go figure.

The “not enough damage” problem is a separate issue from the “parking” problem.

“Not Enough Damage” comes into play when you are getting event credit (which means you are probably also getting the boss chest and the bonus chest), but are not getting the champion chest (the one that goes into your inventory which you can then open from there). Even that isn’t proved, just a widely held belief by players as a possible explanation for why you sometimes don’t get to loot a champion.

Parking at a boss will eventually lead to not getting a chest due to a bug where your event progress fails to update. If this happens, leave the map to “lose” your event progress and start over.

Deugan.3650:

I’d love to have a normal trade function as well, in order to trade stuff with people without paying a 15% fee -_-

Which will never, ever happen because the entire point of the TP is to force you to pay the 15% fee so that money supply can be removed from the game, combatting inflation.

They will NOT give you a way to bypass the system because the system REQUIRES mass participation to work.

Sarrs.4831:

mtpelion.4562:

Silver Lining: Your inconvenience means you are better at this game than the average person who needs all the handholding.

i do not believe any human being requires this level of handholding

imma go wake my cat up and see what she can do with it

I take it you have never worked in customer service then…
:p

Sparks The Rescue.5043:

Honestly, the current best way to “farm” linen is to do daily dungeon tours and just buy it. It is incredibly hard to be able to farm ~6g worth of linen in an hour, the time it takes to do ac p1/2/3 and profit 6g.

Buying it increases the overall price of it.
That’s fine for a short term solution, but if you need lots of linen you should be farming it too otherwise you are going to be hurting yourself.

Hellsoul.6502:

Ok figured it out. Anet refers to to “activated” as swapped. Activate is such a strange usage of wording in this context.

Yes, the wording on Ranger Traits is often ambiguous. You really have to try them out to see how they actually work.

Kamui.4038:

No, because they then warrant it even more. The only way for people to do better is to have their flaws exposed either by making mistakes, giving them challenges to overcome, or by having someone else point it out, all so that they can work on improving themselves. All this handholding and coddling is only going to create worse players, not better ones. I cannot for the life of me see a new player who just hit level 40 and decided to try PVP, only to be completely hammered into the ground by every player they came across, even lower ranked ones, because their whole GW2 career consisted of handholding, babysitting, and spoonfeeding.

ANet needs to read some Nietzsche and put down their copies of Frankfurt School-inspired literature.

Forcing people to be better does not sell games. Making things easier expands your potential market share.

You can go to ANY game series and see the exact same evolution.

I’m not saying I like it. I’m saying that this is an old story that will never change because game developers are businesses and businesses exist for the exclusive purpose of generating revenue. If you can make a change that will tick off 20% of your current customers but add 60% more customers, you are going to make that change every single time.

Kamui.4038:

mtpelion.4562:

Welcome to the real world, where people who are good at things have to suffer through inconveniences so that businesses can cater to the MAJORITY of their customers who are NOT good at things.

Silver Lining: Your inconvenience means you are better at this game than the average person who needs all the handholding.

It’s insulting to the average player to assume they are drooling idiots that cut themselves on their keyboards, or that they can’t handle pushing more than 5 keys on said keyboard.

It’s also an insult to the customers that paid for a product that now has an age restriction of 3 years old. I paid for an MMO called GW2, not a Fischer-Price play set.

The only people who should be insulted are those who don’t know enough to be insulted.

Welcome to the real world, where people who are good at things have to suffer through inconveniences so that businesses can cater to the MAJORITY of their customers who are NOT good at things.

Silver Lining: Your inconvenience means you are better at this game than the average person who needs all the handholding.

phys.7689:

paying tax helps the game in the same way that deleting your gold helps the game.

p2p trading has advantages for players.
not having to pay before you sell an item of value
setting up deals with repeat customers
not having your price determined by last sell
discussion of prices.

now, personally i dont care too much because i wouldnt use p2p trading often anyhow, but to claim its only useful for scammers and idiots is completely inaccurate.

I didn’t claim it was only useful for scammers and “idiots” (your words, not mine), I said that the only people who want it are scammers and the uneducated.

It is your representation of what I said that is inaccurate, not what I said.

Behellagh.1468:

3. Those that think they can same money buy avoiding the fees and taxes.

“Psst. Buddy. I can get you a deal on some ectos that fell off the back of a Dolyak.”

I kind of wrapped that in with “scamming the system”, but yeah. Trying to skirt the tax system that helps the game.

Khisanth.2948:

On the other hand events that break will now remain permanently broken and get run maybe once per patch.

Starting with the new patch they are supposed to be using a new system that rotates the instances (presumably to address this issue, along with the issue of nearly empty maps persisting).

Tharomir.6985:

Like how every battle is a dps-race zerg-fest.

All battles are DPS races (a DPS race is any event where the goal is to Damage a foe enough so that they die before either you die or an arbitrary timer expires). Not all battles are zerg-fests. If the content you are doing is all Zerg-fest content, try playing something else.

Or how you’re usually required to have zerker gear to join dungeons.

Form your own group, or join one of the majority of groups that do not require anything. This is a Learn 2 LFG issue on your part.

Or how the only wanted classes are Guardians, Warriors and Elementalists?

If you are not in a speed clear guild, then this statement is false. If you are in a speed clear guild, then the restriction is imposed by your guildies, not ArenaNet. Take it up with them.

Paradox.1380:

There are other ways of earning Keys, FYI. You can map complete for a 50/50 chance of getting a key + other mats (one of the rewards is always a Key or a Transmutation charge). And there are several maps in the game that once you know all the routes you can easily do in 20-30 minutes. Especially mid-level zones that give coveted mid-level mats. So you can do like Caledon Forest on a new character Map complete it in 20 min get chance for a key or a a Trans Charge and then when its level 10 do the PS and get a key there. I don’t know, its not like they took it away they changed their early game (not to kill key farming) to help new players have a more streamlined and easier process.

I’ve done a lot of map clearing and unless they’ve recently made a change I’d say that the likelihood of getting a key for a map clear reward is closer to 1/50.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

They said keyfarming was alright. Why change it now? This is horsekitten.
Way to be inconsistent as always.

It was all right.
Now it is still all right but more time consuming.

Nothing is inconsistent here, just unpleasant for those who farm.

Wanze.8410:

A Beastly Stein Shimmy.6179:

Is it possible that something like a dynamic TP fee would help the less “fortunate” amongst the population? I don’t mean something like “person X has 10g, so he pays only 10%”, but more along the line of “the higher the price of an item the seller wishes to sell at, the more % the seller has to pay in taxes”.

This has already been discussed in length in other topics. Additional taxes would just be added to the sell price, making prices more expensive.

Not to mention how harmful the taxes would be to a poor player who gets a lucky drop.

I’m beginning to think that they have increased the drop rate for Black Lion Keys in open world content.

I haven’t had a key drop since launch, but last month I had 2 drop and my sister had 1 drop.

People who want P2P trading fall into one of the following groups:

1. Those who are uneducated about the superiority of the Trading Post.
2. Those who want to scam either the system or other players.

There are NO legitimate reasons to request P2P trading.

I think a nice solution would be to allow sub 80 characters to transmute sub 80 gear for no charge.

All 80 gear and all 80 characters will need to pay full price.

Infernia.9847:

Well now that the keyfarm is dead, maybe ( a really really big maybe) Anet would consider increasing the odds of getting scraps and tickets out of the chests.
I would much rather pay outright for a weapon skin than pay for a chance at getting a ticket.
I still say a good model for this is to offer the RNG chance at a ticket for a skin for a set period of time and then after that time has expired offer a set gem price for the skin.
The RNG chance will always be there, it will be the first means of acquiring the skin, and finally after the initial offering is over if the player feels lucky they can always try to obtain it cheaply via the RNG chest before making a more expensive direct purchase.

More likely it would be that the skins hit the gem store first, then get moved to the black lion chest ticket vendor once the gem store sale is over.

It was to be expected. Keys are a source of revenue for ArenaNet, so it makes perfect sense that they would want to find a way to prevent you from getting too many of them “for free” as that means less of them are being bought with cash.

Renegade.6240:

Yep, I almost do it the way you do but got 2 questions, how can I turn karma into gold and what is phat lewtz

A good Karma into Gold route right now is buying Linen-level Karma gear from specific heart venders, throwing 4 of those items into the Mystic Forge, salvaging the resulting Linen-based armor that comes out, and selling the Linen on the Trading Post.

Rule of thumb for Black Lion Chests:

Opening them in order to get a specific item is DUMB.
Opening them in order to have fun spinning the wheel is fine.

Faeyd.5094:

Does Zomorro think I have years to keep getting the mats needed to try for clovers? Don’t know how many batches of ten of stuff I’ve blown and not one clover yet.

Don’t do the 10 recipe if you are looking for a specific item.
You are minimizing your attempts and thus are ten times as likely to be subject to unwanted returns.

There is no gambling involved in getting Black Lion skins if you buy them from the Trading Post.

The system as it currently exists allows people who enjoy gambling to gamble and people who despise gambling to acquire the exact same items without gambling.