Guild Wars 2

I played the event with my 24 ranger. I got two 39 rares, two 65 exotics, and the karka chest with the two 80 exotics in it. My two other guildmates got a similar spread of rewards, and we were all on some lower-level alts in our 20s.

So I got an account bound 20-slot exotic bag and a great level 80 exotic earring. How much gold are those two alone worth? Account-bound, so I can give them to one of my level 80 mains. I sold one of the 69 exotics for 1.7 gold. The other I’m holding onto to sell later. Who needs exotics at level 69? You blow by that so fast. Same for the 35 golds. I’d say 1.7 gold in pure profit plus two nice level 80 exotic items is a very nice reward for the time spent. I couldn’t farm up 15 gold (or more) in that same amount of time farming in Orr.

I was revived at least 20 times during the event. Waypointed twice rather than waiting to be rezzed from a complete defeat. Probably got rezzed from a complete defeat maybe 3 times? Hung in there the entire 2.5 hours from start to finish. I probably revived at least 6 dozen or more downed/defeated players. Probably more.

My total repair cost was all of 2 silver. Not bad considering the total gold equivalent of the rewards. I sold one exotic piece for 1.7 gold on the TP right then and there. The stuff I kept for use is probably worth at least 15 gold.

A shout out to the entire team(s) that built this Lost Shores event. The FotM team for a great dungeon that has none of the issues of the original 8 dungeons. And especially the Southsun team that designed Saturday’s and Sunday’s one-time events. I do feel bad for the folks who couldn’t make either event. (Although Anet publicized the schedule more than a week beforehand, so it’s not like you didn’t have time to plan ahead to be there.)

But despite any negative feedback, I want the Anet teams to know that myself and my partner (and our guildmates who stuck with it all to the end too) felt truly immersed in something historic. Every time we run around Southsun from now on, we’ll have a feeling of “ownership” and of “being there” when it all went down. The one-time mechanic has its downsides, to be sure, but that’s sure a nice upside for the people who make time to be there and participate.

Just. Wow. Thank you it was an awesome 2.5 hours, with really nice rewards!

William Fairfield.1428:

There is no weekly reset of your progress. Your progress will remain saved on your character.

Yes! Thanks for the confirmation of this.

So: Guildwars2hub.com had it totally right, and mmorpg.com had it totally wrong.

But ya, back on topic my main concern is that since the zone pretty much requires 2+ people working together (more for the big guys), what I noticed was that the loot rewards were not worth the effort/time/coordination. It’s more profitable to run around in Orr.

Why are the rewards there so measly?

MithranArkanere.8957:

They have some neat mechanics, but overall their damage and defense are too high.
Specially their damage.
It’s so high, that they can kill themselves when you reflect that attack that spits several water bullets, giving mesmers a massive advantage against them.

And guardians. Just saying. ^.^

You still do after the first power up of the fan. Only the first power up,is free, and you can’t grab any crystals until after the fan has run out the first time. We wiped on the first attempt in there today because we went straight for the crystals,at first like yesterday.

drkn.3429:

Of course you can get things done in any party composition – some are just more demanding. We’ve done HotW with 5 eles, and if you can do AC in a duo, you can do it with anyone really.
The thing about thieves is that they’re hard to play – or maybe there are just not that many people playing thieves and not downing/dying 3+ times during each run.

The whole trick is to run a balanced thief not a glass cannon. As in nearly equal stats across the board for power, precision, vitality, and toughness. With a little more vitality than toughness. Settling for about 40-45% base crit chance. 15-20-0-20-15, prioritizing lotus poison to give you perma-weaken with either Dagger 1 or SB 4. Also prioritizing the 20 percent extra initiative regen from Acrobatics IX, unless you temporarily need to trait for an extra stun breaker with the Acro trait that makes dodge break cripples. And finally, put a superior sigil of Purity on your offhand dagger and offhand pistol, and put a sigil of Bloodlust on your main Dagger and main Pistol. And use Sigil of Malice for healing at 105 per hit at 80.

You’ll solo Orr effortlessly and fearlessly, you’ll get plenty of tagging rights and gold medals by lawn-mowering endlessly over swarms with Death Blossom, and you’ll be less squishy in dungeons than a dungeon-centric Guardian. Truly. I walked out of three fractals today with only 4s in repair costs. Much less than my guardian paid for the fractal runs yesterday.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this fractal run I talked about two posts up was done in all yellow gear with 5x pirate and 1x Traveller runes. By contrast, my guardian needs full exotic gear and 6x soldier runes, even with all the other native condition removal. It’s true that guardians never have to sweat condition damage and help the team strip conditions too, but honestly the thief is nearly as resilient against conditions with that sigil of purity on every weapon set.

drkn.3429:

It’s just that necros and rangers are probably the least useful in ‘high-end’ PvE right now (they CAN contribute and get stuff done, but they’re just too bugged/broken or designed more with solo/PvP playstyle), thieves are hard to properly use (so many glass cannon thieves out there dying in one hit from any boss) and engis are boring/weak/mediocre support/not fun – pick your option.

People have been saying that a 5war or 5guardian groups are best – someone even organised a 5war group for Arah4 to bruteforce Simin ‘cause they couldn’t beat her normally. Then it becomes clear that a mix of the two professions is awesome in dungeons – 3 wars, 2 guardians. Then it becomes clear that they have nearly no combo fields, and while they have lots of party stuff in shouts, it’s still limited – thus one elementalist enters the scene, getting 2g, 2w, 1ele in the end.

I play guardian and thief. Up till now, I never took my thief into a dungeon. My guardian was my dungeon char and is built for support from the ground up, with Power/Vit/Tough gear to enable me to face tank and not go down easily.

Im here to tell you that my run through three fractals today with my thief was smooth as butter. Yesterday I used the guardian. You know who is my new main dungeon char now? My thief. I’ll use guardian for places like AC 2 (Detha) where the guardian has tricks to singlehanded play bait in the spike traps, for example, but a D/D – P/P thief (occasionally swapping P/P out for SB instead) just tears things up and brings all kinds of utility. Thief is also pretty nice when a boss has knocked you into the geometry because you have two different ways to teleport yourself back out. The middle fight in the dredge fractal is bad for geometry bugs like this. Fortunately it was me and a Mesmer who got stuck like that, and we were both able to get out. If it had been my guardian in that run, we’d have failed the run.

BTW our party was two thieves, Mesmer, warrior, and engineer. Easy peasy. And the thieves were instrumental to getting the swamp wisps done without too much aggravation because we each had two stun breakers for undoing cripples as wisp carriers.

Kromica.2831:

I sure hope that isn’t 3hrs for one set of fractals.

Yes, that’s about how long it takes while still learning them.

Blingg gave me nor my guildmates any “map fragment”. All we got was the soggy bag from the beach investigation

Agreed. If normal dungeon tokens are account-bound and not soul bound, that means a core dungeon design imperative is that any PLAYER should be able to enjoy using any of their characters as a specific “tool” with which to run dungeons. By the same design logic, then, the difficulty unlock for the Fractal dungeon should be account-wide, not character-specific.

It’s not a “puzzle” unless you can apply logic to figure out the sequence or to understand what the goal might be. The wreckage investigation in Lion’s Arch is a prime example of the WORST, LAZIEST so-called puzzle design possible. It was totally random to hit up on the right sequence, and you had zero idea of what you were looking for.

The Mad King “books” quest(s) at least gave you a vague “treasure hunt” type of clue, but yes, even they were far too vague. They all should at least have pointed you directly at the correct zone name to hunt around in.

Dont’ get me wrong: I think this was a very cool event in concept and in ambition. And the new Fractal dungeon is awesomesauce and is also VERY excellent design that is casual-friendly and about 100x better than the first 8 dungeons, which are still a mess of confusing, bad overall mechanics except for a few really good ones like the CoF story mode. (and possibly some of the CoF explorables, but I haven’t tried those yet.)

But… Please consider the following feedback the next event, which I assume will be around the Yuletide holidays:

1. Throttle total instance pop in Lion’s Arch and any zone where a big group fight is mean to happen. The lag and rendering issues for Friday’s event was simply NOT fun and NOT exciting. Throttle the normal instance pop to roughly 10% of normal. Simply spawn a lot more overflow instances and spread everyone out.

2. Please dear FSM in the sky: Give groups an easier way to get into the same instance together! For both the Mad King event and this one, it is nearly impossible to get a group of 5 people from the same guild into the same instance to enjoy the event together. It took my group of 5 nearly 40 minutes of trying to coerce the system to put us all in the same instance of Lion’s Arch together before we could sucessfully get all of us into the same Fractal dungeon. And we couldn’t fight off the first main invasion together, because we couldn’t get into the same instance together. This really bites for immersion and camraderie. Why on earth don’t you have an instance number menu like you had in GW1? Or at least, why don’t you iterate your zoning code to prioritize/ensure that people in a group end up in the same exact instance together when they zone in?

3. The beach investigation portion of Tyriel’s investigation question was TERRIBLE, LAZY puzzle design. It’s not a “puzzle” if you can’t apply logic to figure out a sequence. Instead, this was just 100% random to arrive at the correct order to open things. No clue about what you’re looking for. No clue about the correct sequence/order. Nothing. BAD BAD BAD. Don’t do that kitten again!

4. Don’t make a special event quest chain (ala Tyriel) required to be finished within 24 hours. That’s just stupid given the nature of unforeseen bugs when promoting to production environments, and the time required to investigate and get hot fixes pushed out. You should NEVER make a time-constrained quest chain any shorter than 3-4 days.

5. And finally: I’m in Texas USA but show some love to your global audiences. Why are you prioritizing convenient workday hours in America, during the workweek, to kick off your special one time events? Why not START such events on Saturday at about noon PST so you can at least get overlap with European evening primetime? On a weekend day when more people have a chance to attend? And END such events on a Sunday at the same time. Friday at noon/1pm/2pm/3pm USA time? That’s crazy: half of your American audience are at work. And why not rotate your event starting times to cater to USA/Europe > AsiaPac each time? Give some love to down under folks and let an event every now and then start at a time that’s good for them (and let the Americans/Euros wake up in the middle of the night if they want to be there). You could easily be “fair” to everyone by doing one event at Saturday/Sunday noon PST for the American/Euro audience, and then the next event at some time convenient for the AsiaPac audience, then the next at noon PST and so on.

After looking at Stephane Lo Presti’s Phase 1 update more carefully (which is confusingly written, btw), this seems to be the case:

Because Noll is still bugged, you are effectively stopped in progress after you talk to Blingg. Canach and other NPCs come after Noll, and if you can’t successfully pass Noll, they won’t work for you. So the update by Lo Presti should have better clarified and made obvious that the quest chain is still broken at Noll and there’s no point attempting to do anything else after Blingg until they push the fix to Noll at noon PST today.

BTW for those confused about the proper order of things, I recommend Dulfy’s guide to the Lost Shores stuff: http://dulfy.net/2012/11/16/gw2-lost-shores-event-guide/

He becomes periodically attackable ( and you can get a medal if you’re lucky enough to find him in that state), but he will not actually talk to you nor give you an update even if you are there when he’s attackable and get a medal for killing him.

STILL BROKEN; NO WAY TO PROGRESS THE QUEST CHAIN

eightbitnerdy.2905:

Canach is attackable on Maguuma but does not give a post quest update or mail.

This. Canach is still BROKEN

I haven’t seen any definitive answers on this and it will be tomorrow or sunday before I get an opportunity to test/see for myself. I’d really appreciate if anyone who has unlocked difficulty level 2 or higher could answer one simple question:

When you enter the dungeon again with a new group, do you get the choice to pick a difficulty level from 1 all the way through the highest common unlock level in the group? In other words, if everyone in your group has unlocked difficulty 5, could you choose to start at difficulty 1 or 2, etc. if you wanted to? Or are you forced to start only at 5 for all subsequent runs (unless of course you have someone in your group who hasn’t gotten as far as difficulty 5 yet)?

The two preview articles disagreed on this point, but it sure looks from the entry dialog like you can choose anything from 1 up to some max range (based on highest unlock in the group).

Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer. And yes, I know we don’t yet know for certain whether there is a level reset every week, or whether once you attain a certain unlock level you keep that indefinitely until you surpass it again. (The two articles disagreed on this point as well.)

Leetsura.3507:

shaktiboi.5194:

…. an hour of running around four different outdoor zones will grant 4500 karma for your daily achievement and usually 6+ yellow items to salvage……

6+ yellow items in an hour?!? More like 6 yellow items in 5-6 days while playing 10-15hrs/day.

Edit so I won’t be all off topic; I’m looking forward to see what fun loot we can get. More loot = more fun for me

Try wearing a full set of 5x superior pirate runes, 1x superior traveler rune, and always having a +26% or +30 MF buff from food running full time. And always having the guild’s +10% MF buff running full time. You’ll see.

And the +26% MF food is very cost-effectively to produce in quantity.

Just pointing out that one single level 70 item can salvage into one or more ectos worth 20s each on the TP. So…. does 9 tokens, 1200 Karma, and “up to” 12 silver equate to this time/reward comparison? Especially when an hour of running around four different outdoor zones will grant 4500 karma for your daily achievement and usually 6+ yellow items to salvage? Not even counting all the other rare mats and vendor trash you’ll pick up along the way?

… No. It’s a step in the right direction but not enough. At the very least, we should see more yellows and exotics dropping instead of just blues and greens.

Also, I can use MF gear in Orr, but I sure cant get away with using MF gear in a dungeon.

So speaking for myself, this is zero extra incentive to dally with trash and skip able sub bosses. It’s still a better time/investment proposition to speed clear a path in 15 minutes skipping everything possible to get the 60 tokens per day, then head out to more lucrative pastures. Especially when everything is so expensive.

ilr.9675:

Siding with rabbit on this one. The answer has no practical application to us until we can form additional parties and enter it a 2nd/3rd/4th/umpteenth time. Please let the Devs keep working on more crucial issues until that time. They’re obviously in a crunch here

The community manager or architect/designer who occasionally pulse-checks the forums is not a critical path for event readiness tomorrow.

And actually, this information has significant practical application for a guild’s or static group’s very first foray into the fractal dungeon on Friday. What if said guild/group wants to focus first on learning the layout/strategy of all 9 fractals? They might prefer to keep each fractal at difficulty level 1 for a while until they push into the more difficult variants of each fractal.

For a time-limited casual guild, if the dungeon uses the hard lock portrayed by mmorpg, that casual guild might quickly paint themselves into a corner if they try a full run for their first foray.. They might prefer instead to do only two fractals, drop out, and start again to infinitely keep everyone at unlock level 1 for most of the week, until they’ve seen all 9 fractals enough to feel confident pushing forward.

By contrast, if the mechanics are as guildwars2hub states, then such a guild/group would not need to game the system in this manner to achieve their goals.

Or… someone from Anet can simply explain. It wouldn’t take more than a few sentences.

I’ve asked for clarification over in the “Dungeons” forum. MMORPG’s article today and GUILDWARS2HUB’s article today post contradictory claims about how the difficulty scaling/locking/reset mechanics work. Hopefully someone from Anet will clear the confusion?

guildwars2hub and mmorpg both published guides to the new fractal dungeons today. Interestingly, they both posted contradictory information about how the difficulty scaling/locking/reset mechanics work.

Can someone please definitively clarify the scaling/lockout/reset mechanics? I know we’re not supposed to call out Anet specifically, but really, who else can answer this question?

TLDR versions of the two articles:

MMORPG sez: “once your personal difficulty level has been raised (say, to 3), you cannot reenter the dungeon later at any difficulty less than 3. Unless of course you bring a player along in the group who is still at an unlock level of only 1 or 2, in which case the difficulty starts at that lowest person’s unlock level. You’re stuck in this progressive hard-lock cycle until the dungeon resets for everyone once per week. At which time everyone in the world starts at difficulty 1 all over again”

GUILDWARS2HUB sez: “each time you achieve a new unlock level, the game remembers that level permanently. When a group goes in to the dungeon, they can choose any difficulty level up to the lowest unlock level in the group. So, if four people are at unlock level 5, and one person is at unlock level 3, then when the group enters the dungeon they can pick any starting difficulty from 1-3.” Furthermore: GW2HUB says nothing at all about any weekly reset, and they even show a clear screenshot of a dungeon entry dialog that clearly shows a “choose your difficulty level” control on it.

So, um, the company I’m not supposed to call out directly, what’s the real story here?

kmortonson.2154:

shaktiboi.5194:

Best of all, the new ascended gear is NOT a random drop that only drops from higher difficulty levels! Instead, it’s paid for with tokens, and you get a guaranteed 5 token per fractal (15 per run). Even if you only ever farm a difficulty 1 run over and over and never try the harder difficulty levels, you can still earn your ascended equipment at the same rate as everyone else. That’s very very VERY casual friendly!

I’ve read through the guildwars2hub article a few times, and I’m just not seeing where you got the information quoted above. It does say that you get 5 relics per fractal – but the list of items from the NPC does not include Ascended rings. The only Ascended quality item is the “Gift of Ascension” – and I’d assume that is similar to the other “Gifts” you acquire from dungeons at 500 tokens. You can trade Relics for Infusions, it looks like, but those will be worthless without the Ascended gear with the slots for them. So where do you see that we can trade the Fractal Relics for Ascended gear?

Head-desk: you are correct. :/ I confused that item in the list with the “Yakkington’s Ring” shown in Linsey Murdock’s developer article.

In that case… Hrmmm. My former glee is bridled somewhat. But not completely. I guess it will depend on what the drop rates are in the lower-difficulty levels that most “casual players” (in the sense of limited time to play, not limited skill) will be able to consistently farm.

Another confusing thing is that the mmorpg.com article states a very different mechanic for the difficulty scaling! They claim that once you unlock a certain level (say, 4), you cannot choose to reenter later at levels 1-3 unless you bring along one person in the group who is at some unlock level lower than your own. And that this “hard locking” (as I’ll call it) is reset once per week and everyone starts at difficulty 1 again.

If that’s true, it would IMO be VERY VERY BAD in so many ways. And would totally change my opinion of Anet’s design. (to a big thumbs-down)

But… In the guildwars2hub article I link in the OP, there is clearly a dialog shown that clearly includes a “select your desired level” type of control. And the guildwars2hub article never states anything even remotely like the mmorpg article.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

If things indeed work like is stated in the mmorpg article, I can think of at least 4 different ways to totally “game” that system and defeat it. So it doesn’t make much sense to enforce some hard-gating mechanism like that when it’s so easily defeated and players can choose to grind difficulty level 1 over and over as long as they like. It only penalizes the leet players who’d like to make real progress and play consistently in the harder difficulty levels all the time for the best reward chances and challenge. Why on earth penalize them and reset all players to difficulty 1 every week? That makes no sense at all.

but then, neither does the current design mechanics of the original dungeons make any sense at all, so go figure.

Thanks for the link; that was very informative and helpful.

If you haven’t yet read guildwars2hub’s detailed guide to the new Fractal Mists mechanics, yet (http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/basics/complete-guide-fractals-mists), the TLDR that I wrote up for my own “casual” guild’s internal forums is at the end of this post.

I think Anet has nailed it, and I want to applaud the design team that came up with these mechanics and overall design. I can’t see anything in this design that bothers me. Instead, it seems very carefully thought out to be as inclusive of all play styles as possible: hardcore and casual alike can benefit equally and play at the level of challenge they find the most “fun”. And the hardcores and leets who enjoy pushing further into painful difficulty levels do get rewarded for doing so by the better loot scaling of the random/chest drops. But everyone has equal access to ascended gear, and therefore everyone has equal access to future content that requires ascended gear to deal with. This feels very much like how the ascended mechanic versus the Mursaat in GW1 worked.

Best of all, it means that if you have only 15-30 minutes to play, you can still get 1 or 2 fractals done and earn some tokens. This is very friendly to a casual guild like mine where we might have a full 5 members online at the same time for somewhat short time windows. 5 or more of us online? “Hey, anyone want to go run some fractals while there’s 5 of us here?” Then one person has to go after not even completing a full run. No biggie: everyone still had fun and earned some tokens for ascended gear.

This win-win design is just pure WIN. And it certainly beats the current diminishing returns and “all or nothing” token rewards of the existing 8 dungeons. I sure hope some of these same basic mechanics/rewards changes eventually make it over to the existing dungeons too.

TLDR:

Each person individually gains access to a starting difficulty level based on the highest difficulty level they’ve ever completed. Lets call this your “unlocked level”

Every time a group goes in, all members are scaled to level 80, and the group gets an option of how high a difficulty level to start the first set of fractals at. However this option is constrained to a range of 1 through the LOWEST unlocked level in the group. So if four people are at unlock level 5, but one person is only at unlock level 2, then the group can choose to start the first run at either difficulty 1 or difficulty 2.

The cool part is that the group is not forced to start at difficulty 1 each time. If you’re all at unlock level 5, you can start the very first set of fractals at difficulty 5. Why start at a higher level? To get better rewards from the random drops and chests at the end of each fractal, and to possibly unlock the next highest level in only a single run.

Best of all, the new ascended gear is NOT a random drop that only drops from higher difficulty levels! Instead, it’s paid for with tokens, and you get a guaranteed 5 token per fractal (15 per run). Even if you only ever farm a difficulty 1 run over and over and never try the harder difficulty levels, you can still earn your ascended equipment at the same rate as everyone else. That’s very very VERY casual friendly!

Also quite different is that there is no more waypoint zerging possible if you are completely defeated. If the group cannot revive you quickly while you’re only downed, and they cannot revive you at all while you are totally defeated, then you stay put on the floor until the remaining group members wipe. Then you all rez at the nearest invisible “checkpoint”. It will still probably be a very bad idea to try and rez a player who is completely defeated; it will probably be best to just slog on with the remaining players to try and kill everything so they can finally safely revive the defeated player. But it will now become more important than ever to really try and revive downed players before they’re defeated. Getting defeated will hurt much much worse than before.

Finally, each fractal should take only 15-30 minutes. So when first learning the 9 different fractals, it might take us 90 minutes or so to do a complete “run”. But after a while, it should take only about 45-minutes for a complete run. Bump that number up slightly while learning the new mechanics of each difficulty bump.

Delsabre.5934:

Haven’t tested it 100%, but Detha seems to bug if she dies during the trap event and you kill the breeder after she’s dead. The event is listed as complete and you get a new objective and can’t restart the trap event that really failed.

This. This exactly for the Detha bug. When this sequence of events happens, Detha will NOT trigger the event in the next room with the turrets. 100% reproducible.

Gab Superstar.4059:

I obviously can’t convince you. Remember though that if you don’t change your attitude you will never be a part of the large player base that actually don’t have any trouble with these dungeon mechanics.

I skip Kohler (problem solved) and just deal with the scavengers. Sometimes my twitch-fu is strong, sometimes it’s weak. Same for my guildmates.

Again, I’m not complaining and crying. We like challenge; we learn, we overcome.

My OP in this thread, and every reply in it, is feeback to the dungeon designers. You can call my casual guildmates weak or “bads”. We don’t care. We know what we can do. We overcome for those (fortunately very few) dungeons that are the only route to a specific piece of gear we can’t get any other way.

And we know which dungeons are FUN and seem well-tuned to be challenging without requiring an excellent connection, an excellent computer, and console twitch reflexes.

And we know which dungeons and which specific encounters are a DRAG and NOT FUN because of the simple tuning issues I mention in the OP.

It’s Anet’s call (and Hrouda and team’s call) to decide what to do with my feedback to them. I’m not here to convince you of anything. My responses to you are counterpoints to (good, thank you, yes they’re good) arguments against my viewpoint and my feedback. Between you, me and everyone else weighing in on this thread, Anet has more datapoints about player perception to work with. That’s good for all of us.

But here’s the important thing, right now the player perception of roughly 20 people I know pretty well is simple: some dungeons and some encounters are really really terribad. And some other dungeons are hella fun and we cheered and laughed and enjoyed the kitten out of them. And for the most part, we prefer running around in Orr’s wonderful dynamic and ever-changing environment to doing dungeons at all, because even the good ones still give out terrible rewards overall compared to spending the same amount of time running around outside in the world.

Gab Superstar.4059:

But you are forgetting that multitudes of people are not experiencing the same problems as you are.

The Gravelings can be easily countered by dodging away as they leap for you. You know when they will leap by how their front starts “glowing”. If you do get knocked down a lot, have a member of your party pop aegis right before you enter the battle, or have someone utilize a group wide stability ability that lets you get back on your feet should you get knocked down. Remember to move away from them as well, as they will continue to channel their ability, sort of like Hundred Blades.

I do not in any way agree that Lt. Kohler is a hard or cheap boss. After the first few runs I never have a problem dodging his pull which has a very clear telegraph. I’m sorry but as I said, there are multitudes of players who are facing these mechanics and blaze through them by utilizing their dodge and the proper spells. If you can’t then you clearly have a L2P issue (don’t take this as an offense).

No offense taken, but you are missing my point. Even when you know exactly what tells to look for and exactly how to respond to them, the core problem these two specific foes exemplify is that the tell is NOT visible enough and does not last long enough to react to for many players. And it’s not a L2P issue.

Again, there’s a difference between strategy and learning how to fight a given mob/boss, and sheer twitch reflexes. MMOs are no place for twitch reflexes. MMOS are for challenging mechanics and learning the strategy to beat boss X or whatever.

The early boss in CoF story mode that has the two ghostly swords (in his Phase 1) is a perfect example of a GREAT boss fight that is properly tuned for an MMO environment with its lag and inability for many players to execute at twitch-level speeds. That boss will wipe entire groups quite a few times until they figure out why they’re getting wiped. And then it clicks: “Hey, I take no damage if I dodge when he comes at me”. “Let’s spread out in a wide circle at extreme 1200 range so you have time to see that he’s thinking about charging at you: save your dodges up.” And then they execute on that strategy and it’s still challenging. That boss’s “tell” is that he stands there and clearly looks right at you for a few seconds. When he does that, you know kitten well his next hugely long charge is aimed at you, but you’re 1200 away and actually have time to see him start the charge and to execute your dodge to avoid the hit.

That is a PERFECTLY tuned MMO boss.

Kohler? Please: he’s CHEAP. The fight takes place in an area where you can’t pull off those same types of tactics I described above. And half the time he’s pressed against a wall and you can’t even see the sparkle tell. And even if you DO see the tell, his actuall yank range is larger than 1200, for one, and for two there’s not enough delay between the tell and the initiation of his yank. And you can’t even LOS his yank.

As for the scavenger gravelings, their sparkly head effect is far too small and subtle to see clearly in the fracas of 4-5 gravelings leaping all over the place and players being likely turned away from the scavengers to deal with one of the other gravelings trying to eat their face. And again, even if you -do- ignore all the other gravelings and watch those scavengers as closely as possible, half the time there is simply not enough TIME between their tell and the initiation of their leap to react.

TWITCH is for consoles and FPS games. STRATEGY and MECHANICS that account for the effects of LAG on 5 or more different players all streaming data to each other’s clients is for MMOs.

Gab Superstar.4059:

Actually I think that was what a lot of people expected when they heard “explorable mode”. Imagine wandering around in Arah or AC, without any restrictions. There would be puzzles like;

While exploring you randomly stumble upon a boss. That boss, when killed, drops a charged core, you don’t know what to do with it first. But somewhere else in the dungeon there is a power cell in which you can place the core which would in turn open up a door to an entirely new area of the dungeon. The group would have to figure these kinds of stuff out for themselves. Of course, if you wanted to, you could go to the Acolyte of Melandru and chop down the trees that spawn during the encounter, which a huntsman could then use to build a small ladder that would let you climb that door instead. This would all be done in a non-linear way; the power cell and door might very well be placed somewhere at the start of dungeon, and of course this door wouldn’t be the only way to progress in the dungeons.

Instead of the crappy rewards that chests have now, each chest would provide unique rewards, so that there wouldn’t be “that one” path that is the most efficient way of farming.

Random DE’s could also occur throughout the dungeon, which would encourage you to explore every nook of it. For example the crashed aircraft in Jotun path. Why not make it a DE to defend the pilot while he / she repairs it? If you succeed, you are flown off to another part of the dungeon. If not, maybe the pilot managed to craft some sort of explosive out of the fuel which lets you blow up a wall that then takes you to another boss?

This is what I wanted from dungeons in GW2. The current linear design just gets extremely tedious after the Nth dungeon…

I want to play this type of dungeon, lol. That sounds like a perfect fit for the rest of the GW2 look and feel in open world PvE.

Anet: you should hire this guy as a dungeon designer. ^.^

Gab Superstar.4059:

I can see your arguments as to why you want to change these encounters. The problem is however, that you are essentially complaining about the core combat mechanics of GW2. While in other MMO’s you might read a guide, watch videos, learn how a boss telegraphs his abilities, and then make sure you are prepared for the boss accordingly, that is, to a greater extent, not the case in GW2. You have the dodge mechanic for a reason. You are expected, especially as you go higher up in the dungeon tiers, to be able to play a lot more reactively instead of proactively.

Take for example Lupicus in Arah. While the general outburst on the forum towards him has died off a bit, you can still see threads pop up weekly about how hard he is. If you read these threads, you will see that most of these posts stems from the fact that the OP cannot dodge the green bolts which have no telegraphing at all, not the red circles or the shadowstepping.

In the end it’s an attitude change towards MMO combat that you have to make (I had to make this change myself, as have many others, if not everyone who does GW2 dungeons).

I understand what you’re saying, but I disagree with a fundamental part of it. MMO players deal with some degree of lag. When there is significant lag, twitch-based gaming reflexes are impossible to execute. Therefore, MMO encounters cannot be tuned for twitch the same way a standalone console or PC FPS game might be.

In MMO group content, a one-shot attack must have a highly visible telegraph, and it must provide adequate reaction time for players to plan and execute their response given the natural delay time of typical MMO lag.

Again, Lt. Kohler and the Scavenger Gravelings are prime examples of two mob types that are overtuned in this regard, with tells that are too easily obscured (too small and hard to see on the gravelings, and if Kohlers arm is in a wall), and with not enough time between the tell and the initiation of the one-shot.

And I’m not complaining. The OP is only saying:here is the primary tuning issue, and here are examples of well-tuned bosses versus some examples of bosses that exemplify the tuning issue.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

If I can choose between doing a bit of dynamic event farming with fun people, and making roughly 6 gold and tons of dyes… or doing a dungeon for several hours, with frustrated people, insane armor repair costs and simply terrible game play and terrible rewards… yeah, I think I’ll stick with the 6 gold. Those tokens are not worth the pain.

I’m not surprised it is very hard to find people willing to do dungeons, even if the game is only just out. I’ve played the dungeons, completed lots of them. I don’t want to do them any more. I prefer to have fun. Almost all of the dungeon runs I’ve been in, even the successful ones, ended with and angry: “I’m never doing this again!” -on behalf of my entire party.

This is really the core of the problem right now. When everyone in a dungeon knows they could be getting more useful rewards for time spent and they know that the unpredictable, dynamic nature of the outside world is generally more fun, it’s hard to see a dungeon run as more than a chore to get X tokens for something you cannot get any other way. (Such as 500 tokens for a specific legendary, or X tokens for a specific weapon or armor piece with stats you cannot get any other way. For example, a guardian wanting a Power/Tough/Vit helm has no choice but to grind AC or SE for enough tokens to buy the AC or SE heavy helm.)

Every time I start running around in some place like Malchor’s Leap looking for omnomberries only to find myself pulled into really interesting dynamic events such as unlocking the two Cathedrals there, and more than an hour later finally looking for omnomberries again, only to get pulled into a new DE….

… I ask myself whether that AC helm or that AC staff I want is really worth it. More and more I’m leaning towards getting my 500 tokens needed for Twilight, and then just walking away from dungeons except for when a guildmate really needs X tokens for something important they can’t get any other way.

Without going into exhaustive detail, your blinds versus trash mobs, and your Poison Cloud shortbow attack that can cause AOE weakness for 34-seconds with a 15-point trait, and your Shadow Refuge skill are the most valuable things you bring to a dungeon. The blindness and weakness are especially useful against those more overtuned trash pulls.

Oh and Scorpion Wire can be a useful split-pulling tool.

But it’s all about keeping an offhand pistol for nearly permanent blinding of an entire trash pull by having you and all your teammates shoot through pistol #5. That and using the traited Choking Gas from shortbow. And using shadow refuge to revive downed players.

Shuguard.7125:

I think dungeons need newer mechanics that require you to think logically rather than “beep boop large boss with lots of health sighted, push 1,1,1, 2, to defeat beep boop.” This way anyone can do it if you use your brain, gear wouldn’t be an issue. Content would only be as hard as you make it.

There are boss encounters with good mechanics right now. Have you done the final boss in Citadel of Flame (story mode) yet? Fantastic. Not your typical boss encounter at all. Requires logical thought, teamwork, and coordination to do, but no inexplicable insta kill or chaotic mechanics or lack of tells or time to react to tells. Everything is straightforward and logical, and you have time to think, plan, and coordinate how to beat it. And you need to coordinate: wily nilly every man for himself won’t cut it.

So Anet’s capable of doing interesting, fun bosses.

Edit: pretty much every boss encounter in CoF story mode was good. All fun, all different, all logical to figure out how to beat. Once you figured the strategy, executing on that strategy was still challenging and fun, not a snoozefest at all.

Amlin.6041:

Better yet, how about medium chest armor that’s NOT a trenchcoat! Not many options for medium armor other than Duelist (78) or the human cultural.

+1

I’m happy with the human cultural and will spend the money on it eventually. I even rerolled my level 54 Syvari thief as a human specifically to wear that armor someday, once I learned that the other skin that Sylvari could wear was so random to acquire (see next paragraph)…

I’m unhappy that the exotic duelist skin you refer to appears to be only a random reward for zone completion of high-level zones, so there’s no way to reliably acquire it. I never want to buy a piece of exotic duelist from the TP because there’s no preview on the TP and there’s crafted duelist that looks nothing like that particular skin.

So ya, +1 for more truly “assassin-like” armor choices instead of trenchcoats with a pirate or noble feel.

Level 80 does not make the exp paths magically somehow “too easy” or even “easy”.

Only experience and muscle memory among 5 players who have learned the mechanics for each exp path (and the overall pattern of dungeon mechanics), and the exploits and shortcuts, etc. make these easier over time.

That and also the concurrent growth into full sets of exo 80 stats.

But people who have just hit 80 and still have only yellow or green gear? And haven’t run dungeons much or at all yet?

NO. Sorry, but you’re wrong and I know at least 9 people who will back me up on that.

The only answer to the problem you’re really stating (which is that once your static group learns all the paths well, they become boring) is either more new dungeons or another tier of the same dungeons but with more difficult mechanics and larger numbers of enemies and tougher bosses.

But if they take the dungeon paths as they stand today and simply make them even harder? NO. You’ll have a player revolt on your hands. You do see all the threads complaining that dungeons are too hard, right?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We’re in the process of reworking our loot for dungeons. Expect it soon!

I don’t imagine we’re going to put tokens back in chests, and if we do, it won’t be at the volume they once were. What we saw when that was happening, is that people would just farm the first chest or two in a chain and then leave/re-run it, instead of playing through the whole dungeon.

Robert, there’s a simple compromise. Funcom did this with their dungeon currency (Black Bullion) in their Nightmare mode dungeons in TSW, and it worked fine. Nobody ever complained about it. And best of all, you didn’t feel as if “you’ve been beat up and your lunch money taken” (quoting you there: see that? ^.^)

In TSW’s dungeons, where there were 6 boss encounters per dungeon, and something like 17 bullion that could be earned from completing the entire run, you’d get nothing for the first boss, a guaranteed 2 bullion for the second and third bosses (each), something like 3 each (guaranteed) for the 4th and penultimate bosses, and 7 for the final boss.

Most starter groups could at least push into the 2nd boss within a couple tries at most, and fairly quickly start finishing at least the first three bosses with each attempt. That was roughy 25% of the reward for the first half of the dungeon. There was enough “carrot” on the end of the stick to entice you to push as far as possible on each run, especially since all 8 dungeons were on 19-hour lockout timers. If you farmed only the first three bosses from each of the 8 dungeons in one day, you’d get LESS than if you simply tried to push all the way to end of ONE of those 8 dungeons.

Something along these lines would be WAY better than the current “all or nothing” system.

You could easily adapt this without any kitten kitten kitten “lockout timers” (which alone resulted in my entire guild leaving TSW pretty quick when GW2 came along) by simply applying diminishing returns to this mechanic:

first run of the 24-hour reset period in a dungeon with 5 bosses? 0 tokens for the first boss, 8 for the second boss, 8 for the third boss, 14 for the 4th boss, and 30 for the final boss.

all subsequent runs of the same path within that 24-hour reset? 0 – 0 – 0 – 5 – 15

Like that. It’s just functions and tables. No significant changes at all.

It is certainly not very fun to spend several days trying to learn to clear an exp path with a static group of guild mates and get ZERO for the effort. Only when you can finally clear the exp path successfully and start farming it as you get better can you expect any reward at all. Frankly, this is total kitten. As a guild leader, it’s hard to keep everyone fired up and motivated to work through the learning process when everyone gets nothing but high repair costs for what can amount to many hours of trial and error before you finally figure it out.

Edit: I understand the conudrum of trying to discourage farming only the first boss in an exp path as being “easier and faster”, but frankly you punish EVERYONE with the current approach only to stem a very small abuse that can be argued to not be an abuse at all. There are other games where its expected that groups who are gearing themselves up for full dungeon clears will indeed repeatedly farm the first one or two bosses to slowly bootstrap themselves into the gear level required to tackle the harder bosses further in the dungeon.

Ban the bots if want to stop abuse that somehow messes up the economy. Players have no trouble recognizing bots: we see them everywhere and they’re dead obvious. In less than 1 second, we can recognize a bot in action. How hard is it to build some heuristic heatmap analytics that will clearly identify bot action in dungeons?

LOS double-pulls and L-shaped two-player pulls will both work to split larger social groups in two.

LOS double-pull: stand near edge of LOS and shoot the marked target from extreme distance. Backpedal even further beyond the LOS. When entire group leashes, hit the marked target again and run towards it slightly. In most cases you’ll retain only the marked target and maybe one or two from the original group. Prime example: Lt. Kohler in any of the AC exp paths. You can get him alone and his two adds will leash back up top.

L-shaped two-player pull: Player A shoots at anything other than the marked target in a social group and drags them horizontally across the rest of his party at a point about 1200 out from the party. Player B in the party shoots the marked target as the group passes in front of the party, while Player A curves away from the party. Net result? only a few near the marked target will split off towards the party, and the rest will leash as Player A continues running, and will then ignore the party as they leash back to their origin point.

FINY.4710:

shaktiboi.5194:

Same request for medium armor too, please. Not everyone wants to spend 17 gold on T3 human cultural boots (medium) to achieve a tapered calf legging look. And not everyone is human to begin with.

The medium boots from CM are quite slim and pretty though!

Fair enough, but it’s CM (shudder). And that’s how many unfun runs? It’s bad enough I have to slog through AC 15x times to get enough tokens for a staff whose stats I can only get from there, and for 500 tokens that will eventually be needed to get Twilight.

Other dungeons are fun to run. Not AC and CM.

Same request for medium armor too, please. Not everyone wants to spend 17 gold on T3 human cultural boots (medium) to achieve a tapered calf legging look. And not everyone is human to begin with.

One other fix that would go a long way, although I suspect this is more difficult to implement. The “downed” mechanic in this game is obviously meant to provide an additional emergency decision/goal to encounters of all sorts, but perhaps especially so for dungeon encounters:

“Can I—and should I—get to that downed player and get him back up so that he can get back into the action? Otherwise we risk missing a DPS check or even wiping entirely and resetting the boss.”

It’s a nice mechanic. It’s a great idea. But right now, the execution of this great idea is BAD. Primarily because 70% of the time—possibly more—it is futile to even attempt to revive a downed player, because of the poor AI behavior of bosses after they down a player:

1. Often the boss just stands there and keeps prioritizing the downed player as a damage target. Your aggro code should INSTANTLY wipe a downed player off the boss’s aggro table. And add a 10-second immunity to being moved to the top of the aggro table.

2. Even if other players are attempting to drag the boss away from the downed player so that one team member can somewhat safely attempt to get to and revive that player, half the time the boss will just stand there and switch to ranged mode, right on top of the downed player. So the player that comes near to try and revive risks moving to the top of the hate table because your aggro code so strongly relies on proximity rather than true “hate point accumulation”.

3. Even if neither of the above two mechanics come into play, it also seems that boss’s AI tends to prioritize a player who is actively in the process of reviving another player. So literally 70% of the time when I go to revive a downed teammate who is otherwise clear and free to be revived, the boss will nearly instantly switch his aggro to start shooting at me, and I have to dodge roll away because I cannot stand there and take the onslaught even with the 2x revive speed of me and the downed guy both mashing the revive button. Remember, not every group has a pet thief or two with Shadow Refuge. Most classes have no revive-immunity skills/traits, and even if they do very few people will choose to give up a precious skill slot for them. Theives are about the only exception because Shadow Refuge doubles as an emergency play-dead skill. Or as a useful “stealth run the entire group past this trash encounter towards the next boss” skill, lol.

The end result of all these poorly-implemented revive/down mechanics is that roughly half of the boss encounters I’ve seen so far are clearly declared “every man for himself” encounters, where the team understands that it risks a wipe to even attempt to revive someone who is seemingly in the clear. We do better on those encounters when the downed player is totally ignored and knows they should just suicide as fast as possible (by mashing damage attacks instead of attempting to heal themselves) and run back from the waypoint as fast as possible.

There should be ZERO incentive to declare an encounter “every man for himself—don’t get downed and if you do, just speed your defeat and run back ASAP”.

(continued from first post)

Cadecus’s Manor – story mode

Just a mess of dreary trash encounters with A) too many ranged foes in one encounter, and B) too many trash foes in general in each trash encounter. Yes, I know you can abuse reflect shields against ranged foes but lets be honest: not every class has good ranged reflect damage or absorb damage screens/walls/domes. And even if you’re lucky enough to have those classes in your group, they don’t refresh quickly enough to deal with this level of overtuned onslaught. There should never be more than two ranged foes in any one trash pull: more than that you can’t deal with unless you’re a group full of mesmers and guardians and thieves.

I know people complain about the trash encounter with the two rifle snipers in the treehouse, but honestly that one’s not bad once you realize you can LOS the snipers with the tree trunk and they won’t come down with the other trash. That is in fact a well-tuned trash encounter, IMO.

2. However, the final encounter just past that sniper trash one is total kitten. There are just way too many adds with that boss, and between the boss and the hard-hitting ranged adds and no real boss mechanics other than a cheap near-one-shot with NO real visible telegraph and NO time to react to it even if you see it, that final encounter is just a mess of cheap overtuned waypoint zerging. Terrible that a bunch of level 40s are thrown up against this.

3. The first rocket golem boss? a terribad encounter. Great idea, but terrible execution, primarily because there is no visible tell when he’s about to shoot a rocket at YOU. Oh sure, you can see the rockets just fine from the side when he’s shooting at a player far away from you, but when he’s facing you directly, the rocket is invisible. No warning, just dead.

4. The guy in the living room? Again, his really bad near-one-shot has no visible tell and even if you do know it’s coming, it’s nearly impossible to react to.

Overall, you could improve the perception and “fun” of problem dungeons like AC and CM by ensuring that all gimmick attacks on both trash and bosses have A) extremely visible telegraphs, and B) you should add literally 2-3 seconds longer (or more) to plan and react to those tells before the gimmick executes. This type of change is minor in that its just an animation re skin and changing some timer values in a table or function. It’s not a major redesign overhaul.

You can also make drastic improvements for some of the overtuned trash encounters by simply lowering the number of mobs in some of them, particularly looking at the multiple ranged mobs or multiple mobs with gimmick one-shots such as the scavenger gravelings that come in pairs. again, this is simple triage by changing a value in a table or function here and there

Not a “dungeons are bad” feedback. Instead, I’ll point out two dungeons that my guild generally considers as really fun and nicely-balanced with good mechanics, versus two dungeons that we universally feel are examples of really bad design and mechanics.

First, the good stuff that we’d like to see more of, and why:

Citadel of Flame – Story mode

Just perfect for a “story” mode difficulty. The trash mobs had no hard-to-see telegraphs for one-shot attacks, and no too-fast overlapping AOE or perma-KD mechanics or anything like that. Also, the trash encounters could be cleared in 2-3 minutes or sooner, with only a few downs here and there. Best of all, every single boss encounter was perfectly tuned. Every single boss encounter had clearly visible telegraphs that lasted long enough to prepare and react to the imminent threat. Even the hardest boss (the one with two ghost blades/hammers/etc) took only about 5 wipes (for first timers) to figure out. Once we realized that we all needed to fight from extreme range with 1200 range attacks, spread out in a wide circle with lots of distance between us, and watch for his obvious tell that he was about to charge you and be ready to dodge roll when he did so, we executed perfectly on that try with only one player getting defeated during that try.

Twilight Arbor – Story mode

Again, every trash encounter was clean and doable within 2-3 minutes at most, with no cheap overlapping perma-CC or DOT circles being printed too fast. No one-shot mechanics with too-quick telegraphs. All the bosses were interesting (except for the underwater fish, which was just a big high-HP target dummy with no real threat or mechanics at all).

Everyone universally loved those two specific dungeon paths, and thought they were “very fun”. Especially that final boss in CoF: great mechanics and something different than the usual dungeon boss encounter.

Now for the BAD. And it’s too bad that these are typically the first dungeons that most players see, which sets a bad tone and bad impressions.

Ascalonian Catacombs – both story mode and Detha’s path (and probably all paths)

We’ve done only story mode and Detha’s path so far. The main thing that makes this dungeon NOT fun and totally a PITA are:

1. Scavenger gravelings have a 1-shot attack (especially if there’s a pair of them) with a telegraph that is FAR too difficult to see and FAR too short to react to. If you do see it, many classes don’t have an interrupt that is A) fast enough, and B) long-range enough to stop them from doing their 1-shot pounce. Their telegraph is nearly impossible to see in the the confusion of a fight with other gravelings jumping all around too.

2. Lt Kohler suffers from the same problem as the scavenger gravelings: his 1-shot gimmick has a tell that is a little easier to see (but not much) than the scavengers, but not nearly long enough in duration to respond to. I tried every single weapon attack and skill that a guardian has available to interrupt him and failed every single attempt even when knowing exactly what to watch for. Other members likewise swore up and down that they tried to interrupt immediately upon seeing the tell, and they likewise all failed. On every attempt. ait doesn’t help that when he fights near a wall, half the time his tell arm clips into the wall and you don’t know whether it’s a normal backswing or his tell. But that’s not the really bad part, as bad as it in fact is. The worst part is that A) he uses his gimmick attack far too often, and B) his yank range is longer than the longest ranged weapon attack, so even if you’re non-melee, it is nearly impossible to see how far you need to get away from him, or it’s impossible to get far enough away given the small confines of the fighting area.

All in all Kohler is the single worst, crappiest, cheapest boss encounter I’ve ever seen in any game. Not challenging, not fun. Just cheap and messy. No wonder everyone just skips him. Even if you we’re to make his chest drop something desirable, I think most people would still choose to skip him entirely as he stands today.

3. Story mode has at least one trash encounter with too many rangers who have fast-printing and overlapping AOE circles that hurt extremely bad. A smaller quantity that printed less frequently would be fine and fun, but in the current state it’s just a field of death with no way to move out of it. And no, the typical response to rangers (use reflect shields!) is no good here because these are ground-based spike traps.

(continued in next post)

Before last night’s patch that ended the Halloween event, there were numerous reports of a progression-stopping bug in AC path 1 (Hodgin’s). Anyone know whether this bug is still in place after last night’s patch?

Edit: here’s one report to which I refer: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/AC-Hodgins-Path-Bug

Edit: here’s the other report to which I refer: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/AC-bug-keeps-happening/first#post584654

buzzkapow.8465:

Potential Future Revenue lost vs Potential Future Revenue gained is worth it?

This. This is what I feel quite a few fanboys on this thread are missing.

Let’s be realistic: Anet made bank—serious bank—on the box sales of this game alone. They can literally afford to experiment with the cash shop for a while, because they’ve already made bank and there are already some solidly-designed high-income SKUs on their cash shop.

The entire point of the OP in this thread was to provide clear feedback directly to Anet that this experimental aspect of their cash shop—the gambling aspect—is a huge anathema to me, and judging from the outcry over the chests WRT this halloween event experiment, I am not alone in my negative perception of Anet at this point.

Anet alone will look at the numbers and look at the feedback and community reactions, and they alone will have the data to decide. I’m simply doing my part to provide feedback.

And why the kitten do I care? Because this is an awesome game overall, and I want to see it thrive and survive and continue to entertain us—me—for years. And that doesn’t happen without a positive cash flow and enough profit to pay for the maintenance and development costs.

There are many cautionary tales out there, the most recent being The Secret World. Another awesome game (in its way) that is suffering because they can’t make their numbers. As a result, us fans of that game suffer too.

TheRabbit.9478:

shaktiboi.5194:

TheRabbit.9478:

shaktiboi.5194:

TheRabbit.9478:

Gem -> Gold conversion.

Now you can buy any skin you want for gems.

You’re welcome.

Hmmm. At an exchange rate of $20 cash = 1600 gems = roughly 12 gold? No thanks.

Besides, again, the point of the OP was feedback to Anet about how they could make more revenue and create good will instead of bad will.

Ohhh ok. So you people are whining that you want things for cheaper. I could have sworn this was a thread about not being able to use RMT to buy in game things. Oh wait, it is.

Sorry, no. Here: I’ll put it in the simplest terms possible for you:

Anet would have gotten $50 out of me if they’d charged a straight, reasonable price of $10 per skin.

Anet will not see a single cent from me. Especially not to buy gems to convert to gold to pay jacked up AH prices. Because ultimately, the price this way is too high.

So: they could have gotten $50 from me easily. Instead they get $0 from me. I am not alone. Do the math. Are there more people like me who will pay nothing at all if they can’t pay a reasonable price? Or are there enough people who will pay a more exorbitant price SUCH THAT they make up for all the people like me?

My bet is is that the people who will buy enough gems to pay 50+ gold on the AH for items, plus the people who will spend lots of cash for keys for the slot machine, do not in sum total outweigh the people like me.

It’s that simple.

Ok, so you think the skins should only be worth 5 gold each (~$10 converted to gems). Sounds like you have a problem with there being a free market in the game. The suggestion forum is over here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions

Try telling them that you want everything available at a fixed price.

In-game player economy <> cash shop real world economy.

Economy and pricing science fail for you, my friend.

Besides, there are numerous recent examples of severe manipulation of in-game player economies. Famous ones. In several games. Even on Maguuma server, quite recently, with a scam delivered by some wily Goonsquad members with a fairly elaborate scheme, the likes of which they’re somewhat famous for. (-gasp- is anyone surprised?)

TheRabbit.9478:

shaktiboi.5194:

TheRabbit.9478:

Gem -> Gold conversion.

Now you can buy any skin you want for gems.

You’re welcome.

Hmmm. At an exchange rate of $20 cash = 1600 gems = roughly 12 gold? No thanks.

Besides, again, the point of the OP was feedback to Anet about how they could make more revenue and create good will instead of bad will.

Ohhh ok. So you people are whining that you want things for cheaper. I could have sworn this was a thread about not being able to use RMT to buy in game things. Oh wait, it is.

Sorry, no. Here: I’ll put it in the simplest terms possible for you:

Anet would have gotten $50 out of me if they’d charged a straight, reasonable price of $10 per skin.

Anet will not see a single cent from me. Especially not to buy gems to convert to gold to pay jacked up AH prices. Because ultimately, the price this way is too high.

So: they could have gotten $50 from me easily. Instead they get $0 from me. I am not alone. Do the math. Are there more people like me who will pay nothing at all if they can’t pay a reasonable price? Or are there enough people who will pay a more exorbitant price SUCH THAT they make up for all the people like me?

My bet is is that the people who will buy enough gems to pay 50+ gold on the AH for items, plus the people who will spend lots of cash for keys for the slot machine, do not in sum total outweigh the people like me.

It’s that simple.