Guild Wars 2

No problem! I just noticed as per another post by Skye Marin there is an even cheaper recipe for chests – 1 light+1 medium+1 heavy of the same type of skin (shoulder or breather) + 1 karka shell – which is further adding insult to injury – it means the more expensive recipe is still 5 times cheaper than the gem store.

And yeah, I don’t plan on spending any more on the gem shop. I already got the character slots I wanted, the bank tabs and the digital upgrade, so there’s nothing else there that I want for the time being that is worth the price.

Minion of Vey.4398:

Chests are a waste of money period considering for less than the cost of 2 chests you can buy any of the rare skins right now heh.

Technically there are still the mini pets, so there’s still a reason to make chests if you really feel like gambling. Still not worth it with the odds, but yeah.

It’s true, yes – and technically more people becoming aware of this is a good thing for people who paid gems for chests, because it would mean fewer people would buy chests > people would quickly burn through the supply of mats, making their price rise > eventually gems would become more advantageous than the TP to obtain chests.

I did notice a small increase in the price of mats – skins are going for 20-30s each now – but it’s still much more advantageous to use the TP than buy chests directly. Unsure what drop rates will do to prices, but presumably the non-skin mats will drop in price (unsure if skins will drop, sounds unlikely).

It was at around 70% maybe when I checked and it was 100+ meg? I’m not sure what the full size was, sorry, I stopped paying attention and it doesn’t display the full size once it’s done patching.

Bunnehboo.6025:

you mean do what ppl should have done during the halloween event?!?!? YOU DONT SAY

still will be ppl complaining how they spent xxx amount of gems and didn’t get what they wanted handed to them

The point of this topic is to warn that using the forge and the TP gets you more chests than using gems does, all you need to do is spend your gems in currency exchange instead. Farming and buying straight up are still options that are more likely to be profitable, but if people want to gamble, they are getting ripped off by buying chests instead of forging them, is my point.

That seems like the smartest choice – even at the exchange rate I mentioned above it seems more profitable to just farm/save up and get things off the TP or try to get them as drops.

I mostly got chests because I had nothing else to spend the gems on, and I wouldn’t be feeling like it was wasted money if not for the fact I could’ve gotten up to 5 times the number of chests I actually got by using the TP instead of the gem store. I knew the odds were low and I figured I’d just get myself some event-related items with my gems, but I’d obviously have gone for the TP option to get more out of my gems if I’d figured this out sooner. I feel like I got more out of my 200 leftover gems (by doing this experiment and posting it here) than the 1800 I spent on 10 chests.

Safe to say I’ll probably be farming for money (and gems) for a while to make up for the waste here.

Preface: This isn’t a whining topic.

Consortium Chests are seriously broken right now and seriously screwing over people paying gems for them. I wish I had looked into this before I dumped $20 on them.

1 chest = 250 gems
1 chest in bulk = 180 gems

Now, here’s why they’re broken:

I had 200 gems. I traded those in for 1g43s84c.

I then went to the TP and placed these orders:

3 orders for heavy shoulder skins (17s each, 51s total)
1 order for passion flower, 3s
1 order for passion fruit, 25c
1 order for karka shell, 90c

total: 55s15c

The orders were filled within ~2 minutes.

I then went to the Mystic Forge and dumped all those into it and voila, I had a chest, and 88s69c left.

250 gems would’ve amounted to around 1g80s, which means I could have made three chests for the price of one chest in the gem store.

If I’d spent my 1800 gems in currency exchange instead of chests, I could’ve bought mats to forge ~25 chests instead of 10 chests.

I know devs don’t control TP prices, so I’m not exactly blaming anyone – but as it is, paying customers are being ripped off by buying chests and would use their money better by exchanging gems for gold and forging chests instead. This situation may inadvertently have created an “exploit” for getting chests for fewer gems than originally intended.

Edit: By buying 2 more of whatever skin I got from chests, I managed to make 2 more chests and end up with 14s65c left over, plus 1 skin, 1 passion flower, 11 passion fruits and 41 karka shells (all of which I could sell back, if I wanted, for ~61s) – making it 3 chances for rares for under 100 gems; my 1800 gems could’ve gotten me 54 chances instead of 10. Live and learn, I guess.

The rates are still pretty low, but I agree that it is much better than last time.

Donari.5237:

My first 10 chests got me a sharktooth sword, hello 7 g on TP. Then a European guildie who can’t buy gems right now due to a TP European issue wept, and I bought a chest to open for her. Another sword! She seemed happy No, I’m not saying “hey, they are easy to get.” I just happened to be on the good side of the RNG god this go round, as I so seldom am.

So you got 14g worth of rares out of 11 chests. 11 chests, with the current exchange rate, cost more than 14g to get (~15g will get you 10 chests). If you exchanged 2050 gems for gold (that’s how much it cost you for 10 chests + 1 chest, right?), right now you’d get around 14g too. Considering the price of the not-rare things you got, that’s only ~2.5g more. I wouldn’t call a 2.5g profit being on the good side of the RNG, unfortunately – and that’s stunning considering you got 2 rares in 11 chests, which should be an excellent turnout. As it turns out (pun not intended), you only got a tiny profit and it was actually a mediocre turnout. You’d need to get 3+ weapon skins (maybe 2+ pets?) for it to be worth it.

My own experience with them: got a 10 pack, nothing rare. Got all the shoulder/breather skins, plus duplicates (got lucky, I could’ve ended up w/ lots of duplicates). Result with current TP order prices (these keep fluctuating so the calculation may be quite off):

1 Heavy Consortium Breathing Mask Skin, 19s11c
1 Heavy Island Shoulder Skin, 18s45c
2 Light Consortium Breathing Mask Skin, 20s3c
2 Light Island Shoulder Skin, 10s1c each
2 Medium Consortium Breathing Mask Skin, 17s50c each
2 Medium Island Shoulder Skin, 20s9c each
91 Karka Shell, 63c each
11 Passion Flower, 2s29c each
39 Passion Fruit, 23c each

Not counting listing fees, the total is 2g44s22c for 17g’s worth of gems.

Absolutely not worth it. If the items are going to be random, at least the return on them should be closer to 50% of the value of the chests, not ~13%. Wasted $20. I knew it would be gambling when I went into it, so I won’t complain, but I’m also not buying any more chests.

Edit: I have 200 gems left, and can get 1g37s27c for them. With less than 400 gems I could get what I just got for 1800 gems (and with 1800 I could get 12g35s43c, enough to get one of the rarer drops).

Wow there’s a lot of anger in here. Let me just say this – 2 people working on traits/skills may seem like little but it’s not that unusual. I do think there should be more, given the massive number of skills/traits, but it’s not unusual for small teams to deal with specific aspects of a massive game. If you put all the small teams together you’ll have lots of people. Indie developers definitely don’t get 2 people to work on skills – they usually have what, 2-10 people, at most, working on the whole game? Big difference.

That said I doubt Jon calls all of the shots regarding what gets pushed and what doesn’t. There is a possibility the 2 designers screwed up and there is a possibility the balance/bug fixes were too complex to test properly.

Which doesn’t mean I’m happy, myself – I do have a ranger. Also I’m not sure how the longbow is good beyond its AoE attack (which is the only reason I keep one, I would like to get credit for dynamic events sometimes) – its regular attack is so slow that I do more damage to things while downed…

As for the trap cooldown, don’t worry; it’s a bug and it’s been stated it’s slated for fixing later tonight.

Sweet, thank you for letting us know.

“Will all warrior players be compensated for the amount of silver or gold pieces wasted due to the bug?”

I highly doubt that. I get the frustration, though, happens to me too.

Tyrion.8632:

Yeah u need to fix so roll back never happens, some sort of backup even if rollback happens u could get the data from the last entry!

They probably had a backup, otherwise all of the data would’ve been erased instead of rolled back 30min~1h.

Chances are they are busy trying to deal with damage control to post about it just yet. It sounds like everyone had a ~30min rollback, give or take, but I highly doubt it was intentional (rollbacks rarely are unless there is a reason for them). Most likely it was an accident and they’re looking into fixing it.

Be warned though that there is a chance it can’t be fixed, and if that’s the case, there really is nothing anyone can do about it – if data from those ~30min was completely lost, then it’s lost and can’t be restored. There’s no way to check if what players claim to have lost is true, there’s no way to bring those 30min back, and so forth. Usually when an issue happens that requires a rollback you’ll use the most recent backup (to prevent all data from being lost) – everything from that backup forward is lost. If it was only a 30min rollback, that’s actually lucky (some rollbacks can span days if backups aren’t done often enough).

I’m not defending ANet here btw, just speaking from the perspective of someone who’s had to deal with data loss in databases before.

It doesn’t seem like this was one of the bugs addressed by the patch, unfortunately. I was looking forward to it, myself (especially underwater mobs).

bpphantom.8243:

As long as nothing is provided that has stats and is not obtainable after the event, I don’t mind missing it due to work and friends. If something is only available via those events then I have an issue.

^ this.

I’m hoping to make the event, myself, but I’ve been getting terrible lag and if it continues I doubt I’ll be able to play. But if there isn’t anything unique to be gained (and therefore missed), I don’t mind much.

Today I’m experiencing quite a bit of lag that makes playing less sturdy classes very difficult (server is Maguuma). I’m not sure if it’s because of the free trials, but I fear for my ability to take part in the event at this rate. I’m playing from Brazil.

“The dungeon will remember your progress, and will poll the party’s levels when you enter, scaling the dungeon to the highest common attained level.”

The way I read it, the dungeon “remembers” your progress – that is, if you leave and come back, it’ll remember your progress from before – and it scales to the lowest common denominator.

I’d much prefer the scaling to reset, myself (provided that if you crash/disconnect you can still go back in with your party) – if it remembers my progress it could mean wasted trips if you missed a chest or disconnected before you got the instance done, and then you’d be punished for it (since the next time you went in, the difficulty would be higher).

Or perhaps just the option to choose the difficulty level – you’d have to unlock the higher difficulties before they become available, though. Since the rewards also scale maybe this wouldn’t be a problem.

Without zergs I wouldn’t WvW. My latency is terrible and if I get singled out by another player I will die before I can get 2-3 hits in. Zergs are the only way for me to WvW without worrying about dying at every turn. And they’re a ridiculous amount of fun – I don’t care about winning but the mass scale group vs group combat is really appealing to me.

This would probably be easily doable if there is a way to flip the entire character model (including hair, clothes, etc) – otherwise it’d require rewiring the animations to suit the character’s left handedness and that may be more complicated. Flipped model should be doable though, and I agree it’d be kind of cool (and I’m right handed).

Ahhh this happens to me so often. Start typing and then suddenly TP, hero window, inventor all over the place.

Personally I think chat should be interrupted when you specifically click outside of the chat box (which already happens) but in no other situations, especially since in situations where you might want to stop typing (e.g. being attacked) chat isn’t interrupted anyway.

I am going to dump this link here too:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside/first#post721451

“Our goal is not to create a gear treadmill. Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two. We will slowly add the remaining ascended gear items and legendary items in future updates to allow people time to acquire them as we add exciting new content that deserves exciting rewards. We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.”

While this does not specify there will never, ever be another set after Ascended, it does specifically say Ascended is meant as a stepping stone between Exotic and Legendary since the requirements for Legendary are far above those of Exotic. It also only specifies they’ll be adding new Ascended and Legendary items and says nothing of future new tiers.

If you ask me, I’d wager Ascended items came into existence because of frequent (rightfully) complaints that the materials needed for legendaries are excessive, and because of the extremely high prices of legendary precursors on the TP. Maybe it is a bad decision on their part, we don’t know yet. It’s speculation all around.

Edit: The need for Ascended gear to get PvE content sort of irks me a little, too, but I’ll reserve judgment until I actually have need for said gear, personally.

Go ahead and let us inspect traits and skill set too, so that this may become Build Wars.

Or, you know, not.

Disagree with OP. Some players will always freak out over everything – giving them the option to choose just means nothing ever goes live because there will always be someone who disagrees with it.

Polls are bad and lazy ways to get opinions, because people aren’t explaining their reasoning or holding a healthy discussion – it’s a perfect way to jump the gun and vote on an option because you think it means one thing when it’s actually something else entirely. Plus, some people have more than one account and there is the issue with bots and RMTs as well as the possibility of boycotts/griefing just to skew the poll results.

There is also the fact that they’d need to make a poll well before a feature is worked on (otherwise it’d be a waste of resources), which means something may get pushed to an update that is far in the future and then players, knowing the poll results, would keep asking about when X or Y is coming out (this already happens with planned bug fixes, but bug fixes are pretty important since they tie into existing content, so that’s pretty OK in my book). And then the complaints would shift from “this feature that’s going to be added sucks” to “why aren’t you adding X before Y”.

Letting the community shape the game completely is a terrible idea, overall. Player input after something’s gone live is great because people will have experienced it before giving an opinion. Letting players give input ahead of time is terrible because people keep freaking out over wording/thinking it’s something it isn’t, and because they could end up disappointed with the actual content of the update and then say it isn’t what they asked for.

Also, there is no way asking for player input would keep them from making big mistakes. You can only know something was a mistake after it’s gone live. An idea can sound bad in theory and be good in practice and vice-versa.

@kagejuin, I’m guessing you may be able to use exotics for ascended via mystic forge somehow, but we won’t know for sure until the content’s out, I suppose.

I read somewhere that items for name change and appearance change (as well as some others I don’t remember) seem to have been added to the item database, so it’s entirely possible this is coming in a future update.

Regardless I’d love to see the option, too.

There is an official announcement regarding Ascended gear now that states dungeons won’t be the only way to get it (I could have misread, but that’s what it read like to me):

“Ascended and infusion rewards will be available in both PvE and WvW over time, and be made available through all sorts of content around the world including existing content.”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside/first#post721451

I think the main issue seems to be how the original post about the new gear was worded, but it’s wait and see.

I got all the 4 battlefields and I agree with this suggestion/I don’t think it’d be unfair to me if the requirement was removed. It seems strange to force people to go through a PvP area – even if actual participation isn’t required – to get things you would use for PvE too. It’s especially bad if your server does very poorly (I only got all areas this week because Maguuma is winning its tier) and you can’t reach certain areas.

I already find it bad enough you need WvW kills for monthly achievements – needing WvW map completion for 100% map completion is even worse, since with a zerg you can get your kills, but people rarely explore and you often end up doing it alone, making you a sitting duck for people for other servers if you’re not interested in the PvP aspect.

I agree – just make them respawn automatically after a certain amount of time (or if that would hinder things too much, at least make them respawn if they’re dead inside an enemy keep).

This. Oh please this. I keep triggering auto attack when using skills to move faster and it is quite terrible.

There was a quote a while back from a mod, I don’t remember the exact figure so forgive me if it’s wrong, but let’s say it was this: over the course of a week, they banned about 10,000 bots. How many people would they need to thoroughly investigate 10,000 bans? It’s unlikely their bot hunting team has more than a few dozen people at best. It’s unreasonable to expect every single ban to be really thoroughly investigated. I would expect thorough investigation to happen with ban appeals instead – a lot of botters won’t bother to complain and just move on to a new account, so this speeds up the process significantly (as long as the majority of bans are bots, which seems to be the case).

Before you quote “many” you need to look at absolute numbers – go on, count the number of people you can find saying they got their account reinstated. I assure you it won’t be a significant percentage in the face of thousands of weekly bans.

You DID say to scrap the system – your topic’s title clearly says “stop banning and roll back the bans”. That’s scrapping the system.

Of course I don’t know if you’re telling the truth or not – even if I had been banned for botting I still wouldn’t know if you’re telling the truth or not. I’m not sure how that is relevant.

Thoroughly examining each case is what gives bots time to do their thing before they finally get banned. Banning quickly does the exact opposite. Again, you don’t know their ban process – you’re assuming they only ban in periodic sweeps.

And again, the system isn’t bad just because you got unjustly caught up in it. It’s not bad because a few people – in the face of the total number of players – got caught up in it. GW2 has hundreds of thousands of players and tens of thousands of bot bans. A couple dozen or even a couple hundred of people banned unjustly is nothing in the face of those numbers. Could it use improvements? Sure, any system could. It’s not perfect. But it’s not bad either. If 100 people are unfairly banned out of 10,000 – that’s only 1%. That means 99% of the bans are bots. That is actually extremely efficient.

+1, an option to bind a different key to item looting would really help.

Liquid karma isn’t soulbound, so you can use it on your main, if you have no use for it on your alts, at least. You already get xp for each daily milestone and you get xp for finishing the dailies, so even more xp may be unlikely, even if I like xp as much as the next person…

While I agree that they could be a bit more open with their info, if they release details re: how some bots get away with it and how some legit people get banned they’d be giving botters the info they need to get around whatever system they have in place right now.

It sucks, but just keep reporting in-game, I guess? Get a group together to report if you can – it makes sense that if someone has multiple reports their case would be looked into sooner, at least.

You keep talking as though you know exactly what their bot hunting process is like, which I think is really hurting your argument here. You don’t know how you got flagged for botting – so you can’t say they never looked for behavior patterns. I said this before, but well executed bots can mimic legit player behavior well, and really efficient/fast players can end up mimicking bot behavior. There are players who are obviously human and players who are obviously bots, players who are likely human and players who are likely bots and then there is a group of players and bots which can be tricky to differentiate. This is what usually results in innocents being banned and botters being allowed to go back to playing.

You really don’t know what ANet’s bot hunting process is like. Staff have admitted to a few situations that could get someone unjustly accused of botting, but you can be very sure those are not the only methods they use to flag bots.

ANet has access to better information than we do – they know how the bot hunting process works, they know the exact percentage of bans for botting, they know the exact number of tickets they receive. We don’t – all we have is a couple of staff comments, a couple of forumgoers’ comments and hearsay.

You can’t say to scrap a system you don’t understand just because it fails sometimes. Let me say this again: there is no way to have a bot hunting system that won’t sometimes ban people who weren’t botting and let botters go. Seriously, there is no way. What you’re asking for – a perfect system which never fails ever – doesn’t exist. Keeping the current system is decidedly better than unbanning everyone. A couple of innocents being unjustly banned is decidedly better than thousands of bots ruining in-game economy and feeding real money traders’ business.

The system isn’t bad just because you got unjustly caught up in it. That’s like saying we should ban prisons because sometimes innocents get falsely accused and convicted of things, and that’s unreasonable. Yes, it sucks to be falsely accused of things. But ANet isn’t going to prioritize a few players’ pride over hundreds of thousands of players’ gaming experiences.

Again, if you are innocent, just keep pleading your case. That’s all you can really do. Asking ANet to rollback bans or stop banning isn’t really a reasonable request – it harms the players as a whole.

Also, they will not tell you how you got flagged for botting. That’d be a silly move on their part, because if you reveal how you find your bots, you’re giving them the info they need to reverse engineer it to get around your method.

Game protection systems like GameGuard and Xtrap are often met with some criticism (GG for instance can cause several browsers to crash), so I can see why they’d choose not to use it. I’m not saying the system is foolproof because it obviously is not, but I’m pretty sure it’s not as bad as it may sound. It’s possible to get wrongfully banned for any number of reasons (I saw a case once of a guy who reported someone else for verbal abuse and was the one who got banned).

Be assured that the tons of people you see being banned aren’t really all as clueless as they seem, though. A lot of people will deny doing something wrong even in the face of very solid evidence, so in a case like this (where ANet can’t release evidence, with good reason) it’s even easier to sound like a legit player who got unfairly banned.

I’m pretty sure most of the people saying they have no clue why they got banned are well aware of why.

There is no system that won’t get some innocents unfairly banned or end up letting some bots go.

Edit: Gameguard and Xtrap are not foolproof either. Nothing is.

Pop-up verifications are usually triggered automatically rather than via GMs, actually (you get flagged for suspicions of botting and the popup comes up). They’re not failproof, though – you could get them while AFKing or someone could have a really sophisticated bot that recognizes numbers/words (this is wholly possible – captcha systems are not able to fully stop bots). This could also be really frustrating and jarring if you got a huge pop-up in the middle of a boss fight, PvP or WvW, for instance – you’d be pretty much incapacitated for the duration of the popup and that could cost you/your group the match depending on the situation.

Actually, what companies can see is the input that is transferred to their servers if the software is connected to the internet (which, in this case, is true – since the game client connects to ANet’s servers). And even then, either they’re monitoring it live, or keeping logs of what’s been done, because otherwise they really can’t know what you’ve been doing while playing.

Even assuming logs are being kept (they probably are) or that there is a way to flag and monitor someone for botting activity remotely, input from botting programs is nothing more than macros that mimic input from real humans. A macro is something that sends the same signals to your computer as the peripherals would, thus behaving exactly like a click of the mouse or typing.

There is no way to tell with 100% certainty whether input comes from a macro or from a human unless you’re monitoring a user’s computer activity outside of just the game software. Bots behave very mechanically though so their patterns are usually easy to spot – usually. Sometimes a regular player can behave in a way that is really close to bots, and sometimes you make mistakes while monitoring.

It’s impossible to have a system to ban bots that won’t sometimes get legitimate players caught up in it. An effective system, however, will catch a lot more bots than legitimate players, and I don’t really see evidence to the contrary so far (since a lot of the people claiming innocence have probably botted, just like a lot of the people in a reddit thread a while ago claiming they never said anything “bad” in chat had actually said some really appalling things).

It’s a huge hassle to be unfairly accused of something, but keep pleading your case if you’ve never botted. You should be able to get your account back with a more careful review of your case.

They can’t check for a botting program on your computer. That’s hacking, and that’s illegal.

Staff has stated there are no auto-bans, which leads me to believe there is individual investigation of each case (they keep saying the best way to help them track down bots is by reporting them in-game). There are, however, thousands of cases every week and I highly doubt they have a team of thousands of people working on it – it’s probably a lot of cases for each person and some things may slip under the radar. There will be mistakes. A system that is run by humans is inherently flawed.

If you really haven’t been botting, though, keep pleading your case. They should be able to tell from your account history/behavior that you’re not a bot. There is no advantage for ANet in keeping wrongful bans.

Anet staff have stated in posts that bot bans range in the thousands. They’ve also stated that many of the people saying they weren’t botting were, in fact, botting. Sure, there may be a couple dozen legit players who got unfairly banned – but it’s a very small percentage in the face of thousands of bots which also got banned. Some bots will slip under the radar, too, it’s inevitable.

Also, suggesting a human isn’t looking at your case is… odd, to say the least – has it ever been stated that there are auto bans? I think a staff member specifically stated there are absolutely no auto bans.

Suggesting that every bot ban be rolled back and that they stop banning just because a few people got unfairly banned is silly to say the least. What about all the people who are actually botting that they’d be allowing back in?

+1 to this – or just make it so events automatically reset if no progress is made within a couple of hours (which should be long enough that it wouldn’t matter if they reset – since even if legit events reset this way, nobody would be trying to do them in the first place). Events stuck everywhere are really frustrating, and this would be a simple temporary solution while full bug fixes can’t be made.

Hi,

Today when I completed my daily achievements I couldn’t take the reward (a coin and a karma jug) because my inventory was full (got the “you are encumbered” message). I sold an item in the TP to make room, and salvaged another item and deposited the collectible salvaged. This made enough room for the two items. Before I took them, however, I noticed I had a coat that was better than the one I had equipped – when I double-clicked to equip it (didn’t equip from the Hero window), while it did equip, the coat I was wearing before was completely deleted from my inventory (in spite of having room for it).

It’s not a big deal, it was a beginner coat I crafted myself (my character is early 20s), but if it had been an important/unique piece of armor I would’ve been pretty upset, so!

I could take the reward fine after that, it’s just the deleted armor that was the problem.

A minor other issue is that you can’t salvage items when encumbered, even if salvaging the item would make enough room for the new item (in this case a single shredded rag).

I’d like this as well, even though I did make the books on the characters I wanted (necromancer, elementalist). It was difficult running in the high level zones but I got lucky and found groups of players to help (all my characters are 20-25). It’s certainly possible to do the runs on lowbies, but it’s a lot harder not just because of the enemies’ levels, but also because you have to walk all the way to the closest waypoints since you’ll more than likely not have them open. So it’d be cool to be able to use the books on alts that couldn’t make it.

$0.02

Overall I really liked the event. I loved mining for candy corn, and I had fun seeking out the haunted doors before the MK dungeon came in. I’m a fairly new players and all my alts are in their 20s, but I found that thanks to other players I could still get the scavenger hunt done on the characters I wanted, so no complaints there (although I wouldn’t object to making future events a bit more low level-friendly) – I did rely on a guide to figure out where to go, though, since I hadn’t really explored most of the areas where you could find ghosts. At first I thought everything would be in Lion’s Arch so I was pretty confused – some clarity would’ve been appreciated, but thanks to guides that wasn’t such a huge problem.

The atmosphere was beautifully done and I have the wallpaper on my desktop right now. It’s gorgeous.

I don’t really care about farming for rares so I don’t have any complaints about the MK dungeon, though it seemed a little… buggy or strange overall. First time I went in there was the Mad King Says thing, but I never got it again after that. Also, I once went in to the MK already spawned right next to the entrance, which was quite odd. It’d have been nice if the one-time only surprise had been clarified to be a cinematic, would’ve saved some grief overall.

Clock Tower I have a love/hate relationship with, but my only real criticism is that it’s too difficult for the average (or the disabled) players for the short amount of time during which it was available, so an easy/practice mode with no rewards or just the permanent addition of the puzzle (not likely) would’ve been appreciated. If anything, please try to consider keeping very challenging puzzles within the game itself and available year-round and making event puzzles less challenging. That way, nobody’s left without a challenge, but nobody’s left feeling pressured to do something quickly or feeling left out, either.

The way BLCs was handled was pretty bad, in my opinion. Telling players they have a chance is very vague, though this issue was addressed when MKCs were released and the chance was specifically stated to be rare. I don’t believe the gamble was worth the reward regardless, not even from a practical standpoint – the most expensive skin is going for around 68g right now, which if you get 60s per 100 gems would cost around 11.5k gems – it’s $10 for 800 gems, so that’d be worth $143.75 in gems. Some people spent more than that and got nothing, some people spent nothing and got that (and subsequently can get $143 worth of gems with virtually no effort). That’s basically shafting players with actual money to spend in favor of lucky players, which even if you don’t believe is unfair is a bad business model overall. That price can only go up, so a lucky player gets a far better long-term investment than one who actually put money into the game (in particular since most other chest rewards are account bound so you can’t use them to offset the cost of the key).

One viable option would simply be to make the items from the chest available in the store for a reasonable price, and make those account bound, while keeping the rare chest drops free to trade.

The event overall was also quite buggy. The most damaging bugs were quickly fixed, but there are still buggy spots in the Clock Tower, for instance (jumping into the clock and getting warped back to the entrance, for one). Bugs can really kill the fun because they’re not something a player can fix, but I understand devs are probably focusing on content right now since GW2 is still a fairly new game. Still, better QCing seems to be in order.

In spite of the problems I still think this was a great event. We were given a lot to do and there was something for everyone. It’d be nice if everything could be for everyone, but in the absence of that, having at least some activities be doable by everyone is pretty great.

Rukia.4802:

I got it in about 20 or so tries? I wasn’t counting but it took me under an hour, that much I know. My brand new 80 thief opening chest.

Mad minus points to ANet for having everyone start at the same time, all the charr and crap made it impossible to see my character.. I thought it was pretty low and the most frustrating thing, but got it anyways because I’m a pro the puzzle itself wasn’t that hard.

Edit: Not sure how you all had speed boosts, since all skills are disabled I didn’t bother trying to equip my 25% increase, how cheap it would have been 10x easier.

Trait boosts stayed, and you could use speed boosters/candy corn in there.

Finally finished it on all my alts at last plus another alt I made to keep someone company. Finished a total of 9 times, but it glitched once (made it but was warped back to entrance).

After you do it the few couple of times it becomes easier, but with my horrid lag I would often end up teleported back to the entrance or failing jumps I shouldn’t have failed. Can’t say I had fun, but I was happy to finally conquer the thing in spite of lag and slow reflexes/poor concentration.

Could only really do it after figuring out a strategy to rush 2/3 of the way in. Would never be able to get the 3 chests on the way – barely make 3rd chest platform jump every time.