Iggystlev.7203

I built all the skins a before LWS1 relaunched and salvaged them then. Is there any way to get this achievement without grinding out 425 more blade shards and spending 10G on materials?

This is a pretty good take. If they do end up just repeating the same finite birthday rewards forever. Looks like the 11th birthday achievement does not contain any AP either.

That is definitely worse on multiple levels. Other games are not Guild Wars 2 though, we can be better then that. Those items should definitely make a return too. Anet recently re-released the Celebration Hat as part of Extra Life which had not been available since the game's launch.

Most rewards in gw2 are skins, dyes, and gimmicks. After just a year or two of playing gw2 the skin unlock of a random new rare item is more interesting then the item itself. Skins, dyes, and gimmicks are important enough to some players that they spend real world money on them in the gem store, or real time grinding resources for them. Their value should not be discounted just because they dont provide gameplay content.

Absolutely. Each season you are able to earn more than enough AA to buy all of the current exclusive skins. All the extra AA you earn can be used on the more expensive old rewards. You wont necessarily catch up in a single season, and nobody is saying you should. Eventually, you would indeed catch up.

If birthday gifts were by hours played this would be a different conversation. To use your analogy: Nobody made general by dropping out of basic 25 years ago

My point is that there isn't anything you can do. A new player, no matter what they do, will never catch up to an old player who is currently doing nothing.

I could understand it better if these birthday rewards were being used to incentivize early purchase of the expansions or something. But the way they are now they are not really incentivizing anything anymore. The wizards vault solves this well, where the current rewards are cheaper but the older rewards are still accessible. So new players can "catch up" on the wizards vault but the old players still get rewarded because they were able to buy the same rewards cheaper.

This sounds obvious. But what I am really getting at is that GW2 is still rewarding people just because they purchased the game over a decade ago, even if they are not playing and have not played for the last 10 years. A new player who found the game recently has no hope to get to the same reward level as their friends who found the game earlier. Some of these rewards are locked behind the calendar year 2034 for them. It is fun to get rewards for birthdays, and I am not saying people should not get birthday presents. But maybe these exclusive items should not be locked behind having done something in the long long ago so they can incentivize new players too.

The Fluttering Fairy Jade Bot Skin has a very high pitched noise that is very audible when nearby. To me this noise is persistent and kinda grading and not something I want to hear as loud as it is. I cant figure out how to lessen or disable that audio without turning off all other effect audio which contains helpful auditory cues I want to hear?