Illconceived Was Na.9781

If you care only about cost, you should always buy off the TP: the gold you save is more than offset by the inconvenience and time lost to doing collections, refining materials, crafting pieces of gear, and so on.If you care mostly about AP, or like the journey, or want to feel that you've personally gathered all the elements (without having to pray to RNGesus), then the collection method is your best option.If you're not sure, start and/or complete the first tier collection. If that's not fun for you in some way, then save your gold to buy off the TP. If it is, then it's worth pushing through the final tier.The legendary collections were never intended to be less costly or more efficient; the developers were always clear that the goal is to invest the player with the full responsibility for building each part of the weapon.

There's a reason why there are lots of strict boundaries in the new stories: in the past, people used to go too far (intentionally and unintentionally) and glitch out the mechanics, sometimes preventing progress. There were tons & tons of complaints about this. Restricting our movement prevents that particular issue and allows the stories to use huge maps, without forcing us to load a new instance to keep going forward. Of course, it introduced new issues; the specifics of most of them were probably unpredictable. It should be sufficient to modify the mechanic to prevent accidental crossing of the border. For example: Add a visible 'warning track': this is where the "turn back" message is offered, a distance from the "disconnect" area. The mini-map would look different and there would be some sort of visual marker (a buff, an icon overhead, and/or a change in atmospheric graphics).Increase the size of the allowable area to be big enough to dismount.Where there are foes, make sure that the leash distance of foes doesn't extend near the border.Where people are likely to run, make sure the border is at least two raptor/jackal jumps plus a dismount beyond the warning trigger.None of that would be simple to implement, so we're not going to see it soon or even soon™. Consequently, we have to remind ourselves to be more careful while ANet figures out how to tweak the fix, that was implemented to prevent an equally serious (and perhaps more annoying) issue.

Cross-linking from Reddit: Mounts & Math: How Much for the Skins You Want?Particularly the (current) first replyAs the original poster, Kulinda, wrote: Here's the tl;dr If you want four or more specific skins, the most cost efficient solution is to buy the 30-packIf you want one skin per mount and you don't care which skin, you need to purchase 15 to have at least a 90% chance to get that.(In case it's not obvious) The pickier you are about how many skins you like/want, the more licenses you need to buy, on average, to be satisfied.Again, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a topic of at least three other active threads. This thread is entirely meant to give you an idea of how much you should expect to spend to get the sorts of skins you want. Here's the original post from Kulinda Here's how many licenses you'd need to open on _average _to get the X skins you want:Skins you wantAverage licenses requiredLicenses per desired skin115.5015.50220.6710.34323.257.75424.806.20525.835.161028.182.821529.061.942029.521.482529.811.193030.001.00 More interesting is row number 4. You'd expect to need 24.80 licenses, but 24 single licenses cost 9600 gems - as much as the 30-pack.tl;dr: If you want more than 3 specific skins, it is on average more cost efficient to just buy the 30 pack.And from respondent KElderfall(I've only included 2 of their examples; it gets the point across just fine.)

Correct.With banners & boosters and such, you can add another few hundred. If you go to Silverwastes and build up perserverence, you get another 150% (+30% per event), and that ups a bit in the moment you are opening a Lost Bandit Chest. So those who want to can get ~900% MF or more, at least for brief periods of time. Normally, that's not worth the effort to worry about. The exceptions are opening containers for which MF changes the loot, most notably: Lucky Envelopes from Lunar New Year (~ February) and all three levels of Unidentified Gear from PoF maps. There are a couple of posts documenting just how big a difference that makes.

Yes, account-bound luck from MF has the cap of 300, independent of everything else.

It can break more than once, because the issue is dynamic: whenever GW2 cannot connect to the relevant GW1 servers, GW2 won't be able to validate HoM scores and whether GWAMM was earned. If that validation fails, the email goes out and the AP/titles are removed. As soon as GW2's servers can connect to the GW1 computers again, the problem resolves itself. You can always accelerate that process by: Closing game & restarting (easiest, but not 100% reliable)Closing GW2 then visiting the the HoM Calculator and looking at the details of any of your characters (very easy, usually successful)Closing GW2 then opening GW1 and starting any character (ideally, entering the HoM and speaking with Kimmes). If GW1 servers are talking to GW2's, this always resolves the issue.However none of the above will matter if the communication problem is ongoing. This will happen during certain types of maintenance (as we have seen this week), during DDoS attacks, and so on. However, eventually, it will resolve itself. Eventually. BackgroundUnderstandably, people often ask, "why the heck does this keep happening? can't the GWAMM and HoM scores just be permanently stored on the GW2 account?" I wish that were true and, near as I can tell from the developer posts on the topic, they wish it were true for more reasons. (It also affects their accounts, too, and they have to keep fixing it, dealing with the player frustration.) Some time ago, some code was introduced in the game that wasn't supposed to have anything to do with HoM/GWAMM but had the effect of giving people credit that hadn't earned it. By the time the root cause was discovered, lots of accounts had HoM/50 & GWAMM. First attempts to resolve it did the obvious: remove credit & achievements from the 'wrong' accounts; re-validate the deserving ones. That effort did not succeed, because it turns out it's a lot harder to remove AP/titles — without affecting accounts in other ways — than it is to add them (there's apparently a cascade of things that change). That didn't stop them from trying, but apparently, there was at least one root issue that prevented this from permanently resolving the issue. One possible alternative was to ensure that all the deserving accounts remained okay and simply allow some/many non-deserving ones to keep their mistakenly-awarded GWAMM and/or AP. The feedback on the forum was, to my best understanding, overwhelming against the idea. To expedite a fix, they decided to make the validation dynamic: this way, even if the problem reoccurs (as it has done before), the game can fix it automatically. This trades off annoyance and inconvenience for legit GWAMM players, in exchange for making sure that there never will be any false GWAMMs. In short: it's the least bad of a bad set of options.

But there is plenty of "good loot" that is in the game already, it's just poorly distributed. Right now there are hundreds of items that people might consider "good loot" that are either A: omega rarity drops that most people will never see in the wild, or B: only earnable through completing specific content that not everyone cares to do. They could add a lot of value to the game by presenting better paths to save up for those sorts of items via more practical ingame activities. Let people save up for Black Lion Keys. Let people save up for PvP/WvW specific armors via PvE play. Let people save up for Envoy Armors and similar items through general activities. And before you suggest that in at least some cases gold could fill this role, remember that gold is subject to the whims of the market, so the more people have, the less it is worth. This needs to be a non-market currency that retains full value regardless of how much of it exists. If you think that there's any way to distribute loot evenly and have it feel like it's good loot, even after seeing the math, then I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. The game already has rewards that we earn gradually; people think of those as grindy. There are lots of ways to save up for shinies; people are impatient. Take ascended trinkets: people used to value these as drops and now we don't, because they are so easily obtained from an hour or three of LS3 map farming. Technically you're right that gold is subject to the whims of the market, but that's not true in a practical sense in this game. The value of gold in GW2 has stayed extremely strong, thanks to the massive gold sink of TP fees (among other things that were setup well in the first place). There are all sorts of fantastic shinies available on the TP, many that have decreased in price over time (even as its' become easier to obtain gold). And sure, some shinies have legendary-like (or legendary-lite) prices, but even those can be saved up for. It's really up to the player how much they are willing to play, how efficiently, how much grind they want, and willing they are to set money aside for a long-term goal rather than spend on the cheaper shinies in front of them. The instant you change rewards into non-market currency is exactly the same point that people start to call it grindy, because now there's only one way to earn the reward (or two or three ways), versus gold, which is earned by anything we do except sneezing or chatting. (And even then, with the right build, you can still be earning.)

Calling it gambling is a poor rhetorical device. It starts an argument about "what do we mean when we say 'gambling'" and "why is gambling considered bad". In this case, it doesn't matter what it's called, people don't like it. In some cases, because they think it's a tax on people who are bad at math or have poor impulse control. In some cases, simply because who wants to spend US$5 (or 60 gold) on rolling the dice, when there's a good chance of getting a skin they would never use. So argue about whether this is gambling or not, if you want. It's probably not the conversation that will get ANet to rethink their pricing strategy.

I mean, the quantity of loot is fine, they give plenty of loot, but if it's not stuff that people actually value then it's not really loot. I mean if at the end of the week your boss hands you a paycheck for minimum wage, and also three full garbage bags to take out to the trash, well that's a large volume of reward for your efforts, but it's not going to get you very far. That's the issue here, there's not a whole hell of a lot of point to most of what the game offers you. It cannot even meaningfully help you earn the things that you DO want, in most cases. Maybe the solution would be more of a shift away from blue and green "trash" gear, and more towards collectible tokens that can eventually be converted into fancy and uncommon items that you actually want. You did a nice job of paraphrasing what I said: the game gives a lot of loot; it can't possibly be "good" loot as other games have, because we don't need special gear to succeed; and we dismiss the coin-value of "trash" loot as different from collectible tokens. The literal way that RIBA is profitable is by selling that trash loot. We just dismiss it because it doesn't seem special. One way to see this: Other games give expensive gifts, which might be the sweater you'll never wear or the mouse you had your eye on for months.ANet gives us a gift certificate, good at the TP, allowing us to get whatever the heck we want.As with RL gifts, some people prefer the first; it's more meaningful to them. And some prefer the latter, as they always get what they want. Note by the way: when it comes to loot, we perceive random rare stuff as better than giving us a constant stream of little stuff that we can convert at our leisure to the rare stuff. But when it comes to stuff we buy with RL cash (or gems), we're the opposite: we want fixed stuff, not random.

We get so much loot in the game, we don't even realize it. The biggest problem ANet has is perception. Since we don't need the traditional lucky drops to play (as would be true in many, many other games), the only things that feel rewarding are those with super tiny drop rates. Those can often be acquired with gold, that accumulates from just about anything we do. That results in understandable frustration and the feeling that there aren't good drops and that everything "worthwhile" is too expensive. The fact is that we don't need very much in GW2 to succeed, so we tend to focus on things we don't need as being paramount.

"so fast" game has been out for 5 years... with 550k wvw kills loot overstacks It depends a lot on how you play. If you do things that generate a ton of foe deaths, there will be enough loot to salvage to max more quickly. If you tend to do content with lower kill rates, it takes longer. You can choose to speed it up by using things like containers that drop essences (e.g. ToT bags), salvaging ecto for the crystalline dust (to use or sell), and so on.

It's not that hard to max if you really want to. Even easier now with the recent QoL changes. Given how often I saw your main account in the Labyrinth this year, it might be worth it for you to take a little time. Of course, there are advantages to letting it grow organically. I admit to be a little sad when I hit 285%, because then it stopped being fun to gain another 1%. (Instead, it turned into an ongoing angst of "what am I going to do with all that luck now", which brings us full circle to the original post.) That's not quite as easy to manage. :(If you like plants, think of it as gardening: it takes the same effort to weed weekly or to let things grow willynilly and then have to spend your entire week of weeding and replanting. It's just a question of whether you spend a little effort regularly or put it off.

I hope you're not holding your breath. We know the reason; we also know that it's unlikely that ANet will change the things for this set of skins. However, they are (hopefully) thinking twice about how to price/distribute. I know people are upset and I know that some people can't understand why, some can (but disagree anyhow), and others are just annoyed. But that doesn't mean that ANet owes us an explanation or a change. It just means that we have strong opinions.

They do, however, include skins for mounts that you don't own.It hardly matters for the the core mounts, since it's reasonable to expect everyone with PoF will acquire them (or at least, anyone spending on an RNG skin). So you can end up with a Griffon skin eventhough you never paid the 250g required to unlock it, lulz.That's odd, of course. I'm willing to bet that if you got a griffon skin, without it unlocked, ANet Support would be able to help you out. The deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the worse it gets, doesn't it?No, not really.

The licenses only work on the 30 released as part of the pack. They don't include spooky or Warhound.

30 items for US$120, not one item.(Doesn't mean you have to like it or support it, but let's try not to exaggerate.)

Agreed. I expect to pay a premium to be "first" (and I don't expect, but often enjoy huge discounts for waiting).

While that's true, I don't say that because if even a few more people start doing that, the value of upgrading would drop substantially. The profit margin is often slim. I'm not against anyone sharing that info. Instead, I'm saying that it's only valuable because so few people are aware of it. It's barely enough of a sink for the few who take advantage of it now.

How is that different from spending 100 gems for a chance at an exclusive dye]? Or 80 gems (in bulks) for BL keys, with a random chance of skins? Like any lotto, play if you think you'll get lucky, otherwise hang tight and buy the specific skin(s) you want when they show up at a discount later. Those dyes can be bought on the TP and flooded quite nicely with supply. Mount skins cannot be bought on the TP.Still, someone had to play the lotto for folks like you or I to take advantage of the discount. In fact, at least in this case, the 400 gems guarantees a skin; the other RNG boxes on the gem shop contain more junk than not. I'm not likely to be willing to plop down 400 gems without getting to choose a skin, but all the same: I can see why you (like I) won't want to spend that amount for RNG, but why does it affect your paying for anything else that the game has to offer?

How is that different from spending 100 gems for a chance at an exclusive dye]? Or 80 gems (in bulks) for BL keys, with a random chance of skins? Like any lotto, play if you think you'll get lucky, otherwise hang tight and buy the specific skin(s) you want when they show up at a discount later.

Any artificer can convert luck. And any character can learn artificer for free.It's technically not an account bound recipe; it just doesn't matter that it's not.

No, DR doesn't apply to your MF. And the data shows that MF above 300% does give better loot. @Wanze.8410 has made a couple of posts on the topic, sometimes on Reddit as Rude Asura. It's become easier to test in the last year, notably with Lunar New Year Lucky Envelopes and Unidentified Gear. In both cases, there are substantial differences between e.g. 30%, 300%, and 800% MF. In other words, all things equal, it's better to run with as much Magic Find as you can manage. The only reason why most of us don't is that it's impractical to maintain extra MF all the time, so we tend stick with our account bound MF plus maybe some pumpkin cookies and H'ween tonics (both super cheap year round).

I convert to exotic (200 luck) and store them on an alt, because I can afford the space. If I couldn't, I'd "consume all" (rather than the delete). I don't believe ANet will increase the cap, but if they did, I'd rather have them as part of my account then lost to the ether. edit: not sure how we all missed this for 2.5 months, but I typed the wrong amount for 'exotic' essence; they are only 200 luck.

20-23 minutes is consistent with what I've seen in the lab.