Solvar.7953

I can understand to some reason why Anet may want to limit home portals on certain maps. I could imagine some of the lounges would get covered with them. It would be nice if there was just some way (yet another portal scroll device) would could take you to your homestead no matter what map you are on without making that doorway.

For companies that host their own services, it would be rare for them to keep them in their work office. Usually they would be in some co-location facility that has backup power, good network connectivity, and so forth. But in many cases, the pay some cloud provider to host the services - this has the advantage that they can scale up their capacity when a new release comes out, and then scale it down as interest drops off, and not have to have so many servers on-site to cover the highest demand period which would be a high investment which is not used most of the time. In some cases, companies may host some services in their work offices, but in those cases, the important services are still going to have UPS, backup generators, etc.

I can see the timegates for new content as it comes out (keeps people playing longer, perhaps stabilizes some markets so there is not a mad rush of people buying the materials the first day of the release). But for content that has been out for years, I don't see any purpose of a timegate, other than it makes the process more annoying. And for ascended crafting timegate, I'd rather it be a weekly timegate (7 lumps of mithrilium/week vs 1/day). Basically same effect, but then I can just set aside that 30 minutes 1 day a week to do all of that weekly work. Not everyone can play every day, even if it is for only 5 minutes.

I'm really not sure how blocking the API prevents spoilers. Yes, it does prevent data mining, but some folks will complete the entire expansion the day it comes out, and at that point can freely post spoilers (or other comments about the latest release) And while the API can expose details, that would typically require the player to use certain sites (gw2efficiency or the like) to find those. And at that point, I'd say the players who don't want to see spoilers should just avoid those sites (just like they would avoid certain posts in the forums) until they have finished the story themselves. The unfortunate fact is that certain sites like gw2efficiency are almost required to use if you plan on making legendary items, due to the sheer number of crafting steps involved, and the usefulness in identifying what materials or currencies one may need to acquire to finish it. I was working on some legendary when JW dropped, and I basically put that on hold until the API became available again because it was otherwise going to be such a pain to figure out what I had vs what I needed.

I realize that excess obsidian shards may not be a universal problem (in the past I did not have enough), but at this point, my storage is overflowing with them, and there really isn't a viable sink for them. Gharr Leadclaw as added who sells things for a bunch of things that did not have any sinks before, so my suggestion is to add obsidian shards to that list. Folks can choose to use that feature as they see fit - most of what Gharr sells now really isn't worth much, but better than nothing.

One thing I was pondering is which language has the fastest spoken content. Hard for me to imagine that all languages are timed exactly the same, which suggests there is at least some amount of leeway that these can be sped up. Maybe Anet could just add an audio language of 'None', which has audio files of the minimum length necessary for things to still but are also otherwise silent.

That is one thing with both SotO and JW - a lot of the dialogue that is spoken is spoken really slowly. Sure - I'll listen to it the first time through, but when playing through a second time (which at least 1 achievement requires you to do - or at least that instance), it is just boring. Maybe the next expansion will feature a lot of skritt, who at least speak quickly.

I agree with all of those, though I suspect this thread will get moved into the QoL thread as these are not literal bugs, but design decisions. One thing I would add is being about to use a WP while in combat in PvE (not WvW where it would screw things up). What is the problem of letting folks use a WP during combat in PvE cause? It isn't to prevent armor damage anymore (that has been removed), and still costs some minor amount of coinage. The reason I want this is often a pet goes off attacking something random, or sometimes, some creature you ran past is attacking you and it is hard to clear that 'in combat' condition.

While there are certain cases where I could believe the excuse of the devs that the dialogue is needed for certain things to happen behind the scenes, this expansion has had instances where the only thing going on discussion - there is no encounter or anything else that needs to be set up. For that matter, except for achievements, they could just have a button at the start which instantly progresses one to the end because there is nothing important in the instances, and you have already heard it once. Then there are open world situations where things are still going on regardless of the conversation - same point on those, they could instantly move to the next objective in the story and just have the conversation continue. Players could stick around to listen to it, or move to the next objective. I suspect a lot of this mandatory dialogue is to stretch out the story - probably half the time it takes to complete the story is listening to this. For me, it actually reduces the desire to replay these stories with other characters, which then reduces the overall value of these expansions.

If Anet was going to reduce the cost, they could say something vague like 'In a future update, we will be reducing the cost of making legendary relics' The vagueness means that folks can decide for themselves to craft it now (and get the benefits now) or wait for the price reduction, which is not clear how much it might be (may only be 10%, could be 50%, whatever). And by not saying specifically how it will reduce prices, it can help reduce impact of the materials needed, since people won't really know which ones one will need less. Though in this case, it really is the lucent crystals, since hard to see changing the requirements of the condensed gifts. Or maybe add another way to get mystic facets? Would it be crazy to add them as a choice to some of the map meta chests (or if giving a full one is too much, maybe some token where you can exchange X tokens for a mystic facet)?

Anet seems focused on milking the game for as much money as they can (I can't blame them on that - purpose of business is to make money). While I would love for there to be skippable dialogue, I doubt that many people would make that a purchasing decision on future expansions (same for many other QoL features, like more scalable/customizable UI). So while Anet could certainly do those things, they don't see it bringing it much money to do so, so they don't. Where it may cause some loss of money is at this point, if a person asked me if they should start playing GW2, I would probably give them a long list of issues like this (you'll be stuck with dialogue you can't skip, or a UI designed 15 years ago when monitors were smaller and/or resolution lower, and that every other game out there does not have those issues), so it may make it more difficult to attract new players. But those active players probably won't quit playing the game over these issues.

https://fast.farming-community.eu/gathering/home-nodes gives breakdown on how quickly they pay off, based on current prices of materials. Quick answer is most of the LWS nodes pay off fairly quickly, because it just costs 50 gold, and you can convert what you get into unbound/volatile magic, which can then be used to buy trophy crates or ascended trinkets.

I can't imagine the crafting speed is performance related, because certain items start crafting really quickly once you do a few, and some items are fairly slow even if you are on the 100th one. Bulk recipes could help. Or if you do craft all or set a number, it could just all craft those in one batch - there is no reason it has to do them 1 by 1. I suppose some of this might be to give players a chance to hit cancel if they accidentally hit craft all and not have all their stuff converted, but I can't imagine that happens very often. Maybe the slow crafting is slightly more interesting if you have not maxed out your crafting skill so you see your skill go up as you do so, but at this point, I imagine most players have maxed crafting skills.

I used to dabble in PvP with the old daily system, where a daily showed up that was easier than the PvE options. When the new system, I've not entered PvP at all. I play/farm WvW to the extent to get rewards from it, but otherwise don't find it that interesting, except when the guild I'm in does wvw guild missions every couple weeks. So at this point, I'd rate myself 90% PvE and 10% WvW in terms of the content that I play that I enjoy.

I think it would work for the items to be account bound on purchase, but soulbound on use. I don't know if that functionality existed when the game first came out, but it certainly exist now and it would seem they could do that for some number of items and it not really affect anything in any way, other than making it more convenient.