Guild Wars 2 Catch All

I've got it from an official email, also viewable: http://newsletters.ncsoft.com/emp/gw...

Looks like they're having a Black Lion Trading Company sale this weekend.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday...3 items per day up to 70% off. I'm hoping they have character accounts or expanded banks on sale.

Oh god yes, I wouldn't mind pouring a bit of money into diamonds if I could get both a bank slot and a character slot out of one batch. c:

Character slots and other 'account services' items are very unlikely to be part of the sale.

Bank/Bag slots are right out as they are not actually sold through the Black Lion Trading Co.

This will most likely apply to costumes and skins only.

I completed the survey. I actually liked the slightly 'b-movie' crab monster invasion theme and the idea of special events. It's the structure of event and technical problems I have issues with. Oh, and more generally the low number players to work with in a lot of the regions I'm trying to level up in, but that's not an issue with the event specifically (though I did mention it).

Also, has the drop rate got much worse lately? I hardly get weapons or armour any more and little that is useful; I'm currently using pistols I got 10 levels ago and relying more and more on my grenades and turrets.

I found I relied on the trading post rather than drops, checking / regearing every 10 levels or so. It was the only way to keep relevant

babakotia wrote:

Also, has the drop rate got much worse lately? I hardly get weapons or armour any more and little that is useful; I'm currently using pistols I got 10 levels ago and relying more and more on my grenades and turrets.

Yeah, it is much easier to upgrade with the trading post unless you buy stuff from dungeon vendor or dungeon drops

RipEmUp510 wrote:

I found I relied on the trading post rather than drops, checking / regearing every 10 levels or so. It was the only way to keep relevant

Yup. This exactly.

I'm headed out of town for Thanksgiving. Won't be back until Sunday sometime. First time I'll be away from GW2 since (pre)release. Worried if I'll survive it. I mean that's 3-4 days of daily achievements I'll miss out on. And now a sale, too.

Everyone will be looking for level 20+ runs of Fractals, and I'll still have not completed one run.

Tscott wrote:

I'm headed out of town for Thanksgiving. Won't be back until Sunday sometime. First time I'll be away from GW2 since (pre)release. Worried if I'll survive it. I mean that's 3-4 days of daily achievements I'll miss out on. And now a sale, too.

Everyone will be looking for level 20+ runs of Fractals, and I'll still have not completed one run.

they already are, I am only on level 2. I really dont like that system one bit. Its going to just create yet another fragmented playgroup. ArenaNet has been chuck fully of questionable design decisions lately.

Yeah I've seen some crazy-high fractal groups already. On the other hand, it looks like you can do fractal dungeon runs with players across multiple servers so it should be possible to get a GWJ group together for runs.

I completed the monthly achievement the other day so now I'm sitting on a bunch of jugs of karma as well as a lucky karma booster from a black lion treasure chest. I started looked at Karma armor and realized that exotic berserker (power/precision/crit damage) karma armor does not exist. Whoops. And there aren't any exotic karma weapons at all. Double-whoops.

Any suggestions on what to spend karma on? At this point I might just go for Power/Vit/Toughness and use it as a backup set when I want to run something with different runes. At least Power/Vit/Toughness is always useful. I have never found condition damage or healing to be useful on my mesmer.

Buy a buttload of Ash Legion Spy Kits?

And throw a big ash party? I like it!

Has to be a surprise party, though.

Hahaha!

It takes a million to get a legendary wep so keep saving!

Currently legendary weapons have the same stats as exotics, when ascended weapons come out legendaries will be boosted up to that level. It's about a 5% (or was it 8%) difference between exotic and ascended tiers.

Do legendary weapons have better stats or do they just shoot rainbows?

I have (183.5K karma + (42 jugs @4500 *50% booster = 283.5k)) = 467,000 karma. Hmm, I'm closer to halfway than I had realized.

The selection for today's Black Lion sale are somewhat underwhelming.

ruhk wrote:

The selection for today's Black Lion sale are somewhat underwhelming.

Still, it's (probably) had an affect on gem prices: http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

Damn. I should have seen that coming and invested some gold in gems. Normally the going rate is around 70-80 silver per. As of this writing it's currently 1 gold 40 silver.

If by "normally" you mean "two weeks ago". It's quite interesting looking at the trends on spidy, I'm not sure if it's scary or not, the way things are heading for someone without much cash to their name.

It's not a long term trend, prices have been gradually rising over the last several weeks due to the Halloween and Lost Shores events being nearly back to back and the influx of new players from the free weekend, but rates should start gradually decreasing after the sale unless they keep adding new items.

I also heard they finally got the bots under control. (I know I haven't seen any lately) So, less dyes and other stuff are being put up on trading post for quick coin, which leads to higher prices.

That's the thing, I'm wondering where it'll settle out, or what highs and lows it will regularly oscillate between (I don't think any active or healthy market will stabilise exactly). That's if it does of course, given that there will be events reasonably regularly if it's anything like GW1, and I expect them to try and keep attention on GW2 for a while yet with major patches.

Really though, it's early days, and I wouldn't say the game is in a stable state yet.

I guess my concern from my position is that the market, like the game in general moves towards being broadly accessible rather than a little exclusive club for a few.

Scratched wrote:

I guess my concern from my position is that the market, like the game in general moves towards being broadly accessible rather than a little exclusive club for a few.

Your concern is genuinely founded, and hopefully understood by any MMO developer worth their salt. The cause of this is the fact that there is a non-stop flow of money into the environment without a balanced method of getting the money out. I'd like to see more options for how to get money out of the economy, which will prevent this kind of hyper-inflation that occurs after a game has been out for a while. However, I'm not sure what ArenaNet has planned in that area, and I can only hope that whatever they've got planned will do the trick. Ultimately though, unless they want to put a soft cap on the value of an item (like how Eve does with the resources), the inflation will likely continue to grow. The only hope is to stem the tide.

Something I'm wondering, random thought rather than going chicken-little. Does anyone thing another company will out-GW2 arenanet?

I'm thinking along the lines that for all the WoW imitators, or companies pushing out 'old' model MMOs with the aim of being the WoW-killer, it never happened because they never really got the fundamentals there. With GW2 in it's current state I think Arenanet have the spark of something great, but they need to nurture it well for it to be awesome, there's ways they can go both positive and negative.

I wonder if another company could come along and eat their lunch before they get critical mass (*). I'm not really seeing anything on the horizon, no real "GW2 clone", but I wonder if any companies would copy a few little bits here and there and end up doing it better overall.

(* not that they need a constant army of players, I'm sure the game is sustainable without a ton of players)

Maybe EA turns around and out-GW2s Arenanet with TOR once they see how much fail their current model for that is? ;D

The bots have been vastly reduced. Every once in a while you might spy a wandering group of naked rangers, but I haven't seen any of those bot swarmed events in a while.

Scratched wrote:

Something I'm wondering, random thought rather than going chicken-little. Does anyone thing another company will out-GW2 arenanet?

I'm thinking along the lines that for all the WoW imitators, or companies pushing out 'old' model MMOs with the aim of being the WoW-killer, it never happened because they never really got the fundamentals there. With GW2 in it's current state I think Arenanet have the spark of something great, but they need to nurture it well for it to be awesome, there's ways they can go both positive and negative.

I wonder if another company could come along and eat their lunch before they get critical mass (*). I'm not really seeing anything on the horizon, no real "GW2 clone", but I wonder if any companies would copy a few little bits here and there and end up doing it better overall.

(* not that they need a constant army of players, I'm sure the game is sustainable without a ton of players)

Well, hopefully MMO companies do use features in this game. Rift was more like WoW but the class system was really versatile and a great improvement along with the rift events. TSW (although most people did not play it) had class flexibility and fun combat. GW2 has put together some great features and I want a lot of them in my next MMO.