Guild Wars 2: Post-Release Discussion

[Kuishen]

I did the recipe like 3 times. I lost money and stopped. It was RNG based and reliant on black lion salvage kits for any form of consistency, so to say its obvious that it was an exploit is stupid. And nobody was "hurt" here. The market corrected itself within hours, the snowflakes skyrocketed in price, and Ectos dropped like 2-3s.

It's an asinine policy of theirs to ban for that kind of thing, it was their fault and it wasn't entirely obvious. But either way less than 200 accounts were banned and it was only those who duplicated the recipe thousands of times. Not really sweating it.

Yes. It's totally not obvious that it's an exploit when you have a chance to gain back triple of a pricy ingredient. Especially since the entire way the crafting system is made that you're not supposed to gain much from it. (Whether that's a stupid decision isn't the issue though.)

Just because there was a minor random factor and reliant on specific conditions doesn't mean it's not an exploit.

You're right, the market wasn't hurt that badly, but it could have been potentially, which is something they're trying to avoid. Banning people with the attitude that it is ok to do that with the potential result of ruining the entire games market is perfectly acceptable.

[Sci]

Shouldn't need an economist for something as common sense as this.

Speaking of which, doesn't ANet have one on staff?

They do, and iirc he even said the recipe was fine. Which is one of the reasons people are upset about the bannings.

[Katlan]

Nvm. Beaten by Sci

[Celeras]

Yes. It's totally not obvious that it's an exploit when you have a chance to gain back triple of a pricy ingredient. Especially since the entire way the crafting system is made that you're not supposed to gain much from it. (Whether that's a stupid decision isn't the issue though.)

Just because there was a minor random factor and reliant on specific conditions doesn't mean it's not an exploit.

You're right, the market wasn't hurt that badly, but it could have been potentially, which is something they're trying to avoid. Banning people with the attitude that it is ok to do that with the potential result of ruining the entire games market is perfectly acceptable.

First of all, I already said I personally did it a few times and lost money. What part of that was supposed to be "totally obvious" to me? Because believe me, I did the math, and after completely missing 3 consecutive times I would have had to hit more than 10 in a row just to get back in the green. The probability of doing so with (.9/ecto * .8/recovery) each attempt is a total of 3.7%.

Secondly, every rare recipe in the game gives you "a chance to gain back triple of a pricy ingredient". Hence why the ingredient's are pricy. The only exploit here was buying what other people put on the TP cheap, because they were initially too stupid to see what it could be used for.

You're entitled to your opinion, but quit frontin'. You're in the minority, and I haven't even seen anyone else mention the perma-bans without it being anything short of asinine. But like I said, it didn't effect that many people and isn't exactly a world-breaking issue.

[Sci]

That's the argument that John Smith (Anet's economist pseudonym) was going with. In his eyes, if the recipe was so great, the price of the components would eventually balance out. Snowflakes would either come into equilibrium with Ectos, or Mithril would eventually run out. I guess the issue was that both Snowflakes and Mithril were too readily available. I'm more curious as to why Anet decided that the "exploiters" did something damaging enough to the economy that they needed to be banned.

In other news, all of the node warping bots that I had been keeping tabs on seem to be gone now as well. So we'll likely see prices on everything gathered go up. *edit Or maybe it was the update last night and they just hadn't logged back on. I'll have to check again tonight to be sure.

[Shiyo]

It's pretty dumb that they would ban over something like this, but leave people who literally control the entire economy, and almost all precursors. Why weren't all the people who exploited the high chance at precursor rares banned? They completely control the entire economy now, especially precursors. THAT is much worse than this.

[Sci]

It could just be that Anet didn't have the proper amount of transaction logging then, and so they didn't have a good way of isolating who grossly abused it and who didn't. And it really wouldn't be fair to try and figure it out now by any sort of metric like "This person has 20 precursors and 10000G, they obviously cheated!"

I want to say that the right answer for precursors would be to add a more concrete way to obtain them. 3k dungeon tokens? 1k WvW Badges? Something that would take a lot of time, but eventually would result in getting the item you want as an alternative to the mystic forge.

[Arcana]

The problem with the initial precursor gains was they weren't monitoring those kinds of issues at that time, the focus was more on broken low to mid level events so people could level in the game but by the time that they fixed the issue lots of people had gained enough precursors to set themselves up comfortably for the rest of their time in the game. i would have personally preferred that they punished those that abused the system by selling off their gains at a lower price. The problem is its 5 months in now and they still havn't done a thing to counter the effects that these people have had on the main endgame focus for a lot of players. The promise of a scavenger hunt is there, but will they get around to making it happen before 2014? i don't think so.

[Katlan]

Scavenger hunt is in February or march update

[Arcana]

Scavenger hunt is in February or march update

We'll see about that.

[ClarkSammich]

Seems like a lot of things (especially spvp related) are becoming a "maybe next update" kind of deal.
Few months back "oh yeah dudes, don't even worry, spvp will get a huge update in January don't sweat it."
Yesterday "yeah there's actually nothing being done to spvp in January."

We're nearing five months in without the most basic spvp features that should have been included at release, pretty sure the dudes in that department are garbage compared to the other devs.

Edit: And further more, wtf? Why haven't they released anything spvp related apart from paid tournaments? Are they hoping to release some enormous messianic spvp patch that will have thousands of players flocking back to it? Their ways are confusing and frustrating.

[Kuishen]

I'd like to know what the fuck happened to "we want to be part of esports".

[Prothescar]

they all say that. few succeed at it

[The Blackrose]

Reality hit.

Also, a game as volatile as GW2 would not make it in any league. MLG had WoW Arena at one point and dropped it, citing how often they changed class balance. Only Dreamhack could potentially pick it up, and nobody would give a shit. GW1 would probably do better.

[Shiyo]

GW2's PVP is almost as bad as rift 1.0's PVP. THF's and downed state just make the entire game negative fun.

[niwaar]

Meh, I for one enjoy sPvP. That being said, I hardly play it. Why? because there simply isn't anything there. Paid Tournaments are never going to be accessible to a solo player. Pug Tourney's are no better. The "CoD"like automatic map rotation system is not conducive to any real "fun". The actual gameplay is fun and enjoyable, but there are too many downsides to put all my eggs in that basket. I know I will get ripped for it, but if we had a traditional "single map" queue system, a comprehensive leaderboard, team creation with team leaderboards, and a better system of rewards than "random armor bits than I can make other random armor" with it would be more interesting. sPvP (and WvW PvP in general) needs a better way to "progress" and show off that progression. Because afterall, PvP is an epeen activity, and when all you can do to show off how "badass" you are is show off the same armor as just about anyone else can earn and do a /rank that only proves that you play a shit ton, then there is no epeen at all.

[Arcana]

But the armor progression IS part of the epeen of spvp. paid tourneys are the way to access the high quality armor types and make you alot more obvious in a crowd of players. The rank also equates to epeen, how many people rank 50+ have you seen? i've seen about 3 different r50+ and they are well skilled players. But until they start doing televised matches for random people to watch (like they did in GW1) then skilled players are only recognized by the amount of rank points they have on the ladder. They will never really get PTpvp into an esport because its so inaccessible and the skill jump from FTpvp is HUGE.

They need to add in GvG again, Thats where the true potential of GW pvp has lain but lets face facts, poor maps & zerging ruins hot join and dissuades people from getting into the actual fun part of pvp which is the tournaments, if they can't get people into tournaments they need something to re-ignite the pvp community and GvG is the thing that can do that.

[Shiyo]

If you need "progression" to PVP you aren't a real PVPer and simply only PVP for gear. SPVP is perfectly fine where it is, it should not have any progression at all besides cosmetics, the fun part of it is fine for the person who enjoys that. I simply DESPISE competitive MMO PVP(lol) and find is a complete joke, I prefer WVW type PVP. WVW is tons of gold/karma/exp, so I don't really find it's rewards lacking, but adding more rewards to it, especially more server-oriented rewards would be very nice and fun. My main problem with PVP is not rewards, I don't PVP for gear, I pvp for fun, and THF's, downed state, plus a few things like 100b when I'm CCed and other minor things, make WVW incredibly unfun for me. It's mainly THF's existing and downed state though. It's not even that THF's are OP, they're just..not fun to fight.

As for SPVP, the reason I find is negative fun is because you >>NEED<< 4 other competent players to play it or it's no fun, doing tournaments isn't fun at all with random pugs, and it's impossible to actually find people to play with with how it's currently designed. It's very anti-social, yet encourages you to team up with others, but there's no actual way to make friends or make teams, and hotjoin maps don't work for PUG type PVP, hotjoin should use completely different maps. Plus only ONE objective for every single map(King of the hill) is meh. Why no capture the flag? Why no other game types? The same game type over and over again is..bleh.

[Arcana]

Its not like it's hard to fend off thief's or 100b warriors, the only problem with thieves are the ones that know how to glitch insta-kill you in tourneys. They NEED to fix that, but its very rare that you come across them.

[Kuishen]

Its not like it's hard to fend off thief's or 100b warriors, the only problem with thieves are the ones that know how to glitch insta-kill you in tourneys. They NEED to fix that, but its very rare that you come across them.

What? Is that what's been happening? There have been a couple of times where as soon as a Thief hits me I'll go down and nothing in my combat log indicates that much damage. I mean depending on their build I can still kill people in a few seconds but nothing like that.