perilisk.1874

Everywhere I saw it used in the writing, it seemed to be used as a name. However, the word literally means "overlord", and I think can refer to certain types of bishops IRL. "Overlord" is a little on the nose as a name, and it makes sense as a title (given his creation of the various houses and noble titles, it would probably be a self-granted title). But that's just thinking with out-of-game knowledge. Is there anything in the actual writing of the first release that suggests it could be a title instead of a name? If it was a title, it might suggest that that writers want the character's identity to be a surprise, meaning it could perhaps be a character from past lore that was either a demon, or became demonic. Even though the court has been around for much longer than GW1 era, I don't think I remember reading anything to suggest that Eparch's reign is more than a few centuries old.

Title says it all. He is a demon of sorts, and might still be alive. Maybe he has some knowledge of or connection to these events?

Most living world? It's not a living world episode, but it is comparable to a living world season. Each act is about the length of an episode. The maps are somewhat larger and more detailed than LS maps, but altogether it's maybe 3 LS episodes worth of content. It feels like a little less than it is because where you would normally fill up your green bar in between story instances by exploring the map and running DEs, here you usually just do the copy-paste Rift DEs, so mastery points (and novelty) are the main reason to bother with normal DEs.

While making people pay to play content is obnoxious, I kind of like the concept of an item people can craft to make an event more rewarding for other people -- if it were made applicable to lots of types of DEs or other content, then it could help to solve the problem of dead group content that blocks people from completing collections and achievements, especially if there was a section in LFG for help beacons, and a way to teleport to them directly as well.

I would mind them a lot less if you could dump them into tradable RN items. Like, spend 250 at the RN vendor to get a tradeable item that can be consumed for 250. Then let people who want to play that economic optimization game play it, and let everyone else just directly buy RN items from them on the TP.

I can confirm that breaking LOS works to prevent green circle damage. Depending on where you fight, this might be easier than getting out of range.

You... get more than 2 gold for doing dailies, if you spend the AA you get from the daily chest in the shop. You get 1 gold from the daily chest. On top of that, you get 65 AA from the chest and achievements together. The first 90 gold bags you buy cost 6 AA, so you could technically get 11 gold for your first few dailies. After that, it appears that there is no cap on the gold bags that cost 30 AA, so that is a minimum of 3 gold per daily, if you use AA only on gold.

The thing is, they definitely track some internal set of achievement "slots" separate from the actual achievements, and can swap them out at will -- I bought the expansion yesterday with partial completion of dailies and weeklies, and it swapped them out for new ones, but still kept their completion state (expect for one that was done but unclaimed, which was mildly annoying). So, there is no reason they can't do the same thing on demand with PvE, PvP, and WvW if players change their checkboxes.

The other 1 gold, you buy from the AA shop with the AA you got for the dailies, I guess.

I think they would have been better off with giving the full set of tasks (maybe on 3 tabs to keep it neat), but a daily and weekly cap on AA from individual tasks. Also, since they're overhauling it and limiting it to lv80 accounts, they should just make all dailies universal, and add an extra option for each expansion rather than replace items in the pool. They could even have tasks give different AA rewards based on relative difficulty, and unlock the chest based on AA earned rather than number of achievements, so you could do one hard thing or 3 piddly things. That said, the new system does have its pros -- you can at least earn partial progress even if you don't get 3 dailies, or all the weeklies. And the reward selection is more interesting, and you can focus on the rewards you actually want.

I think the reason they went away from raids is precisely because of story. That is, putting the same amount of effort into writing and presenting story for a game mode that is ignored by a sizeable percentage of players as you would the main story that everyone plays through, doesn't make a lot of sense. Aside from difficulty, one complaint about putting story in raids is that it is gated behind being able to find a group, which is not true of the main story. Now, could you add an accessible single-player story mode for raids, with easy versions of the bosses, and that simplifies or removes some mechanics? Sure. Of course, there is still another issue, and that is that story gets in the way of high-replayability content. Whether it's because you wiped over and over, or just because you are grinding the same thing yet another time for weekly rewards, being bothered with a lot of exposition you have already been through, especially if it delays the action, is like an unskippable cutscene before a hard boss fight. Very annoying. Now, you could solve that problem too -- just leave all the unskippable exposition for the story-mode version of the raid that everyone sees (but probably only once on a character unless they want some achievements). And cut the more repeatable hard-mode version down to just the boss fights and rewards. And... that's where we are with Strike Missions. Of course, there is less story overall, since the raid story and the main story are merged into one thing. But less story content in general is a different complaint.

I'm fine with the additional flexibility too, but... if maximizing flexibility is what we want, why even worry about rune sets? Just split the set bonus evenly among the tiers and let people mix and match runes how they want.

Nice to see that at least one part of e-specs will added for this expansion. Unfortunately, since there are no formal e-specs or e-spec names, we can't call the new twin-pistol-wielding guardian a pair-a-gun...

Joon was written with personality defects that allowed for some ambiguity as to whether she would become an antagonist (or at least, for longer than one home invasion mission where the Commander was basically the villain). She had the whole arrogant, transformative lone-wolf technologist/mogul thing that could go heroic (Tony Stark) or villainous (Ozymandias, maybe Andrew Ryan). Always kind of a tossup. I think the larger red flag was that she was a powerful, proud female leader who nearly single-handedly created a technomagically advanced civilization by extracting energy from a not-quite-cosmic being (which itself extracts energy from the planet) using a facility at the bottom of the ocean, and who has some sort of personal relationship with that being. You wouldn't be wrong to short floating island real-estate in Cantha. And if she ends up having a son and he starts saying creepy stuff about black winds, get out of there quick.

But they do make money when people buy gems to exchange for gold. The exchange rate is reactive. Every time people buy gems with gold, it moves the exchange rate in favor of gems (that is, gems can buy more gold), which makes it cheaper to buy in-game items with fixed gold prices, like icy runestones or the griffon mount. That implicitly raises the value of gems, which entices more people to buy them. No kidding, it’s pretty obvious that Anet makes money when someone buys gems... A player exchanging gold to gems is a $0 transaction, that’s the point, but some are obviously unaware of this. Uh no it's not a 0$ transaction because those gems were not aquired free, they didn't magically spawn from a chest in game like gold or drop from a boss etc etc. For it to be a 0$ transaction then the gems would have had to be generated in game from WITHIN the game eco system. Instead someone spent real $$$ to buy those gems to then inject them into the "game eco sytem". As such every time someone buys gems with gold or gold with gem Anet has made $$$ because those gems come from only one source. Anet themselves as they are the only gem sellers which by defaults make anyone using gold to buy some Anets little gold bots for their gold selling business so to speak Really? I would like you to tell me how much Anet money earns for their bank account if a player exchanges gold to get 8,000 gems? $100. You can be pedantic, I guess, and argue that they make nothing in that specific transaction because the price was paid when the gems were bought, not when they were spent to buy gold. But by that logic, nothing in the gem store makes them money. S/he have answered you mutiple times already, someone buy 8k gems for 100$ turns them into gems pool for gold, that someone else then buy for gold.So anet get 100$ for those gems.It dont matter that the person buying the gems for gold dident spend those cash themselfs anet still got paid.And if the gem to gold is to low people wont buy gems to turn into gold.So not buying gems with gold actualy hurt anet since the people not wanting anything from the gemstore wont spend cash to gain gold. That’s not answering the question... Maybe reread it. This was the question... “how much Anet deducts from your bank account if you just exchanged gold for 8,000 gems?” Well nothing from the bank account but the time to gather all that gold has a worth aswell, ever heard the time is money line? So your question is a silly line in the sand mate stop asking it. So on the topic of how Anet monetizes the game, someone exchanging gold for gems doesn’t spend a penny. Thank you for answering and for highlighting how generous Anet really is. It's not generosity. People are sadly not motivated to play merely by fun, they also want to earn in-game rewards. So long as rewards can be traded, there needs to be a medium of exchange, and way to earn it. Thus, there will be gold, it will drop in game, and some people will want to shortcut the in-game effort to earn in-game rewards by using real-world money. Arenanet put the gold exchange in place to cut black market gold sellers out of the loop, and force people to purchase gold through Arenanet. Only rewards are in cash shop: Game is no fun, it fails. No gold: No economy, too many constraints to create a good reward system, game fails. Sell gold directly without player inputs: Too gross, damages economy, devalues in game rewards, game fails. Just an indirect version of "only rewards are in cash shop", and creates a strong incentive to make everything pricier and pricier while being stingier and stingier with in-game gold drops. No gem/gold exchange: Gold-sellers run rampant, game is probably fine but less profit for Arenanet. No one puts gold on gold exchange: No one spends gems at gold exchange, less profit for Arenanet. If I can't buy mount skins for gold, you can't buy Legendaries for $$$. Just accept that if people don't put gold on the gem/gold exchange, it costs Arenanet money. While they could have chosen not let people obtain gem shop rewards this way, it would have just meant people who might have paid Arenanet for gems would instead pay gold sellers for gold, which costs Arenanet money. If they just decided to force everyone to get everything from the cash shop (or let them buy gold outright without other players needing to make some effort), the game would suck and everyone would quit, which costs Arenanet money.

How much money does Anet get from my bank account if someone gives me a gem card for my birthday? If they get paid, they get paid, it doesn't matter whose account it comes from. I can't buy those gems from the exchange unless someone pays Arenanet to put them there. It's just supply and demand (the exchange is supposedly modeled using some micro-econ type supply/demand curves or something, IIRC, with Arenanet certainly "taxing" each transaction as well). If I bought the gems for $$$ instead of gold, I would keep my gold instead of putting it on the exchange. As a result, supply on the gold exchange would decrease, therefore a new equilibrium would be reached at a lower demand point. "Lower demand point" is just another way of saying "fewer gems spent to buy gold". When you refuse to put gold on the gold/gem exchange, you're just discouraging people who want to swipe for a legendary from buying gems, and practically stealing money from Anet's pocket. Shame on you!

You should really think this through, because gems don't appear out of thin air on a gold to gem exchange, they get there because players buy them with real moneys and put them there. Arenanet isn't printing gems and giving them away for gold, so far as they have said or suggested. If you work on their exchange tech and know better, feel free to enlighten us.

I'm afraid I'm perfectly, absolutely right. I could have sworn you knew the answer, but maybe not. Well, I'm nice, so I'll tell you, no charge.

Transaction 1: Someone spends 8000 gems at the cash shop for a super-deluxe mount skin.Transaction 2: Someone spends 8000 gems at the gold exchange to buy gold from you (the same transaction you keep describing, put in different words). Arenanet gets exactly the same amount of real cash in each transaction. And that amount is... well, you seem to think you know, so what is it?

Someone doesn't understand it, sure. Arenanet set up a system, so far as they have explained it, that mathematically in the long run works out to an exchange between players on both sides. One player has gems, the other has gold. If the player with gems wants gold, to buy stuff in game that costs gold, he can only do that through the players that put gold on the exchange, because this is how Arenanet designed it. They could have simply conjured up gold and sold it directly like anything else in the gem store, but that is not the system they implemented, nor is it how things work in the other direction. When you say "spend gold to buy 8000 gems", it's the same thing as saying that someone else "spent 8000 gems to get gold", which is the same thing as saying "spent 8000 gems for a bunch of convenience items" or "bought 8000 gems and quit the game forever without spending them", as far as Arenanet's bottom line, since they make their money when you buy the gems, not when you use them up. If you don't put gold on the exchange, then players can't spend gems to get gold to use for things that cost gold. If they want something that costs gold, but they can't get that gold with gems (or the amount of gold they can get per gem is so paltry that they can't afford the needed gems), then they don't buy gems for that purpose. If they don't buy those gems, then Arenanet doesn't make money. When you give another player X gold for 8000 gems, essentially you're paying them in game money to pay Arenanet in real money.

wvw is not pve land Like I said, I'm just a filthy PvE casual type who barely plays except for GoBs and the mount. Tho, it sure seems like a lot of WvW involves running around in a giant zerg to undefended objectives and slaughtering NPCs, which sounds an awful lot like vanilla PvE. Not to mention the wildlife, existing NPC camps, and so on, and the fact that to some extent WvW exists to theoretically satisfy people who want PvP in OW. But note that I wasn't pushing PvE for its own sake. I did think it would provide a little bit of a shallow end for PvErs to splash about in before getting brave enough to seek out PvP, sure. But mostly, I wanted to address the fact that people don't defend as much as they would in an actual wargame, because defending is only participating if someone decides to show up and fight. Not only is it not extrinsically rewarding, it's also not intrinsically rewarding -- it's mind-numbingly boring. If you give people a means to contribute to the war effort by staying parked on an objective and doing something at least moderately engaging, and it's required to score (and scoring actually matters a little more than it does now) then it means teams stay more spread out, which means more and smaller fights, which are better suited to a combat system which is inherently balanced around groups of 5-10, and breaks down in zergs. No cap timeout means that no objective is safe, so defense is always relevant. No automatic NPC respawn means human defenders are always needed to prevent small attack groups from winning by attrition. That said, it doesn't over-emphasize defense. In the system above, holding an objective does you no good if you can't get caravans there. Attacking and defending supply lines is as important as holding objectives.

But they do make money when people buy gems to exchange for gold. The exchange rate is reactive. Every time people buy gems with gold, it moves the exchange rate in favor of gems (that is, gems can buy more gold), which makes it cheaper to buy in-game items with fixed gold prices, like icy runestones or the griffon mount. That implicitly raises the value of gems, which entices more people to buy them. No kidding, it’s pretty obvious that Anet makes money when someone buys gems... A player exchanging gold to gems is a $0 transaction, that’s the point, but some are obviously unaware of this. Uh no it's not a 0$ transaction because those gems were not aquired free, they didn't magically spawn from a chest in game like gold or drop from a boss etc etc. For it to be a 0$ transaction then the gems would have had to be generated in game from WITHIN the game eco system. Instead someone spent real $$$ to buy those gems to then inject them into the "game eco sytem". As such every time someone buys gems with gold or gold with gem Anet has made $$$ because those gems come from only one source. Anet themselves as they are the only gem sellers which by defaults make anyone using gold to buy some Anets little gold bots for their gold selling business so to speak Really? I would like you to tell me how much Anet money earns for their bank account if a player exchanges gold to get 8,000 gems? $100. You can be pedantic, I guess, and argue that they make nothing in that specific transaction because the price was paid when the gems were bought, not when they were spent to buy gold. But by that logic, nothing in the gem store makes them money.

Regular expansions, with the cash shop only as supplemental income?

Well, it's not like you can watch animations behind the giant wall of particle effects, and they don't put activating skills under the health bar, unlike GW1. How else would you be able to predict attacks?

But they do make money when people buy gems to exchange for gold. The exchange rate is reactive. Every time people buy gems with gold, it moves the exchange rate in favor of gems (that is, gems can buy more gold), which makes it cheaper to buy in-game items with fixed gold prices, like icy runestones or the griffon mount. That implicitly raises the value of gems, which entices more people to buy them.