EVERYTHING that is consumable and stacks (with the exception of wvwvw blueprints and boosters) should have a “consume all” option. I have enough karma to max the drinking title through ales from the vendor in cragstead but the thought of double-clicking through thousands and thousands of ales is very off-putting.
It works out alright for single-purpose, account-wide consumables like Luck, but giving other items consume all or salvage all options would burden CS agents with tickets from players who accidentally used the items on the wrong character, or wanted to consume/salvage one and ended up destroying the whole stack.
This is the kind of solution that causes more problems than it solves.
To be fair, time-gating charged crystals wasn’t necessary at all since you can barely harvest enough each day to make one (you get 10 crystals from the queen, 6 to 9 from regular nodes, and an extra 3 with a rare chance of getting 5 more from your home instance).
You can buy quartz crystals on the TP – and this was the case when it was first released into the game too – so the time-gate is the only restriction on creating charged quartz, you can buy 1000 crystals instantly if you wanted to.
So let’s say 1000 players gather one day to purchase 1000 crystals at once, making the total of quartz acquired from the TP 1 million units. Let’s also say the number of available materials is lower than that. So, now no more quartz is available in the world; how long does node farming take to make quartz available again? (Without taking into account that you would need surplus quartz, not just farmed material, since you would probably use it for crafting).
Which is why I say that rarity through scarcity isn’t necessarily a good thing; we’re also not requesting that it becomes common, abundant. Just that it becomes a little easier to acquire.
Crafting materials move through the TP so fast that this is irrelevant. What happens is the price of the remaining crystals are high, so players start farming them again and players like the one posting after you who has stacks of them waiting in his bank start putting them up on the TP – don’t need them so might as well turn them into something you can use via gold – and the supply builds up again with a few days.
It’s been attempted before, but it doesn’t work except in the very short term.
To be fair, time-gating charged crystals wasn’t necessary at all since you can barely harvest enough each day to make one (you get 10 crystals from the queen, 6 to 9 from regular nodes, and an extra 3 with a rare chance of getting 5 more from your home instance).
You can buy quartz crystals on the TP – and this was the case when it was first released into the game too – so the time-gate is the only restriction on creating charged quartz, you can buy 1000 crystals instantly if you wanted to.
You can. However, given the scarcity of nodes the prices can be pretty substantial. Atm a single quartz crystal is ~9s25c on the TP. Since you need 25 for a charged, that’s ~2g31s25c to make a single charged quartz. For exotic Celestial equipment, you need 5 charged each piece… raising the cost to ~11g56s25c AND a 5 day time gate.
I think this was a reaction to a problem they encountered when introducing Ascended crafting. Some of the component pieces are account bound but the materials such as Elonian Leather, Bolts of Damask, etc. were tradeable. They seemed to believe that because creating these items were time-gated, it would take a long time to craft ascended armor and weapons. But a few players spent whatever it costs and created their gear within days of release.
So this is the reverse situation – the components are tradeable, but the main crafting ingredient is account bound. Twelve gold is nothing – I have two accounts and can make 4g per day just doing the dailies (takes maybe an hour) and another few gold doing the boss events and selling the gear/salvage I get. Without the time gate someone who really wants it could have a full set of celestial exotics within a day even a set of ascended if he already had some of the money.
Now, most players who want them have already put in the time and/or spent the gold to get them. Whether the time-gate is still relevant or not… that’s a matter of opinion. If it’s on a list of changes for the next expansion or something, Anet isn’t going to talk about until right before the change goes through because they’ve learned not to release that kind of info too early.
To be fair, time-gating charged crystals wasn’t necessary at all since you can barely harvest enough each day to make one (you get 10 crystals from the queen, 6 to 9 from regular nodes, and an extra 3 with a rare chance of getting 5 more from your home instance).
You can buy quartz crystals on the TP – and this was the case when it was first released into the game too – so the time-gate is the only restriction on creating charged quartz, you can buy 1000 crystals instantly if you wanted to.
Just a guess, but I’d say that creating new content is a higher priority than non-critical issues like this. If it doesn’t break the game, changing something months or years later is a “maybe if there’s time to work on it” thing.
It turns out most MMO players are not into the whole “role playing” and “reading” aspects of the game. SWTOR tried to do that with fully-voiced cut scenes and found that most people use the spacebar to skip through them, which makes group content frustrating for everyone – half the players want to spacebar through cutscenes, the other half don’t because they don’t like getting “SPACEBAR!” yelled at them.
There are those who like these things, but most players just consider them a waste of time. They skip the story stuff and want to get back to killing monsters and collecting shinies ASAP. So the developers of such games try to find a balance between giving the game enough story to keep things making sense, and giving out enough rewards to keep people playing.
Change it. Small but important details like using a different design for male/female charr and asura armor is definitely a good idea. But indicating “female” by pasting on a pair of non-existent (or unnoticeable at least) mammary glands is not the way to do it.
I was patiently playing while waiting for some changes as well but at this point, I think I think I’ll wait it out doing something else. It doesn’t feel like I’ll miss anything going else where for a while and I am pretty sure they will address at least some of what I’d like to see at some point.
Was thinking more about what has got me turned off at this time. It’s a number of things but it mostly having to do things I don’t like doing. This is supposed to be a form of entertainment, afterall.
The other day I was watching a TV series on Netflix I had wanted to watch when it premiered but never got around to. The first few episodes were good, but after a while the plot got very weird and convoluted and I started to lose interest. But I kept watching because I wanted to see where it went. My wife watched a bit with me and went off to do other things. A few hours later she asked me what was happening in the show and I told her I wasn’t sure, I had lost interest in it and didn’t really follow the latest plot twists.
“So why are you still watching?” she asked. I realized I didn’t really know why I was still watching. This is supposed to entertain, not confuse and distract. I thought it would end soon but it didn’t. The next episode came on, and it was “Season 2, Episode 2.” I realized there would probably be hours more of this, and so I turned it off.
Play the game because you enjoy it. Play the way that you like, play the content that you like. If you’re not having fun, walk away. The devs have the next year or three planned out, and while those plans could change, they probably won’t change based on a forum thread or two. You can put down the game and pick it up again later. If it still doesn’t grab you, walk away again.
Well, if you write down two lists: “Classes with the best shield skills” and “Classes I like to play,” Mesmer is the only entry on both lists, so that would seem like a natural choice.
Is there a reason why you stopped playing a Revenant? They don’t get shields until level 80 so if you dislike the class in general it may not be the best choice to play while collecting the components for a Legendary item.
It’s a design decision, and one with a long history in computer RPGs (and their predecessors as well). If you don’t like it then design your own game, or look for another that better suits your playing style.
Generally speaking, in these games the less human-like a PC race is, the less players choose to play it. So there is already a minority of players who care about the charr either way, and it’s hard to say whether more players among this minority like them as they are or not. But the beast-like appearance is probably a major reason why a lot of those players chose to play a charr.
This is a design decision that was made long before the game released, and changing it would make the charr into something resembling furry, beast-headed norns. There would still be clipping issues, a lot of visual effects would have to be changed, it would introduce a massive number of bugs into the game, and many who preferred it the other way or were annoyed by the clipping/bugs would complain, loudly. Even offering a choice between two postures would involve a lot of work for the approval of a tiny percentage of the player base.
They recently cancelled all in-progress Legendaries so starting a new project to appeal to an even smaller segment of the player base just isn’t going to happen.
Im getting really tired of ppl telling me how to play the game and in what gear. I already play the most efficient stuff on 3 toons. Sue me for tryin to be clever with a build
If you don’t post complaints about how hard it is to craft the gear you want, people won’t respond with alternatives and easier to make options. You’re inviting comments by posting in a public forum, then complaining that your post gets responses.
Try harder next time, don’t be so obvious about it.
Yeah and of course i forgot to mention that it should be a toggle and you were unable to figure it.
They could require a tutorial video, a quiz, retype the process verbatim and point to the toggle with big glowing arrows and people will still mess it up and blame Anet.
Some people are probably doing that but I expect that to be relatively rare. It is very easy to end up losing money with that approach unless you are big gaps in prices somewhere. The supply would have to be low enough and demand high enough for the relisted items to sell in a timely manner.
It’s possible but difficult, and easy to end up with a bunch of TP listings that don’t sell because you misread the market. Most TP action is probably looking for low priced equipment, salvage, and sell the mats for a profit. Which involves a lot of clicking but if you’re careful you can end up making quite a bit from fluctuations in prices.
Same thing has been said many many many times over the years since release, with the same answers (including responses by the on-staff economist). This is a solution for a problem that only exists in the complainers’ minds.
Really hope Anet will release new races in order for me to create four other characters for the four remaining professions :-).
Best regards.
Bahan
What about male/female of each race? That would be ten toons, one of each profession and double up on your favorite.
Myself, I’ve created and deleted dozens of toons looking for the mix of race/profession I like. I don’t have an organized system, but I don’t care much for the Charr or male Norns, they distort the non-cultural armors too much for my tastes and just look weird overall. I ended up with more Sylvari than anything else, a few female Norns, and a couple of humans and Asura.
Yesterday I decided to purchase HoT and I’m starting over with a fresh account with four Sylvari, one each for the light/medium/heavy armor professions and a “boss runner” to use the 80-level token on. Visually speaking, they are the most varied race, with a lot of different options in skin color, face and hair style, etc.
How much of the spike is being caused by players now hording or even buying up MC as they enter the TP thus keeping supply low because they hear that MC prices are/will be going through the roof?
Essentially all of it. Nothing has moved demand in the past couple months, and consumption should be down from the price surge.
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What about the new shortbow Legendary? Players who want it may be getting to the point where they are making Clovers of Random-mess for it.
What’s stupid is that people who want to actively play the game are at the mercy of those who just play the Trading Post. And that’s ANet’s responsibility to fix, not the players.
It’s a good thing this never happens in the real world, where the consequences can be a lot worse than taking a little longer to get your shiny new wardrobe skin.
People have dreams of spending a few gold to get something worth 3-4K gold. It’s hard to resist that sort of thing even though logically the likelihood is you’ll spend the gold and only get boosters, some odds and ends and maybe a few ticket scraps.
Oh, yes. The same thing happens when the Powerball jackpot goes over $200 million and the like. That’s why the gem exchange is working as intended – JS and the rest of the devs know what they’re doing.
People buying keys I bet. Some people are already reporting getting the contracts. One guy said he got 2 with 25 keys.
“For a limited time, all super rare Contract items in the Black Lion Chest have three times the chance to drop. Please note: they are still very rare.”
What does that mean? How can you “buy to win” in GW2? You can look shinier, but you can’t play better for having more to spend.
I just started playing again after a long break (sometime before HoT was released, got bored doing nothing but dailies and the champ train all the time). It’s kind of comforting to know that the forum arguments haven’t budged an inch since the last time I logged in.
Scarlet coming back from the dead really would be the perfect cherry cap on the Mary Sue sundae that was her entire existence.
Might as well, the entire story was written by taking the worst comic book tropes and throwing them into a blender. They could retcon it by pulling the “I didn’t really die, my arch-nemesis captured me and held me prisoner in the Phantom Zone while replacing me with an evil clone” storyline.
The only decent way to retcon the story would be to have the PC wake up and realize everything that happened since the introduction of Living Story was a dream, and reset the game world to the way it was at launch.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me four times… um.
Someone’s got your email password. If CS wouldn’t lock your account and restore to its rightful owner after being told it’s been hacked it’s because the hacker wrote back to them with YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS saying “false alarm, nevermind. All good here.”
Then, perhaps Dungeon Sellers could ask for an item(s) equal to the amount of Gold they would charge. Just as in GW1 where certain items became currency. No limit there. =)
And loose 15% when selling? Bad idea. Stop defending Anets decisions even if they only inconvenience 1% of the players.
Ask anyone who is blind or confined to a wheelchair how well the world is designed to accommodate them. Or just watch one of the many “little people in a big people world” TV shows.
When dealing with hundreds of thousands, millions or even billions of individuals, it’s just not possible to anticipate every person’s needs or desires and design around them. We have to settle for doing the best we can for the most people we can, and if that leaves less than 1% slightly inconvenienced, that’s really the best we can hope for.
Yell at the screen instead – use your voice, not your fingers. It has just as much effect, in that it’s all about making you feel less frustrated, and you can’t be suspended for verbally swearing at the computer.
Sigh… I miss the BLTC forum. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a good “TP flippers are scumbags” argument, and OP doesn’t even pretend to know anything about the subject. Try harder next time.
Botting works that way already mate. Hence the term undetecable on most popular bots..once they are detectable they are useless. So it is ALREADY about convincing them you are not using one if you wanna set one up.
So of course botters and wannabe botters want to be excluded from the 500g transfer cap… I can certainly understand that it bothers you, what I’m saying is that this isn’t an unintended side effect or bug that they need to fix, they knew before they set it up that some innocent players would be inconvenienced and they went ahead anyway. If they could tell who was legit and who wasn’t they would have set up the system to detect that in the first place. They can’t, they didn’t, and it’s unrealistic to think that they are going to go back and hand-check every account that protests the cap.
They knew that a small number of legit players would be affected before they made the changes… and went ahead with the changes anyway. I try to be realistic in my expectations, and if it’s going to cost $100 to make $50 then it isn’t going to happen because they would just be throwing money away.
So, the changes you’re asking for will not happen. If they were going to do something like that it would have been part of the changes they made to begin with. At some point they may adjust the weekly cap but they are not going to give specific accounts an exception to this because it’s essentially telling players “you can go ahead and set up a bot if you can convince us you are not setting up a bot.”
I totally agree they cant factor such small cases but so they should be ignored? I said this many times in this thread already – i am not looking for them to overhaul the whole thing. Just a way so we can SPEND EXTRA TIME/EFFORT to somehow work around it with anet support. Or maybe increase the mail limit that is sufficent for a week. Or.. many other things i already typed.
Unfortunately that is not going to happen. Support agents would have to examine the game logs in great detail to somehow confirm you’re not botting… and then continue to watch your account to make sure you don’t start. Multiply this by a hundred or so legitimate accounts and they would have to dedicate several CS agents to this.
In addition, individuals engaged in botting and RMT would surely “test” the effectiveness of Anet’s detection systems by claiming to be legit players affected by this and try to get the restriction removed as well. So thousands of accounts would be lined up to be approved, and it would be difficult to tell which were legit players and which were not.
This would be more costly than if they had never created the restrictions in the first place. They are not going to do this, your only choices is to accept the restrictions and adjust your activities to work within them, or to play another game.
Please explain how this is different from a random sampling of forum threads over the last 2.5 years… besides nothing mentioning the necessity of adding mounts to the game, that is.
It makes no difference that it’s a known sequence of numbers because it doesn’t matter to us. The PRNG being used repeats every 4 × 10^6001 numbers. If you call the PRNG 1000 times a second it will take greater then the duration of the known universe to repeat.
Well, there’s the problem then. If you were offline when you were supposed to get your precursor, you have to play another 150 billion years before it comes around again.
Sequence of numbers, not the numbers themselves. And you could say the same about any form of rng – what if you missed your lottery win because you didn’t buy a ticket last week?
It makes no difference that it’s a known sequence of numbers because it doesn’t matter to us. The PRNG being used repeats every 4 × 10^6001 numbers. If you call the PRNG 1000 times a second it will take greater then the duration of the known universe to repeat.
Well, there’s the problem then. If you were offline when you were supposed to get your precursor, you have to play another 150 billion years before it comes around again.
Yeah but….no
Guild wars 2 is intended to be different than that. Anet said countless times that they want the “journey to be the goal” rather than grinding new stuff to be able to play the new content.
So the OP is totally right in this particular point.
And a large number of players insist on treating the game like any other MMO. So who can blame the devs for giving players what they want? Thus they introduce fractals, ascended gear, optional stuff to grind for, “raid” boss Tequatl, an expansion, gear reset… it wouldn’t surprise me if they change their minds and raise the level cap too.
It’s essentially a gear reset, like when other games raise the level cap when an expansion is released. Suddenly your BiS gear is not anymore and you have to go out and earn new gear.
It’s a common enough thing in MMOs, the environment is always changing and the company behind the game is not going to hand out new stuff every time it happens. It provides a reason to keep playing the game, if you want to play a game that never changes once you reach the end, this is the wrong genre. It is assumed that any aspect of the game can and eventually will be changed.
I hear they are working on an expansion. Radical changes to how loot is distributed would probably be implemented with the expansion, or put off until after it is released. In either case they probably won’t announce it ahead of time because it would disrupt players doing things now if they knew they could wait a few months and get a guarantee of better loot.
Fair points. On the other hand, I don’t think they’re going to do anything. After all, they’re “fixing” the precursor issue with masteries, and there’s very little else in the game that’s worth much of anything.
Yep. When people complain about not getting good loot, they almost always mean “I haven’t gotten the precursor I want yet.” Or more recently, “I haven’t gotten access to the beta yet.”
There has been no movement on this issue from ANet. This could mean they don’t plan to do anything, or that they do plan to, but won’t tell us anything until it’s mostly ready. How would we know?
One of the reasons I tend to view this game with a healthy dose of cynicism is the Gag Order.
I hear they are working on an expansion. Radical changes to how loot is distributed would probably be implemented with the expansion, or put off until after it is released. In either case they probably won’t announce it ahead of time because it would disrupt players doing things now if they knew they could wait a few months and get a guarantee of better loot.
I’ve never thought of a computer program as really being capable of truly being random.
But even if it can’t it doesn’t really matter, because the program doesn’t have emotions and will just work the same way for everyone.
I said sufficiently random. I can’t predict what loot will drop, nor can anyone else. The “seed” has been confirmed not to be connected to account number, or age, or the height of your character or any other number that would permanently kitten any particular account.
The same complaints pop up every so often since the game was released, and if the system was bugged they would have found it by now. Nor was it secretly created to favor new accounts, old accounts, or people named Charles or whatever. As long as you vary your in-game activities to avoid triggering DR you have the same chance at getting a particular piece of loot as everyone else. Anet gains nothing and loses much if they deliberately cheat players out of pixels that are ultimately worthless anyway.
And as I stated in my last post, people are horrible at understanding probabilities. With a low enough chance you can get a significant percentage getting nothing while a relative few get a boatload given enough trys. That’s the nature of randomness. There isn’t a discernible pattern. There will always be “unlucky” and very “lucky”.
Just to be clear here, I know that there is nothing wrong with the loot system and that it truly is sufficiently random, and that any extremely lucky streak can end at any time. The anecdotes about accounts that collect precursors like popcorn on movie night are just simple trolls or exaggerations. I know it will never happen, but I’d like to see those who claim otherwise “put up or shut up.” I know that any real experiment of this nature will only reinforce the realization that loot is random and occasionally people get lucky but over a period of time results are pretty much what you would expect.
This is the quote from John Smith I was thinking of earlier today:
“This is the kind of post I mean when I say evidence. I don’t require numbers I require a coherent idea that makes sense in this setting. If I think it’s valid I’ll be researching it myself (assuming I haven’t already).”
JS has proven to be a reasonable and open-minded person. If you can show that there may be a problem, it doesn’t matter what the other players say, if you can convince him the issue should be looked at then he will do so.
The system would be “bugged” if there was a significant difference between a normal and “problem” accounts. In science, I believe a “significant difference” is a difference of 5% or more.
The problem here is, if the experiment was conducted and data appeared to be perfectly normal and reasonable, I wonder how many people would discredit the data purely because they have experienced otherwise. (People currently discredit A-net’s word).
The only opinion that matters belongs to John Smith. I don’t know if the thread from the Black Lion forum survived the Great Forum Massacre a while back, but he once said something to the effect that you don’t have to prove there is a problem beyond a shadow of a doubt, just provide a real hypothesis for him to test and he will investigate.
Really? Just 5 or 10 accounts will give reputable evidence? It does not seem likely, to me, but, of course, I am no expert.
If we get more that would be even better, but managing 5-10 accounts at a time is far easier then say 30.
Except that’s not enough to provide reliable results.
How many accounts were involved in the data that showed there was a problem with ecto salvaging? I can remember one person posting his data, but I don’t know if anyone else did.
This isn’t about proving anything, its about providing enough information to back up the claims and convince the devs to investigate because they have far more data to work with but need a reason to look at it.
@ tolunart: You aren’t understanding how hard it is to gather evidence relating to this possible problem. Sorry you can’t understand…. Also this issue has nothing to do with rolling dice. Anet having a bug is much more likely than a dice being malformed or something to always roll a 1 or 6… There isn’t an outside variable with dice where the dice can be bugged.
I disagree, but that’s okay. I don’t really care what you think about my capacity to understand things.
