Solvar.7953

Note also that over the 28 day login cycle, you will get 20 mystic coins from the login reward chests. So that is almost 1 more/day for doing nothing but logging in.

It may also be because GW2 really only lets you have one story (quest) active at a time. So while other games may have side quests that flesh things out, GW2 is very linear - do A, then do B, then do C, etc. GW2 tries to get around some of this by local map events, which since they repeat on a regular basis don't real feel much like story, and by making use of collections. For example, the skyscale collection is would be a side quest in any other game, but in GW2, it is formulated as a collection as a way to get rid of the 'one active story' at a time problem.

There is likely not return on investment for an engine rewrite. If you could definitively say (not sure how you could) that an engine rewrite would result in 2x the money coming in that it cost to do, you can bet they would rewrite the engine Instead, players probably fall into one of these categories: - Currently active players, who buy gems. A very small amount of these may stop playing because of the engine, but most likely the engine would be a contributing factor, not the only factor. - Active players who don't buy much. Maybe a new engine would inspire them to buy stuff. Only real case I could see for that is the cosmetics with an improved engine are sufficiently better than players would want them, when they don't now. - Prospective players (F2P accounts). Some number may try the game, and decide they don't want pay many for a game that performs poorly, but this is probably a small number. The only real hope for a payback is that the engine (and likely textures to go with it) are so much better that it blows the socks off and creates a new buzz for the game. But pulling that off would seem like a real longshot.

Some of the rationale for time gates is to stretch out the content as it is just released, and in the case of legendaries or things that require materials, to reduce the spike in prices. If Anet released a non time gated legendary tomorrow that used a lot of materials, those materials would like spike in price as everyone wants to be the first to complete it. But after a few months, this timegating seems unnecessary, and really becomes annoying. This is especially true for time gates that require some amount of activity - if you are in a situation where you really only have time to play a couple days a week, but a time block of several hours to play, this makes it harder to complete something vs someone who can play every day for 30 minutes - even though the weekly play time in both cases may be about the same. It seems like the game already adds things to encourage daily playing (login reward, daily achievements) - if those are not getting people to log in, I doubt the time gates are adding much.

If daily AP is removed, this opens a slippery slope - as noted, salvaging has a cap. All the festivals have APs which you can do some number of times for AP points, and then award 0 AP, but the achievement is still repeatable - should those be unlimited also? There are probably lots of other repeatable achievements that cap out AP.

While I'm at AP cap, I think the cap is a good idea, and still often do dailies for the 2 gold (actually more if you include the rewards for the daily chests). I'm at about 27K AP, so more than half of my AP is coming from the daily. If there was not cap, even more of my AP would be from dailies (and I suspect this is true for lots of characters_ - if 10 ap/day went back to release, there would be about 30K of AP from dailies if there is no cap. While looking at a characters AP is meaningless, if you see they have 25K, you at least know they did something more than just log in each day. And it seems completely reasonable to me that if you want some of the higher tier AP rewards, you do actual work for them.

For most of the PvE stuff, you just need enough people to do it - they don't need to form an actual group of squad. I often participate in metas without joining a squad. For HoT, people will often just shout out on the map chat of 'Need help with X hero point', and others will show up to help out. There is some content (dungeons, fractals, raids, strikes) which you do need to form an actual group to play. But you don't actually need to play those game modes.

I think some of the fault is that when you complete the 3 dailies, it still shows an award of 10 AP, but your AP does not in fact go up. It would be better if in fact it instead showed 0 AP as the reward (though then people would ask, why am I now getting 0 AP). But it showing 10 AP that you in fact do not get is a bit misleading.

The post about GW1 (and each release having a full story) reminds me a problem with LS story, which is that with 2 months between installments, it is pretty easy to forget various details about what is going on. I know some folks re-play the previous episode shortly before the next release to refresh their memory. But it also feels like a lot of the more recent stories have characters just running around the map doing mostly pointless stuff, just as a way to stretch out the release. GW2 has never been very good about side stories - it is pretty much the main story, or various map events which are things going on, but don't add much to the story.

I leveled it up as I played, but the only thing you really need it for is crafting ascended equipment (you can get some ascended drops, and I think there are some other sources, but I think if you want a full set in a timely fashion, you need to craft it, as it is account bound). You may need it for legendaries also (definitely end game), but I can't remember if there are minimum level requirements for the various gifts. You can buy level 80 exotic gear of the TP, for probably about the same it would cost to craft (or if you had the materials, how much you could sell the materials for). If people could make a lot of money by buying mats of TP, turning it into exotic equipment, and then selling it, people would be doing it, and the prices would stabilize again. IMO, there are some synergies of crafting and the class - it certainly makes it easier for the armor crafting to match the weight of the armor (not much reason for the person who wears heavy armor to have tailor, because by definition, you are going to need to shuffle the created armor about). Weapons are not as clear cut, as there is more overlap, but probably doesn't make a lot of sense for a warrior to have artificer, as I don't think any of the weapons made by artificer are used by warrior. My warrior has weaponsmith, by ranger huntsman, and mesmer artificer. One thing is that exp you gain by crafting can increase your overall level. So that can be a decent way to get the character high level (unless you have any of the other ways to do so)

Even better, at least as far as achievements go, would be a way to get to the part of the instance where certain achievements start, and skip all the junk (trash mobs, conversations,etc) that lead up to it. It would make achievements easier to get, because you could retry more easily. But at this point, I've largely given up on a lot of them, because I do not find it fun playing through 15 minutes of junk content, only to then fail at the achievement in the first minute of the battle. Though in reality, I don't expect Anet to ever fix this. The fact they never updated the LS2 ones so that you could try to get them when playing through first time on another character is evidence of something that does exist (all following LS stories support this), and it is incredibly rare that Anet ever touches old content.

The comments about 'if you add this, why not add this totally out of balanced thing' are not generally useful. That is like saying they should sell home instance nodes that give you 500 leather/day, because after all, they already have one that gives you 5, so whats the difference. There clearly is a difference. Anet already sells a lot of things for gems that save the player gold or makes gold for them. This is just another one. Yes, with the 5 minutes the player saves, they could do other content and earn something in that 5 minute time span. I don't see that as a major shift in the economy, or even a minor shift in the economy. I personally think adding this would make financial sense for Anet. People would buy the butler (presumably it is priced reasonable). It would probably lead to more sales of home instance nodes also - I've talked with some others, and there comment is that they just can't be bothered with home instance nodes (I was in that same situation for a long while, until I got enough of the LS ones and farmed those on a daily basis to get ascended trinkets for all my characters). But the amount of materials generated from home instance nodes is probably a drop in the bucket compared to open world gathering, salvaging of items, and other rewards.

My presumption on such a system is that whenever you enter your home instance, the butler would be there and say something like 'Pardon me sir, here is the stuff I gathered today while you were away', and basically gives that 1 day of harvesting - not weeks or months of stuff. Also, I already have random skritt or ogres living in my instance (depending on which path I took when playing through the core game). So giving them something to do wouldn't be unreasonable. The complication here would be pricing - the value of it really depends on how much stuff you have in your home instance. Most home instance nodes have a payback of 1-2 years. In terms of economy, the game has sold lots of stuff in the gemstore which in theory could mess up the economy (tools that no longer break, salvage kits that are cheaper, or just nodes themselves that produce goods). It does save the players a few minutes per day, which they could presumably use making gold elsewhere, I can't see that being a significant impact.

This would probably lead to some sales for Anet. People buying the butler (I would), and then people buying the home instance nodes because gathering would be so quick and simple. So it would have some impact on the economy, but I doubt it would be significant. GW2 does a pretty good job on the economy with the trading post, so even if more of some materials were produced, it may also result in more people buying them for whatever they need. And a fair amount of the materials (LS ones) are account bound anyways. For glyphs, could be a something in the interface where you select what glyphs/tools you want your butler to use. May for simplicity, these have to be permanent tools (more sales there), if the user doesn't have permanent tools, then only basic gathering is used (you can't buy the limited used special tools and have the butler use them)

What Anet should do is rebuild the JPs as races, with just a super long timer (way longer than it would take to do the JP). Advantages I see with this: - You can reset to the start of the race if you mess up. Some JPs are quite a ways away from a waypoint, so just getting back to the JP in case of death is annoying. - As evidenced by the winterdays race, there is logic in races to detect if a person is using a mount or not. So they could remove those no mount zones and just use that logic. - Races have gates that show up - for longer JPs, or those that are less obvious, this could be used to show the players where to go, instead of players needing to look at the wiki or use TACO. This would have the side effect of making ports harder (good? bad? depends on your point of view I guess). -

Apple is notorious for giving few details about upcoming releases (when the release will happen, what will be in it). I suspect Anet wants to get ahead of this, and doesn't want to be surprised by Apple releasing the next OS with very little notice that removes support for OpenGL, and people unable to play when they update to that OS. Now they have potentially give lots of refunds (anyone who is not going to play anymore and bought things recently), explain to players why they can't play, etc. And as other have mentioned, there is the cost to develop and maintain the MacOS version. Even if it works right now, every time they do a new build, they need to do some amount of testing on it to make sure nothing breaks, and especially any new features work. And if they know they are going to drop support, it then becomes a business decision - does it make sense to keep supporting it for 6 more months, and then end support then? Or better to end support now and take those resources that are maintaining & testing it and have them doing something else.

While technically against TOS, I also suspect Anet won't care much if you are just messing with things in the mystic forge. They care much more about these type of things when it comes to people doing semi automatic farming/killing things in PvE.

The problem is probably more that if there is no content for 3 months, you will get people saying the game is dead, Anet has abandoned it, etc. So even if the result is that after 4 months, there is a bigger/better release, Anet is fighting that perception for 3 months that nothing is going on. Releasing content, even poor content, perhaps gives some people solace that Anet is still working on the game.

The reason I want mounts & gliders allowed in jumping puzzles isn't to make it easy to get rewards, but so that instead these no mount/no gliding areas don't exist on the maps, so you don't suddenly get dismounted if you get too close to a jumping puzzle. For JPs that are sufficiently isolated from the map, I don't really care. Though if the goal is to really make sure people do the JP the 'right' way, portals and TP to a friend should also get removed, but people seem upset about that (why is bypassing them one way OK, but another way not?)

The rewards for the JPs are such crap anyways, that I can hardly imagine people using mounts would be a very big deal, though it does sort of defeat the point of the puzzle. The problem I have is that they add no gliding/no mount areas to various world maps to 'protect the integrity' of the jumping puzzles, but it does mean that if you are just doing normal activities on that map unrelated to the JP, you get unmounted. And in lots of cases, you can still bypass the jumping puzzle with various mount & gliding skills (as new skills were added since that initial protection). For new maps, Anet can hopefully isolate any jumping puzzles enough that this is not an issue. But really, for an unid green item, not sure it really makes much difference.

And for drizzlewood, there really isn't any downtime when a meta isn't going on. So at any given time, there are probably going to be players trying to do the adventures or other achievements on not the meta.

Anet can really only sell stuff to people that are playing the game (if you are not playing the game, why would you spend money on it). So anything that keeps players playing, even temporarily, gives Anet some money. So even if players show up for 1 week each time a new LS shows up, and then go away and play other games until the next LS shows up, that is a 1 week opportunity to sell them some stuff. I'm not quite sure where else Anet should invest resources. Would new PvP or WvW maps really attract new players, or (at this point) keep players from leaving? I suppose it may get some players to return for a time.

I think DW is still a problem - I hopped on a map that had just completed the north meta (wasn't my intention - that is just the map it tossed me on), and was able to loot some of the chests before things timed out. So if I was able to loot stuff without participating at all, it would seem like an AFK person (or someone not AFK, but doing other events on the map) could equally loot the rewards. Not sure if this same thing applies to the south meta.

I think the point is that if a full breakdown was given, such that you knew there was a 1% of some item worth 500 gp, 10% chance of item with 50 gp, 5% chance of item worth 20 gold, etc, one could take all those probabilities and say that on average, the stuff you get from a black lion chest is X gold. So if that was less than it cost to buy a key (via gem conversion), one could say one should not buy keys, if it is more, you are in theory making money. But since a lot of stuff you get may be account bound, you are not really making money - your overall account value may be going up by more than the key cost you, but you can not translate that directly into gold. Also, other objects (guaranteed skin unlocks) have an imprecise value that varies based on account. On a brand new account that hasn't unlocked anything (why they would buy keys is a different question), since unlocks have a lower value because there are a lot of very common and cheap weapons it may unlock. On an account which has played a lot, the value of that unlock is more. My personal thought is more information is never a bad thing for the consumer. It may be that users will not complain statistics, but right now, vague definitions of rare, uncommon, etc are not great either.

I see lots of comments of 'make rewards better', and while that would certain draw some players to it, I don't really think that is a good fix or necessarily a good direction to the game. Effectively what Anet is doing in that case is paying players to play poor content. This sounds like most jobs, where the employer is paying the employee to do something that they otherwise wouldn't do. Basing a game on that seems like a poor idea - mostly because at some point the players will realize that they could instead play game X, in which the content is actually enjoyable to play.