Solvar.7953

Just a note, right now one can do this, but it is a manual process. Put your good tools in shared inventory slots, and equip normal tools. Then you just double click on the shared inventory slot with the good tool to swap with normal, and repeat when done with that character. That is what I do, and I don't ever have plans to to buy more gathering tools from the gemstore. But I would be willing to pay something to not have to do that manual switching, and get those 3 shared inventory slots back for something else. In theory, Anet should be able to mine this data (how many people have gathering tools in the shared slots, how many people have bought one set (or close to that) for their entire account, etc. If that number is large, it would suggest a lot of people are doing what I do. If the number of tools in shared slots is low, or the number of accounts that have bought many sets is much greater than those that have bought one, that suggests there may not be a lot of money to be made. But it is hard to know how many people might buy tools from the gemstore if they could more easily share them among all their characters, but in the mean time, are just willing to breakable tools from vendors (especially since you can now get some that act like they have certain glyphs from certain vendors in the major cities)

The LS episodes draw people in when they are new, and then the players move to the latest LS when it releases. So the old LS (and really, even old core maps) generally don't have a lot of players because people are playing the latest content. There are some exceptions, as there are some interesting meta events that draw players in. The problem for the LS maps is that there are only so many metas people can do, so they start overlapping times with other metas, so now players are needing to choose meta A or meta B. And which one they choose could depend on many factors - how fast it is, the level of rewards, how interesting/fun it is to play, etc.

In some cases, like the clocktower, it won't start a new run if less than 2 minutes or so. So you sit around for 2 minutes for the timer to run out, get dumped into a new instance where you then wait for another minute for it to allow new players to start. Now 3 minutes isn't a lot of time, but I'm playing the game to have fun, not sit around and have nothing happen. The really annoying one is sanctum sprint activity. It will dump you into an instance and then helpfully display a message along the lines like 'there is not enough time left for you to compete and get any rewards', but because the sanctum sprint activity takes a while, I think that cutoff is closer to 5 minutes. But that one is especially galling - dumping you into an instance that once you get there, they game knows there is not sufficient time to complete the run.

This is one of those annoying bugs that also hits the clocktower at halloween, and really any instanced content. I guess it isn't straightforward to fix (whatever logic choosing what instance to dump a player into may not know how much time is left in that instance). However, there must be some communication going on, because the selector knows how many players are in a given instance and whether it can dump new ones there.

If my math is right, it is $7/slot (5 slots for 2800 gems is best deal). If someone wants to spend thousands of dollars to get hundred of slots, I honestly don't see much a problem with it, and it helps out Anet. There may very well be some technical issues where allowing thousands of slots adds a fair amount of complication, and if only a few people buy them, it is not worth it. But it clearly seems like a decent number of folks are wanting more slots, so increasing the number to 30 seems reasonable to me. I suppose Anet can gather numbers and see number of slots people have unlocked. Maybe right now, only a tiny minority have unlocked all the available ones, which is why there is not reason to unlock more, because at best, you would only be selling to those who are currently maxed out - someone who has 10 slots is not likely to buy more if the cap becomes 30.

The above example of ineffective AFK farming may be one reason why Anet doesn't care much about preventing it. Other than looking bad, it really doesn't affect the game much. I have to imagine that even the effective AFK farmers probably are not generating that much loot that it really doesn't affect supply/prices of things much. Of course, it costs the farmer nothing else, so even if they are only generate a couple gold an hour, that is more than zero. It would be nice for Anet to prevent that from happening, but in the great scheme of things, I personally don't see it as a real high priority.

I personally didn't like the LWS2 missions - I think the story was fine, but in a lot of the missions, you are playing a different character, as you assume Caithe is a flashback form. And then it is an odd thing where you have to control the character, fight things, can die, etc, but it is a flashback so you can't do anything but follow the strict path set forward, so it felt like an odd narrative to me. So it fills in a lot of the story, but adds very little content. You may be better off watching the video that fills in these stories, and saving the money for LWS 3 or 4, which at leads adds a new map for each chapter, instead of the total of 2 new maps for all of LWS2 (which as noted, you may not even need LWS2 to access)

Anet probably leaves multi boxing as a grey area, because they are happy to have that person to have paid for 6 accounts. I'm not going to defend multiboxing (I only have a single account), but based on rules as Anet has presented them, it seems the usage described above falls within them. Anet could certainly clarify the rules or add more restrictions (when multiboxing, the accounts can not be on the same map would be a simple one to prevent this). But unless Anet actually wants to enforced the rules, it really makes no difference, and I've not seen much indication that Anet does want to spend much effort enforcing the rules.

I suspect at best what Anet does with botting reports is see if there are a bunch related to the same map, and if so, maybe send a GM there to ping the players. They probably want to be overly cautious and not ban legitimate players, so a botting report by itself is not something they can act on. I suspect that for the most part, it probably isn't worth Anet's time to deal with it - they ban some accounts, those people create new ones, and repeat. The botters probably don't pay any actual money (convert to non-free account) until they have gathered enough stuff to make it worthwhile.

I see this in chromium - very hard to tell which groups have unread messages and which do not, as the font now looks to be the same.

So while original achievements in GW2 were grindy, they were not tied to metas. I've still not gotten the slayer for killing 1000 of some of the creatures, but am slowly getting there, and I can do them on most any map (presuming it has those creatures), and a mix of activities. In comparison, the meta achievements tend to have to be done on one map, with a singular activity to get to them. I'll eventually kill 1000 ettins, but unless I actually play Bjora Marches map, I'll never progress on most of those achievements.

It seems like Anets solution to lack of content is to make grindy achievements. I completed pretty much all the LWS 3 achievements and most of the LWS4 (I think I missed a Crack in the Ice because there were no spare achievements, and the one I was missing was in a story instance, and I didn't feel like playing through 10 minutes of that story chapter before I could even start the achievements). A lot from those maps seemed to be to cover really exploring the map - defeating all the notable bosses, scavenger hunt, etc. But with IBS, even with Grothmar Valley (last meta I've completed) it became grindy - destroy 100 devourer nests, do this event 20 times, etc. In my case, them being more grindy has backfired if Anet wants me to play more - I look at them, say "I'm never going to do all that crap, so no reason even trying"

I can understand time gating for new content to stretch out the play time (and if some of the materials are things bought off the trading post, it may help stabilize prices there because you don't have all the players putting in orders the first day). But once content has been out a few months, neither of these seem like big issues. Time gating is one of my biggest annoyances with GW2 - it would be simple for Anet to fix this, but they tend not to go back to old content to make adjustements.

I'd like an option to 'show all active groups' which only expands the tabs where there is a group, and not the others. Most of the time, the total number of groups is not very large anyways.

I'm not sure letting players create new instances would be a good thing. But letting players see the instances, and hop to a different one, could have some value. More than once I've been on a map where a commander is trying to organize some large scale activity I'm not interested in. I'd be more than willing to hop to another map to make space, but there isn't any great mechanism to do that - I suppose I could log out, then log back in again (or go to guild hall and leave), but there is no guarantee there that I will get on a different map. Related, the 'this map has few players and closes in an hour, click here to leave', it would be nice to see/have a choice what map it will dump me to. More than once, I've gotten dumped onto a map that has fewer players than the one I left from.

The input lag, vsync, freesync all gets somewhat complicated. If you are able to sustain 60 fps, it means your lag is around 17 ms (1000 / 60). If your FPS is 20, it means it is only drawing one frame every 50 ms (1000/20). Freesync doesn't really change that - what it changes is that it can draw that frame whenever it is ready, instead of waiting for the next refresh cycle (which worse case at 60 fps is 17 ms) I updated from a I7-3770 with a gtx 970 to a i7-9700 with a 1070 a couple years ago - performance is tremendously better. With the I7, big fights would start dropping to <5 fps. Now, while I may get some drops, at least things are still quite playable. If you want to get a new monitor for other reasons (doubles as a TV set and you want a 4K TV), then you could certainly go for it, and just keep playing GW2 at 1080p. But otherwise, definitely update that 9 year old CPU.