[Wizard's Vault account limits highly incentivize multiboxing]

17 minutes ago, ShadowCatz.8437 said:

A lot of Gold to grab? I suppose you also have a lot real money to pay for upgrading your account with SoTO ?

Purchasing several upgrades for multiboxing and then turn that into Gold, seem counter intuitiv.

It would be cheaper to just use Gem to Gold in that case.

Before upgrading my old account with SoTO that iten where locked, so you had to have SoTO or you couldn't buy that Starter Chest and you where also locked out from Special in Wizard's Vault which give most Astral Acclaim from completing story or achievement related to SoTO content.

Dude, nobody said you have to upgrade to Soto. The account limits are clearly abusable without soto.

In fact, they are so abusable that most of the wealth in this game will likely be multiboxed accounts reaping mystic coins and bags of coins. It's that simple.

ArenaNet by limiting the number of rewards per account have basically opened the doors to the entire economy of the game being dominated by people willing to open legions of accounts, setting vault to pvp only, then playing 1-2  pvp matches per day on each account.

Why would I play 5 hours on the same account, and get no rewards, when someone could play 30 minutes on each of  10- accounts, and get 5-10x the rewards?

ArenaNet has designed an incentive structure that highly--and I mean RICHLY--rewards people who creates throwaway accounts.

[Wizard's Vault account limits highly incentivize multiboxing]

Just now, vares.8457 said:

More nonsense, oh boy
You would have to play your second account and do the dailies and weeklies to earn enough currency to buy them, no? 
 

If I have 5 hours of time, (and assuming the weekly is ~1 hour)  I am now HIGHLY incentivized to play 1 hour on each of 5 alt account rather than 5 hours on my main account. That's the problem. By capping the extremely lucrative rewards on 1 account, you basically HIGHLY incentivize people to log onto secondary accounts to get them again.
I've already heard schemes of people opening 20 accounts do the rewards continuously.

[Wizard's Vault account limits highly incentivize multiboxing]

So they got rid of daily log in but made it even worse -- if you open a second account, you can easily get extra cheap Legendary Starter Kits,  cheap 90 bags of coins, cheap 60  mystic coins, cheap heavy crafting bags.

These rewards are once-per-account so dedicated players get screwed while it's a bonanza for multiboxers.

What a nightmare of a patch.

 

[Astral Amor Same Price or Maybe even more Expensive than Actual Legendary Armor [Merged]]

Wow that's terrible. And they aren't even good maps either. Remember the HoT and PoF days when the maps actually had soul, depth, and new assets? Skywatch is only half successful because it reused all the good assets..

Amnytas on the other hand.. what a disaster of a map.

[Heart of Thorns metas are still packed, SoTo metas are now a ghost town]

All these years later and people still crowd to the HoT metas, maps are full all hours of the night, coordinating in map chat.

SoTo metas are already dead and usually fail due to low player populations.

Could this release be any more catastrophic? Could these new maps be any less inspired, more vapid, empty and lacking in S O U L ?

[You guys made everything easier. Disrespect for old players.]

4 hours ago, Das Boot.9627 said:

hello, I would like to express my dissatisfaction with the path the game has taken.

I've been playing this Game for 5 years, it's more than 10k hours of gameplay, and I've seen a lot of things here, and more and more, I see you making things easier, not only that, but literally giving them away for free to everyone, stay the question, what is the meaning of this? You are creating a community of slackers, who don't want to make any effort to get something, who don't want to spend a few hours in WvW to do ONE reward Track, to get a Gift of Battle.

First was the Prismatic Champion's Regalia amulet, which came to replace Transcedence (Literally replace, because today nobody wants to do it)

Aurene's Legendary Weapons, which spend less material than a generation 1 weapon, and the material you get for free from the npc.

Not to mention Skyscale, which is already the 3rd time you've made it easy to get him. And where is the compensation for those who already have it?

And to make matters worse, you're almost giving away a legendary weapon from the 1st generation through the Vault, what's the point of that? Is it for people to forget how poor and weak this update was? because the price paid was almost that of a Full Price dlc.

If you want to bring more players and keep the active ones, it's not facilitating and giving things away, much less abandoning content, how many maps and farms did you kill, Domain of Istan, Dragonfall, Dungeons, among other maps, not to mention that , now the longer you stay on the map the less XP we earn. what is the next farm you are going to kill? Fractal 42? You have already lowered the rewards for CMs.

In my opinion, what you are doing is disrespectful to players who have been playing the longest and have suffered to get things done in this game.

I say this because we go and kill ourselves to get it, now a new player comes and wins almost for free and after 2 or 3 months they stop playing and come back only in the next expansion, but we stay here.

And I'm sure of that because when a casual player gets the items they want they just leave the game, and the excuse is always the same "I already got what I wanted, I have nothing else to do in the game." I've seen it over and over again, and now you're giving them these items. "Ahhh but you can't make things difficult because nobody does it". Narrative is wrong because they do, and when they succeed they are happy, it generates a feeling of achievement (which is no longer in this game).

Here's a list of MY wishes.

. Improve the Marketing of the game.
. Improve existing content (Raid, Fractal, Open world).
. (I don't speak of Dungeons, because I understand that the code where they are is inaccessible right now.) .Rebalanced the aquatic combat. (It has a lot of Useless class) .
.And where is the Legendary Breather, 11 years and nothing .
.The aquatic legendary weapons of the 2nd and 3rd generation?
. Make more beautiful skins (there are a lot of ugly skins that nobody wants, isn't that what sells? cosmetics?).
. Improve the Functions of the Guilds (The game is called Guild Wars and the Guilds are useless, I spent 2 years playing without a guild and I didn't miss it).
. Home is abandoned.
. WvW rework has been going on for 2 years and is not out of Beta.

And for the love of God, stop making things easy, if somewhere needs a flying mount it was for the player to go there to get it FIRST, then do the expansion content. Yesterday a guy entered our Discord asking us to take him on a turtle to make the map of New Kaineng, because he didn't have any mounts. (He wasn't supposed to be there).

Anyway. thank you for your attention. this was my opnion, everyone has their own. And if you felt bad about something that I said, MMORPG is not for you go play LOL.

 

Completely agree, couldn't say it better myself.

[Lack of developer discussion and feedback on the current issues with the game(imbalanced classes, boring rifts, unrewarding new content, boring new content, etc)]

I agree that SOTO has been a catastrophic, unmitigated failure.

Two maps, both of which are low effort trash. Skywatch is just reused assets that I bought years ago. Amnytas is just two assets, a marble wall and a pillar with an orb on top, copy pasted into cubes.

The standout feature is.... skyscales? Which we have had for 4 years? Now the effort I spent a few months ago to get it is trivialized? Thanks, I guess.

Rifts? They happen at the same location and you kill 5 mobs.. The only randomness is if you get a Glutton or Despair. Great. Thanks. 

Relics? A "new" feature that is actually a massive, unmitigated downgrade from what we had before.

Wizard's vault? A "new" feature that is actually a massive, unmitigated downgrade from what we had before.

Whoever is making decisions at Arenanet needs to look at their organization and ask how these "ideas" ever got to even a concept stage when they should have been laughed out of the room. Whoever said they need to rerelease an old mount, destroy the rune system and destroy the daily system as "features" should be straight up fired.

[Relic system?]

Relic system is trash, I mean actual massive downgrade preschool drooling terrible trash. New rune effects are lazy, and terrible. The interesting ones require insane conditions to be met, aka useless, and half of them are "on elite", which is also useless.
They need to go back to the drawing board and make actually interesting runes because right now Thief or antitoxin are essentially the only viable ones, maybe 1 or 2 of the condi ones.

[Laurels are now completely broken]

With the old  daily login reward, laurels were a currency tied to days logged in. AKA reward just for playing.

Now that laurels complete for Astral Acclaim with all the other better rewards, laurels are now UNACHIEVABLE.

TRASH. COMPLETELY POORLY DESIGNED TRASH. TRASH. SHAME. SHAME.

[Is new Living Story worth it?]

34 minutes ago, Endilbiach.4132 said:

Little early to ask this imo, but it's absolutely an expansion.  The only thing it's missing is new elite specs, but considering the fact that it's bringing us the option to use any of the elite spec weapons on a character regardless of their current elite spec, I consider that a fair tradeoff.  Also class balance has got to be getting hard.

Pros: New stuff!  Also legendary armor and legendary relics coming soon as part of it.  Ley line and updraft on skyscales and griffons is gonna be awesome.

Cons: Fix the friggin daily login system.  Only having 3 things we can do and being screwed if we don't like/can't do any of them is awful.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:GW2-mastery-regions.jpg

Uh, bro. People forget that HoT and PoF had like 14 full size maps for $40. Plus full elite specs. The Living World was free if you logged in and got them.

Now for SoTo it's like 1.5 maps for $25 . And I say 1.5 because the Skywatch map is shameless asset harvesting and Amnytas is essentially one wall texture and one pillar copy pasted into lazy cubes.

It continues the laziness and decline of EoD which gave us like 5 maps for $40, but at least we got the specs which added substantially to core systems.

If you actually consider $ per map, SoTo is ridiculously, like 2x or more more expensive. And we aren't even getting any core system upgrades, in fact they are uprooting and simplying and reducing if you consider Relics and Login changes as actually sort of a backwards step like most people do. 

I guess I will be generous and say SoTo is 2.5 maps because they felt gracious to give us a single one later...

I don't blame Arenanet for raising their prices in Joe Biden's collapsing economy but still, the decline in their output is undeniable.

 

[Relics will reduce build diversity]

51 minutes ago, Stx.4857 said:

Did I miss anything?  66% speed increase that doesn’t work anyone?

Yeah, you missed the one where if you fear someone they slow down slightly. HAHAHAHAHHAA

[Relics will reduce build diversity]

because everyone will choose Theif. +5% dps simple as.

[New dailies/weeklies [Merged]]

New daily system "Wizard's vault" is a downgrade in every way, functioning like a knockoff Dollar General cheap gem store . Forces players into another currency and store system instead of the passive background daily system. Decision fatigue anyone?  The old daily system allowed sPVP players to get full completion in just one game mode (complete 3 of 10 tasks to get the full 2g reward). This one gives you basically 1/3 of the reward any game mode, forcing you out of what you want to do and into other stuff you don't want to do. AKA trash. Not only that, but the Wizard Vault UI itself has terrible performance and a discordant graphic design from the rest of the game. It's truly jarring and disturbing that this product shipped.

[Secrets of the Obscure general feedback [Merged]]

--New daily system "Wizard's vault" is a downgrade in every way, functioning like a knockoff Dollar General cheap gem store . Forces players into another currency and store system instead of the passive background daily system. Decision fatigue anyone?  The old daily system allowed sPVP players to get full completion in just one game mode (complete 3 of 10 tasks to get the full 2g reward). This one gives you basically 1/3 of the reward for any single game mode, forcing you out of what you want to do and into other stuff you don't want to do. AKA trash. Not only that, but you must actively click to activate and then click again to redeem each daily. A true disaster. The Wizard Vault UI itself has terrible performance and a discordant graphic design from the rest of the game. It's truly jarring and disturbing that this product shipped.

-Skywatch Archipelago - Asset reuse masterclass.

-Amnytas - Copy paste cube land, I will add that it is also clearly plagiarized from recent WoW Shadowlands Bastion / Oribos / Zereth Mortis both aesthetically and thematically.

-The main map meta event of Skywatch Archepelego completely bugged on most instances after 20 minutes of work has been done, everything comes to a standstill until timeout and event failure. I failed it twice then gave up.

-Skyscale recycling: the game. 

-Premier feature: click a button to find nearby trash mobs followed by a slightly stronger trash mob.

-No new mounts, no new classes, no new weapons, didn't announce until release day that SURPRISE the new weapons are 3 months away.

-Impossible to navigate new maps, unnecessary and frustrating verticality and spread.

-Relic system - total and unmitigated disaster. Game shipped with 4 relics that have no text whatsoever. Ruined everyone's runes--horizontal progression FAIL. Require insane conditions to be met for each relic to proc. "On elite" NO JUST STOP. "If someone has 5 confusion then you disable them, then inflict confusion on nearby foes". Ok, wake me up at the heat death of the universe when this procs. "Fear you inflict causes foes to move 50% slower" Oh great, I was so concerned about how quickly foes were moving while they were feared.

- ALL the new features are actually things we already had but now TAKEN AWAY and we have to work to get them back. Daily system -> taken away, you will now work 3x harder because you can't get full completion with 3/10 tasks, you now need to do all of them to get max reward. Relics -> haha we stole your rune, work harder to get them back. Skyscale -> haha, the effort you put in to unlock it is now stolen, we're giving it to everyone and btw you need a new mastery to get back to full functionality.

Overall, an mitigated, untested, unpolished disaster, a step back in every way that spits in the face of the work players have done in the past. Shameful and disgraceful.

[New dailies/weeklies [Merged]]

AGREED. OLD DALIES WERE BETTER.

[The Achilles Heel of Legendary Armory]

Dyes are also terrrrible.

You have to redye every piece on every set of armor as opposed to regular armor which carries die across sets.

[@arenanet AFK players]

Unpopular opinion, but I think AFKing is a reasonable response to someone insulting or disrespecting you. It's the one thing that you can control; you can just say, ok, you don't deserve my presence and you can punish others with loss of rank and waste of time.

[When will Cantha be included for dailies?]

Dailies are going away next week. The Wizard's vault will be replacing that and I'm sure they will include cantha.

[How to Play Guild Wars 2 with a Controller]

Google sent me here. Thanks for the guide. Works nicely.

[10 years, still can't figure out how Skyhammer jump pads work]

I jump on them and 50% of the time I do a front flip without launching. How the heeck do these things even work? Any tips?

[The Solo-Q crisis]

3 hours ago, NotoriousNaru.6241 said:

lmao you are being incredibly bad faith. You were upset in map chat and were told both our accs are in the top 10(no one is being boosted) and then come to the forums to lie. Both accs showing the lb with normal winrates. These issues are all population related. The one thing I agree with you is that duo q should not exist. The skill gap is too big between tourny level players and average ranked qs, and the population is too low having 2 on one team will result in very one sided games. Personally i stream and get sniped with alts all the time who are duo'd i much prefer solo only ranked even at the cost of coordination / team building because the population cannot take it. Maybe theyll revisit that, but to lie and say maw(my duo) and I are cheesing you when both are in the top 10 is insanely bad faith.

No, I was not told both accounts are top 10, or rather if I was then I didn't hear it and that was never my understanding. The entire point is that the account was made last week, your partner himself messaged me and told me this. And because you ran him through placement matches, he could get Knight or Baron and knock someone else off the leaderboard. And no, it's not really a population issue. If a top 10 player partners with a fresh account, their MMR will be averaged and therefore face Gold/Silver even in a high population situation.

I don't necessarily blame you for abusing poor game design, and you are certainly talented, but you make an incredibly weak case for the ethics of your behavior. You are clearly running other people for titles. Whether there is money changing hands is not something I can prove, but there is unquestionably VALUE being exchanged at the cost of other players, which degrades the experience for everyone else but you and your partner.

Top players should not be able to offer access to top Leaderboard slots to less talented players.

[The Solo-Q crisis]

Just now I got out of a match with Notorious Naru partied with a new account made last week. DuoQ is getting out of hand. He literally runs other people on fresh accounts to sell titles to them. Partnering with a fresh account means that Naru's extremely high MMR is averaged down to Gold/Silver tier so he can steamroll noobs. He can just run like 10 consecutive placement wins with the partner and that partner will get a title.

Any Golds or silvers that are steamrolled along the way are just minnows that ArenaNet is willing to feed to the sharks. 

It's completely nasty that ArenaNet allows such egregious abuse of their players.

 

It makes me sick to my stomach, i spit on the ground.

[GW2 2Q 2023 Earnings]

20 hours ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

total income after conversion to KRW, which is not the same as company performance

HAHAHAHA. Ok, this highlighted is why you are wrong. The performance of GW2 is literally IS total income after conversion to KRW. That's literally the value they report for performance, that's the variable they are maximizing. That's the number every single person in the company is LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO MAXIMIZE, and should be the singular goal of their efforts, and the purpose of the entire organization and enterprise. Your conclusions are confused, and sad, because you have an fundamentally deficient understanding of how ArenaNet is organized as a business and the entire purpose GW2 as a product. I will repeat it to you. The performance of GW2 is inseparably, totally and completely, ultimately and singularly the number of KRW it generates. Yes, the performance somewhere along the way is affected by one or more FX conversions, but that conversion is already captured by the bar graph. That's why the ONLY relevant information you need to bring into that bar graph to understand the TRUE value generated by GW2 is the internal inflation of KRW over time and NOT the FX conversion.

To even begin addressing you, we have to understand the goal of business. That is to generate value. If ArenaNet is 100% owned by NCSoft (too lazy to check, but I think it is), then ultimately the performance of GW2 is measured by the KRW value generated by it AFTER it arrives in Korea plus the current account and local assets of ArenaNet, which are for our purposes arbitrary. I will repeat: It is ultimately the total value of the KRW generated that reflects the performance of GW2, not USD or EUR or any other currency. That's literally the metric used to measure performance. Thus, the only relevant external information you need to understand the total value generated by GW2, that is to say, the only external information you must modulate into the bar graph of "KRW generated over time by gw2" is KRW inflation, because that affects the total value presented. Not USD-KRW conversions, not EUR-KRW conversions, or anything else WHATSOEVER because that information is already captured in the height of that bar graph. 

Currency conversions do affect the ultimate performance, but those conversions are ALREADY CAPTURED IN THE BAR GRAPH. ArenaNet would obviously uses the cash it generates locally in the US to fund its operating expenses before it returns its profits to NCSoft. That would maximize the ultimate KRW generated. But the performance is still measured by how much KRW arrives in Korea to be distributed to stakeholders. That's the variable they are maximizing.

If you're looking at the performance of GW2 / ArenaNet / NCSoft, you look at that bar chart. That's it. That's what the investor sees. That's LITERALLY the performance. An investor might look into public perceptions of the game, player counts, currency conversions, operating expenses, future plans, company culture, whatever else they want. THey might use that information to buy or sell a stake, or whatever. But the KRW that arrives in Korea is ultimately the conclusion, the final performance, and the result of their efforts. It's not possible for GW2 to be outperforming while that chart is going down or staying flat, because performance is literally defined by that bar regardless of all other variables, with the exception of KRW inflation because that affects the total value reflected by that bar.  Currency fluctuations are a cost of doing business just like tariffs, lawsuits, bad weather, labor costs, rent, the price of electricity, bad publicity or whatever else. Yes, if the KRW rises relative to USD, the all else being equal, KRW income will be lower than in previous years. But I will repeat that this information is already captured within the bar graph, and thus the ONLY relevant information you need to bring in to understand the performance of GW2 is KRW inflation ALONE.

[GW2 2Q 2023 Earnings]

14 hours ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

While inflation is definitely word he was thinking of, there is a point that using graphs in specific currency, that is different that the primary currencies used for generating revenue. AN is primarily dealing in USD/Euro, so the exchange rates between USD/KRW and Euro/KRW will affect the graph.

And I have just checked graphs for the last 3 years, and KRW is definitelly on an upward trend compared to USD, which means that same revenue on NA market for AN in Q4 2020 would display as less revenue in KRW in any quarter of 2023.

What it basically means is that just looking at the graphs expressed in KRW alone, provides misleading picture that omits important information.

Inflation is of course also an aspect to be taken into the consideration, but different currencies have different rates of inflation, and it would again require a massive cross reference to determine how much of impact did it have in this particular case.

 

TL:DR: the gross income graphs used in this thread are expressed in currency different to the ones used by AN, and therefore are incomplete picture that leaves the currency exchange and other factors out of the picture, therefore on their own and not reliable source of data to try to determine company's actual performance.

No. You're mistaken. Currency fluctuations do not affect the conclusions that we can draw from the graph of total income in Won. To understand the value being generated by GW2, you look at Won income. That's it.

Yes, currency fluctuations affect the total Won income, and might affect the understanding of revenue generated PER REGION, but since we have the total Won income, and because we NEVER had revenue broken down by region,  ALL currency fluctuations are captured because Anet does the conversion to Won, and so we can accurately observe the total value generated by GW2. Get smart or kitten.

[GW2 2Q 2023 Earnings]

On 8/9/2023 at 12:15 AM, Izzy.2951 said:

http://imgur.com/Tatvpe2.jpg

 

PD: Full article: http://irsvc.teletogether.com/ncsoft/pdf/ncsoft2023Q2_eng.pdf

 

On 8/9/2023 at 7:38 AM, Zok.4956 said:

Here's the updated image of quarterly sales since release:  
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/685436537827098645/1138795199477321738/gw2-sales-2012q3-2023q2.png

 

On 8/9/2023 at 8:06 AM, Gibson.4036 said:

Except you also have to adjust that graph for inflation. Those 2023 KRW are worth more than those 2016 KRW. Inflation adjusted, they have more income than they’ve had over the last 8 years or so.

Sorry Mr. Gibson, you have inflation backwards. Almost all government currencies tend to lose value rather than gain value over time.

From an internet inflation calculator, ₩100 in 2012 has the same value as ₩121.2 in 2023. That means that the value of a single Won has declined about 18% in the past decade.

Thus, to know ANet's income in REAL terms since release you have to hold the 2012 values constant and decrease the 2023 bar by about 1/5 (with a gradation in the years between) to get a true sense of the value being generated by GW2.

That being said, this lines up with my general feeling that the developed world as a whole is 20% poorer since 2012 .. but that's a discussion for a different forum.