TheWaternymphHC.1847

The Twitch and the currently running GeForce NOW promo don't replace a sale. ANet usually gives away some free stuff around the anniversary and at the end of the year, therefore it's nothing unexpected even if the items might be a bit more valuable than usual. Many folks are just used to a large month long sale that hasn't happened at the scale of the previous years (yet). Especially if you dig around in the wiki, you'll notice that some of the items typically only go on sale during anniversaries as well. Unless we see something large next week, this year will be quite a disappointment for people who were saving money or gems for a time when some of the big ticket store items are more affordable.

If you look at the Living World seasons alone, it's a ~23% discount buying them via the Complete Collection compared to buying the gem store bundles for each season which would set you back 4160 gems or 52€/$, ignoring the fact that you have to overbuy gems for at least 55€/$. That roughly translates into a 10% discount for the complete collection. I guess, Steam doesn't allow to show this discount if the parts of the bundle aren't available separately. That said, I fully agree with your sentiment that the Complete Collection and a standalone LWS bundle should be available in ANet's own shop for those who want to buy the seasons with money instead of gems. It's quite surprising that ANet/NC West still haven't streamlined their messy sales & marketing of GW2 for the Steam launch. Finally offering a decent volume discount for gems would have been the greatest 10th anniversary gift for many, many players as well. No surprise that ANet doesn't show gem prices on GW2's Steam page compared to most other similar MMOs. Generally speaking, 100€/$ seems to be a hard sell for a 10 year old game regardless of its popularity or the amount of provided content. Personally I think that ANet should have chosen a price point somewhere in the 70 - 80 €/$ range and made it obvious that this is actually a discounted bundle. Maybe even throw in a launch sale for gems to soften the blow once people notice that they pretty much need to spend additional gems for some convenience to make the game a pleasant experience after buying it with all expansions and DLCs.

You cannot redeem gem cards for Steam accounts. The only way to get gems for the Steam version of GW2 is buying them via your Steam wallet. Steam FAQ

Alternatively there is a list of authorized retailers. Some of the smaller online shops (e.g. the Dutch and Swiss one) are even selling to other countries than listed as long as you can use one of their accepted payment methods.

The "best" way would be to acquire more GW2 accounts and farm log-in rewards. This method is hands down the highest gold per hour and pretty much the only method that can be scaled infinitely. However it's fairly boring and requires a decent PC with a somewhat fast internet connection. The gold is usually generated by selling Mystic Coins and converting laurels to T3/T4/T6 crafting mats. Even with the currently low prices for both, you will yield around 1.3g/day. Depending on your setup and your focus on the task you can typically log into 90 to 150 accounts per hour. Turning things into gold takes some additional 5 minutes once a month per account. Sadly we probably won't see any large GW2 sales until the end of the year and upcoming promotions for Heroic Edition are always quite unpredictable. At the current exchange rates and TP prices, buying additional expansions at the full price doesn't pay off for many, many months though.

Guess it's time to update the wiki again. edit: done

You can always try to buy the expansions and gem cards from the authorized retailer(s) for your country.

I guess my wording was a bit confusing here. I'm fully aware that the gameplay experience is pretty much the same for anyone regardless of where they bought GW2. I was actually referring to the sales and support aspect. Take the Complete Collection bundle for example. If you buy it on Steam the LW seasons are ~23% cheaper than buying them via gems (ignoring the fact that you have to overbuy gems unless you use gold). On Steam you also buy separate editions of PoF (incl. HoT) and EoD for ~30€ each, regardless if you buy them in the ~100€ Complete Collection bundle or not. On the other hand there is no ~50€ Collection bundle for those who aren't interested in LW seasons, but want all 3 expansions. Imagine what will happen once discounts for gems and expansions sales start appearing at the end of the year. Will there be parity between Steam, ANet's shop and the other official retailers, or will the mess we had a couple of times last year repeat itself again? Maybe this time even worse? Personally I'm probably just a bit disappointed that ANet, NC West or whoever calls the shots for GW2's sales & marketing didn't use the opportunity to streamline their offerings. However that is in some part from my whale's perspective of someone who has and still buys more accounts than most people have in the game.

It shouldn't be, since F2P accounts can actually buy gems and use them in the gem store for items that don't require expansions. The only limitation for them is that they can't convert gold to gems. However you might have to wait 72h after account creation (or activating your expansion) on Steam as additional security measure. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if ANet added some additional security checks for the Steam launch since they had a security incident with the in-game gem store last November when they changed payment providers.

Try to using the little eraser symbol ("Remove Dye") in the dye section on the channels of the mount manually and re-apply the dyes of your choice. If I switch from an Exo-suit mount to a Mad King mount, they look similar to your pic.

Did you manually reset the dyes after switching to the skin? If you have "Show Default Dyes" enabled in the mount panel, you won't see how your mount actually will look like with the dyes from the previously used skin.

The Steam launch wasn't about F2P players. It was mainly about Steam as payment provider for all those people who couldn't buy GW2 or gems, because of the absence of a local Amazon online-store, issues with ANet's payment providers (past and present) or the general lack of any other official third-party retailer for many parts of the world. It's actually quite embarrassing when the community has to figure out each sale whether Aussies or Canadians have to buy gem cards from an official retailer in the Netherlands or Switzerland. Unless EGS, GoG and others offer similar payment services like Steam, it seems quite unlikely that ANet will split the playerbase even more.

Seems to be a funny new bug... My F2P guardian on steam is also a time-traveler

This is actually only the restriction on Guild Vaults for already verified accounts. From my personal experience with both my EoD-only and a few Heroic Edition alt-accounts over the last nine months, it also takes 5 days (120 hours) after activation to access the Guild Vault on new accounts. I think it's just another case of sloppiness at ANet. The old error message was quite confusing since it only vaguely referred to expansions and 2FA as requirement, although I can access the vaults on my two banking guilds with all my heroic edition alt-accounts whether they use SMS or eMail for authentication. If you still have problems after 5 days, either write an in-game bug report via "/bug" that is directly send to the QA team or write a support ticket that will end up with the CS team. Usually such stuff will be fixed rather quickly. It took them less then 24h to switch Eurozone accounts from US$ to €uro in the gem store after I reported it as bug.

Judging from all the a/b-testing ANet did during the last months, my educated guess is that they wanted a way to speed up leveling without a flat increase in XP. Personally I managed to casually level an F2P account to 80 just by exploring Queensdale, most cities and doing the complete set of tutorial masteries within ~26h, because I was lucky to score a hidden 200% XP buff. The current system at least forces people out in the world, doing stuff that is more engaging then running from PoI to PoI in the starter zones. If I remember correctly, the drop rate for the on-boarding armor set was much higher for low-level characters than max. level ones, especially if the achievement wasn't finished yet. I did it on my main account on my key-farming alt while going from 1 to 10 in Queensdale without much need for grinding, despite those boxes never dropping on my original 80s before. Funny side-effect of the removal of the achievement is that those boxes now drop left and right on any lowbie it seems. My (F2P) level 14 guardian has enough boxes for three more sets in the bank now. Same with the food/sharpening stone that was bought for karma, it's now available in virtually unlimited amounts, since eating it doesn't grant the achievement anymore.

AP alone aren't even the main problem. The original tutorial mastery achievements had actually a number of quite useful rewards like a 10-slot bag, 2x boxes of a level 10 weapon choice, some karma pots, a 14-day lounge pass and a bunch of boosters that funnily enough were more useful later at max. level than during leveling. So far I only noticed that I'm about 70 AP short of the 100 point achievement chest at the same stage of leveling when I typically got that one around level 9 on my old accounts. That was usually a nice boost in gold and also gave a 2nd 10-slot bag. Now I'm level 14 on my Steam F2P-account at that point, broke and without any free decent sized bags. Looking at my old accounts, it's also quite annoying that a mid-level character (30 - 50) pretty much has to go "back" to searching for scouts and other stuff, even a new player typically ignores after playing longer than a couple of hours to unlock the appropriate tier of the character guide for that character.

Personally I think that the things that stood out back in the day aren't anything special anymore since they were pretty much copied by any other the Diku-style MMORPG that was released in the last decade. Here are some examples that come to mind: a mostly linear XP curve, lot less grind during leveling, a much more co-operative approach to the game's zones (including gathering), a world that scales with the player, originally a much bigger focus on the open world than the competition, more streamlined professions (aka classes), a combat system that was very action focused compared the competition of the time, combo-fields and -finishers in group play were also quite unique, the global Trading Post instead of an eBay-style auction house (often only per server). If you ever played the last content patch of WoW: Legion, you'll pretty much notice that many of the systems mentioned above were adapted and integrated into the modern World of Warcraft game as well. Without a dedicated and innovative developer team that tries to innovate, GW2 won't stand out any longer. For example if you look at the UI/UX of the LFG tool, you'll notice that the current crop of devs try more to emulate other games than come up with their own, hopefully better solutions. I mean, I play a game called "Guild Wars 2", yet it doesn't have a proper guild finder! Even the long abandoned Vanguard had a much better tool in-game, which by the way was dumbed down and copied by Blizzard into WoW (again). The big elephant in the room, however, is the payment model. Back in the days during beta and at launch, ANet was touting it's unique "buy-to-play" scheme that was sold to us as some sort of holy grail of gaming, because it was supposed to be fair to us players, since we didn't need a subscription or weren't constantly nickeled and dimed like by those pesky free-to-play games. Turns out that B2P never fulfilled that promise and when looking at the price for the complete Steam-bundle of the game and all that additional stuff you need to buy to get rid of the nuisances of certain systems, it feels like a very expensive freemium model nowadays.

It works perfectly fine. Both my main GW2 account and my Steam account (with GW2 F2P) use the same email address. Haven't noticed any side-effects so far. Both GW2 accounts are independent from each other.

Personally I expect ANet doing Steam focused promotions in the future that might include the Heroic Edition. Since those promos can be structured in a way that codes don't end up on key-reseller websites, it might be a way to do them without generating more cheap/free accounts for the log-in farming crowd. Especially since the steam version of GW2 isn't yet supported by the external launcher tools for multi-boxers/-accounters. The bags can just be bought on the TP. They ones from the HC edition are nothing special just an account-bound version of the mithril box. The legacy armor skins are also available for black lion statuettes at the moment. However you only get the skins and not the exotic level 1 gear which is actually quite useful for weekly key-farming. The heroic boosters are usually best bought with statuettes anyway.

With the last update, ANet started a/b-testing some new default settings for new accounts which include changes to the way targeting works by default. Maybe there were some side-effects with the rollout of that new test.

That's quite a hilarious explanation... I selected that axe for my test, because it was a low volume item. According to the external TP-related websites that use GW2s API to track prices there were only 0 to 3 listed per day over the last 3 months. Btw, I just checked, 6h after my buying spree there are still only the 4 expensive axes listed I mentioned in my previous post and it doesn't look like there were any other trades since then. Go ahead and waste some hundred gold on those 4 axes and see how long it takes until you completely buy the item out. Anyway, I either found (and reported) a way to dupe items, which isn't supposed to be possible according to ANet or it's an indicator that a lot of those suspected bots are actually part of a market making system run by ANet. Go ahead and enlighten me about how many "Strong Iron Axe"s of fine quality with a level requirement of 54 are generated by GW2's loot system per day. And while you are at it, explain to me, why those large amounts of those axes only get listed when I decide to try to buy them out completely. As mentioned above, according to the websites that track the TP via the API, only 0 to 3 axes of that type have been listed per day during the last 3 months. Okay, log into your official ANet forum account and post for example the MAUs of May, yesterday's DAUs and/or the peak concurrent users of yesterday.

If you are referring to my post above, I hate to break it to you, but I was able to buy 400+ axes within roughly 5 to 10 seconds since I spam-bought that specific randomly dropped loot on purpose. It's a low volume item without any buy orders in the system. I pretty much bought more axes in seconds than are usually bought within months. Personally I don't see how someone is able to post 220+ unpopular items within such a short timespan, but stops posting once I bought out all items below 50s. Also keep in mind that there is typically a slight delay between a sale and the notification to the seller that a sale occurred. If you have alt-accounts, you can easily reproduce that behavior of the TP system. There are still a few bags that scale with character level. I haven't checked the ones from Silverwastes lately, but for example the ones you get from the personal story still scale. People can also park mid-level characters at the end of core Tyria JPs to farm chests for mid-level items. However I doubt that people waste time with working out which items to salvage and which ones to sell since anything that can give T3/4 leather and ore is pretty much always better salvaged than sold. This and sniping for materials that are used for value added sales seem to be much more worthwhile for any botter, if they actually exist in those large quantities as people in here believe, than running large inventories of items that might be lost at any moment once an account gets banned.

Where did I say anything about systems that were around in 2012? I'm talking about today. Please explain to me how I was just able to buy ~450x Strong Iron Axes (lvl 54) when there were only 177 available according to the TP interface? Unless the TP allows going into negative amounts of items, which would be quite stupid to allow from a design PoV, I should have gotten all of them for ~15g. There are still some 4 pieces available at fairly high prices (~50s to ~1g) that get instantly refilled if I buy them out over and over. Interestingly enough after relisting 25 axes at a few silvers, they magically got bought out instantly with a single trade despite everything happening within one update cycle of the API. Interestingly one of the external TP sites only reports 185 sales. Since GW2 is a top heavy game, it's quite unlikely that many mid-level items actually get listed in vast amounts, even if you assume a fairly high amount of loot creation. Also keep in mind that max-level characters typically get tokens and not actual items. Therefore me and the OP encountered either a fairly wonky transactional system of the TP or there actually is some sort of market making system working in the background.

It's most likely a market making system that ANet runs for certain items like low level armor and weapons since it's unlikely that the player base supplies enough of those kind of items regularly across a wide range of levels. Personally I never did proper modelling for those types of items, but I'd assume the offers on the TP will almost always be above the salvage value of those items to avoid players buying them in bulk for their mats. No idea how ANet set the TP backend hard- and software up. However if it was some sort of cache/sync/consistency issue, I'd assume that you would only be able to buy stuff twice in a row and it would probably affect other types of items as well. Don't underestimate the overall stupidity of TP users. As someone who sells stacks of mystic coins and a ton of T3/4/6 fine mats regularly in bulk, I can assure you that there are quite a number of people on the TP that have no clue about daily and weekly price-cycles or the typical supply and demand of certain items, are not paying attention at what price-level they are actually posting, or are just trolling.

I just created another character, parked it as 31st alt at the end of the JP and was still able to open the chest, after having opened it 30x before today. Did you by chance open the chests yesterday shortly before the daily reset? Some chests don't seem to properly reset if you are logged into your account during the daily reset.