Deimos.4263

> @"Lamont.5973" said:

> Yup, been having way too much fun with decorating lately

Very well done! How many times did you fall to your death decorating mid-air? It's a pain few understand.

I'm glad the OP is enjoying the instruments. They can be a lot of fun.

> @"WyvrnRipsnarl.5918" said:

> I just wish that octave swap issue would be fixed by this point, since it is an hindrance on our abilities to play them.

Yes. This is a major issue in the music community, and unfortunately hasn't been addressed since the bug was introduced in November. It really impedes the ability to do complex songs. Three-octave instruments are particularly affected. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

I don't know of any events planned. In our guild hall we made a special area as a tribute to her efforts, the Gaile Gray Commemorative Gardens. Hit me up in game if you'd like to visit, all are welcome.

I wouldn't be opposed to it, but I don't think it's something I'd spend a lot of time doing either.

I think the way to rationalize this for 2000 gems is if you consider one of the skins to be a "premium" mount skin, and the rest as freebies. Is that the case here? Debatable. I'm taking a pass on this one.

I've purchased most of the mount skins, because I like having stuff. But I think the price on at least some of them is a big ask, and does put some people off buying them.

I know a fellow who I *believe* is the richest player in the game. I'm not positive on that, but he's way up there and he has more than one account in that very high range. He's also a really nice and generous person, and a lot of fun to play with. I've seen him send out hundreds of gold to a stranger on more than one occasion.

For people at that level, the answer is definitely *both* real money and playing the trading post. (And some other things, like having a small army of people "farming" legendaries for him. He provides the non-account bound materials in exchange for a cut of the final sale price....you wouldn't believe how many people are sitting on tons of Gifts of Exploration and just need a little motivation/help to finish them off.) But no, most don't get there by farming mats.

I had a fun talk with him one night and he's actually put in less real money than I have by a factor of 5 or 6, but he considers trading post economics to be a fun challenge...and I don't. He also has a lot more liquid gold and sellable items, whereas I have a much nicer wardrobe. Everyone's motivations are different I guess.

While we're asking for crazy things, I want my five-seater Veteran Oakheart party mount to stomp around in style. It'll come with 4 dye channels, but mine will all be Electro Pink.

"WvW players" are unsurprisingly territorial, but they don't own the mode. You *don't* have to join a zerg just because you're on the map. You can solo roam, you can join or make a havoc squad, you can go do the catmander jumping puzzle, get your vistas or dailies, get your warclaw, whatever you want. Get out there and have fun!

Good commanders realize morale is a thing, and communicate effectively and calmly even under a stressful situation, so you'll *want* to join them. Raging commanders tend to lose their squads in a hurry. But those are relatively rare.

More often you'll get a toxic team member in chat and this situation isn't really different from elsewhere - these people are usually wrong and projecting their flaws upon everyone else. They can be safely ignored.

My "account value" according to gw2efficiency.com is about 400k, (202nd overall at the time of writing) but that's a lot different from having 400k gold. The vast amount of that "value" is in account-bound wardrobe items. I think the most actual gold I've had at once is more like 6k.

How did I get there? Not by farming or TP. I'm far too lazy for that. By shelling out an *obscene* amount of real world money for shiny things I wanted, for guild hall decorations, fancy gifts for friends, black lion keys and ecto gambling, etc. I did the math, and I've purchased about 2.4 million gems by now. People may have an opinion on that, but if you just think of it as "supporting the game", you're welcome.

LW has always been an economic carrot to get people to show up, stick around, return to the game, invite their friends. The truth is most people don't pay, and if asked to they'll just leave or not engage the paid content. But Anet needs them around anyway.

Your very existence in game, whether you personally pay them a cent or not, is a selling point. That's one of the reasons they don't have a subscription, and also one of the reasons why they went FTP. More people playing for more time = better experience for those who will pay = more money. A lot more than trying to charge people $7 every few months.

If what they're doing now works, and by all available evidence it does, they'd be insane to jeopardize their revenue stream. Putting new episodes up at any price isn't a carrot anymore, especially when we're used to that juicy carrot. If anything they should consider making the older staler episodes cheaper/free so that more people know what's going on and are engaged story-wise. (It's a tragedy that Season 1 isn't playable anymore, but apparently it is too time-consuming to remedy.)

I just noticed they're on sale for 20% off right now so they definitely know their audience. I would've cut LW S2 a bit deeper considering its age but that's definitely the right approach!

People have been asking for a "basic" mount in PvE and the warclaw sort of double-bills as that. Even if you don't WvW ever again, you've got a basic mount. I would've preferred a dolyak or moa, since they're everywhere in Tyria, but it's ok.

I don't know if the warclaw will be good or bad for WvW as a whole. But I think it's going to suck even more for new WvW players, when all the experienced people have these in a couple days/weeks and hunt them down even faster than before. What's a newbie to do? I guess we'll find out soon enough.

> @"tacoclaw.8251" said:

> Yeah, I'm starting to see this. This makes the game very one dimensional. I was hoping you could experiment with non meta toons and just end up playing with lower ranked players and just have fun. What I find however is there is always some highly ranked players put in the mix and when you cross them they will wipe you. You can learn to avoid certain classes, but at the lower ranked games this becomes problematic.

The worst is when you show even moderate competence, get ranked accordingly, and then decide to try out something completely new. You'll get matched based on your previous character/build, not whatever janky thing you're trying out.

Sometimes you just need to step back for a bit.

One useful exercise is to create a new FTP account, without masteries/mounts and all the gadgets, and start the game anew. There's something really fun about playing a level 1 character from the ground up. I guarantee there are heart quests, challenging vistas that will have you falling to your death, and early game stuff that were interesting the first time around that you've completely forgotten about. You can start a new character of course, but it's not nearly as limiting. Plus you can help out some newbies and make new friends without completely carrying them.

If you get bored, well you've always got your main account to fall back on.

That looks like a lot more fun.

> @"Shylo.1426" said:

> Let's pretend we actually do have mobile phones for a minute...

Ok.

> If Anet did come out and say they are making a mobile game would it be a bad thing

No. I'm sure they could put SAB on a mobile phone. Maybe even Mina's Target Shooting.

It wasn't my favorite, but the radiance build was the best build we had at the moment. It arguably still is, there's just not that much else out there that works right now. I pretty much only play core guard, so...it's either theorycrafting time, or quit playing PvP.

You can still try to run a radiance build as-is with valkyrie/lynx and eat the 25% reduction in crit chance. I'm going to try marauders/vampirism for a similar build stat-wise. It'll have about a 25% higher crit chance than the old valk build (50% higher than the new valk build), but about 20% less crit damage. And of course you'll lose the 25% movement speed from lynx, but I picked vampirism to get the health pool back up. We all know guardian's health pool is quite limiting. Either way it's a straight nerf, with no other viable builds being particularly evident. I can't think of much else that will survive.

Looking at the other comments I've already done most of these things so....I don't know.

We have no real say here. The only way the community can fix this is by voting with their wallets until better decisions are made.

Judging by the number of people who say truly uninspired things like "layoffs happen it's not the end of the world" or "not supporting them now will only kill the game faster", it seems that collectively we'd rather watch this ship sink slowly than even try to turn it.

I can't speak for everyone, but my gem store dollars aren't something to be taken for granted. If NCSoft wants them they'll turn the boat. I doubt they will, but we'll see.

> @"Eltiana.9420" said:

> I saw a list of names of cuts. Not going to lie, I don't pay attention much to who works at ArenaNet, but even I know who Gaile Gray is, big loss for the community. I don't really understand how we're supposed to have faith in this game anymore when you're cutting people who are such a big part of the community that even casual gamers like me know who they are. It's funny, I was debating whether or not I really wanted to invest more money into this game, and I had decided I would still put in a few bucks every month, budget allowing, but now I once again have to rethink this stance.

If I could stop giving them money twice, I would.

All those people wondering what the "RIP" posts are about with regards to GW2? This.

Gaile was with ArenaNet for 18 years and one of the best parts of it. She was our community liaison. Of all the people to let go, for "revenue purposes", you chose poorly.

To reiterate, I think you just need to take a step back and realize this is a *sacrifice play*.

If they don't counter it...great, you'll nuke them all and stay standing (good luck finishing off five downs solo...that in itself is a challenge.) If they do counter....you'll fall over but the result is largely the same, they're down or at least severely beat up.

What determines success here is choosing a moment for this play when you've communicated with your team that you're making such a play, and/or they're smart enough to back you up. I think retaliation here is fine. Don't try this if your team hasn't got your back.

Well....nuking yourself from retaliation while heavily damaging the enemy team is actually a valid strategy. If you're dumping that on the entire enemy team solo...well yeah you'll fall over and you deserve to die if they're smart enough to counter it. If you're dumping that on the entire enemy team and have friends handy to help revive/rally/mop up....it's potentially a winning play. Context is everything but I don't think the counter is the issue so much as the situation.

I hope it's fast and can deliver supply. And I hope it has a Speedy Dolyak skin. Being able to take down gates is ok too.