voltaicbore.8012

Okay so it sounds less and less like hacking, and more like your dad didn't recognize the purchase. What happens a lot is this: the bank/credit card company sees a transaction called "ARENANET" on your dad's card, sees that he doesn't really spend money on games, and then sends him an automatic text saying "hey man did you buy ARENANET?" Your dad doesn't even know what ARENANET is, so he just presses "no" on the text message, and the credit card company did a chargeback. Was the purchase (HoT/PoF expansions) the one you made shortly before you were blocked?

You're mixing up terminology here. By "blocked" I assume you mean that once you put in your login details and attempt to login into the game, Arenanet is blocking you from actually entering the game. When you talked to support about it, they told you about the chargebacks. What the rest of us are thinking about when we talk about you being blocked out of your account is this: if some hacker gained access to your account, bought a bunch of stuff, then did chargebacks, how did you manage to actually do all this password-changing/phone number stuff? Usually if your account got hacked, the hacker changes the logins so the original owner totally loses access to it. If you were able to do all the account security things you said you did, that means the hacker just Logged in as you, didn't change any of your login details, bought a bunch of stuff and charged it back, and then just... left, still failing to change your login details. Which is not how this kind of story usually goes.

So as everyone knows when you buy something from game company A with credit card B, B actually pays A money on your behalf, and you get whatever you wanted to buy from A. Normally you have to pay B back later. A chargeback is when someone calls up the credit card company and say "hey I didn't actually want to/authorize that purchase" and so B actually takes back the money it previously sent to A. This happens a lot with hackers and games, because usually As soon as the hacker makes the purchase, the game company provides the product and can't take it back/take it away from the hacker. Since the hacker now has what they wanted from the game company (and the game company can't take it back), they initiate a chargeback. This means they now owe $0 to the credit card company but still have the in-game item that they initially purchased. The end result is that (a) hacker gets stuff and pays $0 for it, and (b) Anet gave the hacker free stuff AND is maybe charged a fee by the credit card company because of the chargeback... and also has a hacked account to deal with. At this point I'm not sure what you can do. If you don't own the cards that the purchases were made on and can't undo the chargebacks (which might not be a good idea anyways if the hacker made HUGE purchases), that's it.

I think this is it. I've been running a staff druid for some time now, and I still have all the same tools to deal with DH. The easiest one is just to sacrifice one pet to trigger traps on an empty node that the sad lonely DH is guarding, while I'm actually multitasking and doing something else. If I do happen to get speared and pulled, Signet of Stone basically lets me walk away for free, added bonus if they wasted a True Shot into it as well. Of course that's just for one particular flavor of ranger, but I get the feeling that whatever set of tools you had which made DH lose relevance for a long time are still there, and still just as usable.

Agreed. The only two QoL things I'd like to see have to do with managing these infinite gathering tools, and maybe an account-wide fishing tackle box as well.

It is a bit of a chore, but I find it becomes easier if you leave a set of placeholder tools in 3 slots of your shared bag. Then, all you need to do is double click on each of those tools, and it'll swap into your character (and your infinite tools will go into the shared slot).

I think Anet understands some people liked them, but they just don't care. I think they're pushing towards greater uniformity in effects (which I don't like) and greater overall emphasis on getting players to interact with boons/boonstrip (which is fine by me, but I don't think completely trashing ever 6th-piece bonus was the best way to do it). At this point I'm almost 100% certain we're not going to get our summons back, at least not in the form we used to have them. Don't get me wrong - I'm not happy about that prediction, and would love to be proven wrong. The relic change ranks as the absolute worst part of SotO in my opinion.

In sPvP, if a team downs a ranger and lets it get back up via Lick Wounds, that's a sign of a bad, bad team. Don't even need to commit to a stealth+stability+whatever stomp; pretty standard cleave damage can do the trick. People forget that the pet dies pretty quickly, and that ends Lick Wounds. Even if you swap pets, Lick Wounds is on CD. Moral of the story: Lick Wounds can bring a ranger back up in competitive ONLY if there is absolutely zero pressure. Literally have to have everyone ignore the bleeding out ranger. Yeah from that alone I could tell you had no experience against rangers in sPvP. You couldn't be more wrong about its effectiveness.

@Ezic.8325 my initial reaction was "wow, what a long post just to ask 'how to farm gold?' " - but I'm glad I actually read a little closer and it looks like your question is more along the lines of "how I can get a reasonable amount of gold without super tryhard farming?" Others have already given you the right answer - just do stuff you enjoy, and continue stockpiling materials. That will go a long way towards ascended armor, in terms of using the raw materials in the crafting process or just selling off piles of mats that you don't need when the time comes. I enjoy dungeons in GW2, even though they're severely outdated (even though there are recent signs that Anet might very extremely slowly try to update them a bit). I bring all different sorts of builds and characters to solo them (both story and explorable), and it's turned out to be fairly profitable. If I'm even minimally efficient, I can probably get 10+ gold in 60-90 mins of gameplay. It's way lower than the truly profitable gold farms, but (1) I like dungeons, and (2) I can solo the entire 1.5 hours so I can stop and start whenever I need to. The point is that you can make a decent pile of gold just doing what you like, and you can make reasonable amounts of it without being super-veteran-farmer efficient.

Yeah my current build is axe/axe with hammer on swap. Axe ambush in particular hits hard and does a great job on lifesteal from several targets that might not all be neatly bunched up in melee range. Switching the offhand axe for warhorn would just add more ranged pressure and good swift/fury uptime, might be worth it. But frankly I'm thinking such changes will be unnecessary.

I main ranger, and hammer untamed is a spec that is slowly becoming the primary thing I run in PvE. I'll give this fight a try later today if I have a chance, and let you know if there was any low-hanging fruit (maybe something as simple as equipping sword for the leaps) that helps. Also thematically, there was a cc-heavy ranger build in GW1 known as the "bunny thumper." I don't remember if Anet said it explicitly, but that's pretty much where we get untamed hammer from.

For me, this is the problem with weaponmaster reaper. Before, even if bad situational awareness or cc left me in range of all the shroud/blind of melee reaper, I could disengage reasonably well. Pistol has just increased the amount of time and distance I need to properly disengage, which leaves me more vulnerable to the reaper's backup, or at the very least gets the reaper much closer to having utilities/shroud come off CD. I'm sure most of it is a class/skill issue on my end, but it just feels like pistol offers reaper all the ranged commitment they need to tip the balance. So instead of being able to soak some of the burst, disengage, and jump back in while the reaper is a bit vulnerable, I now find myself disengaging... then just looking for something else to do. Running back in for round two generally has the same result as round one, unless the reaper is bad at LF generation.

I'm in the same boat, but I've "only" been here for 7 years. There's still a lot of stuff to chase. While my legendary armory is pretty well-stocked (still working on some of the trinkets), the Wizard's Vault has allowed me to go after a few more legendary weapons I never intended on making. In terms of overall staying power/retention in my case, the fact that (almost) everything I work towards remains just as valuable as the moment I got it is a big thing that keeps me around. It assures me that what I'm going after at any given moment is going to be worth it, and that goes a long way to keep me interested.

Future proof? Maybe. But if you ask me, that's a future I'd rather not see. And as harsh as it is to say it, if not getting a mobile version means we lose players like OP forever, I'm okay with that. I don't think a mobile version would really have prevented this guy from leaving anyways.

I use SotO content to test solo builds. The roving champions have enough HP and attack power that I can really test if a build is lacking in one aspect or another. Also if you're soloing some of the events on a glassy build, it turns out swarms of Kryptis backed up by the stupid shielded floating turrets can actually be modestly challenging. But I broadly agree with the sentiment that there's not much in SotO if you don't need/want to grind rifts. The only difference is that I'm not disappointed - I think SotO's story writing represents an improvement over what we've seen the last few years from GW2, and I like the floating-city aesthetic of the Tower and Amnytas. I'll take the SotO maps any day over another travesty like New Kaineng City. In terms of OP's desire for character progression, the one big "this changes combat" thing was just handed out with zero work required: the weaponmaster change. A number of builds I use saw an increase in fun with the availability of elite spec weapons. Despite the impact of said change, I can see why OP (and anyone, really) would feel like there was no meaningful change in SotO - weaponmaster just kind of happens, it's not a grind or journey of any kind to unlock it. The other significant change is the in-combat skyscale mounting mastery. That's a pretty big game-changer IMO, but ironically it allows you to just straight up ignore more of the game. A fight getting boring or you just want to avoid it? Don't even need to drop combat, just mount up and fly off. I find myself playing a lot less SotO after capping out masteries. Like a lot of us in the thread, I had skyscale and all legendary armor weights long before SotO was even announced, so those big-ticket attractions meant nothing to me even on day one of SotO.

Isn't that what OP did though? I read through each one of your criticisms, which might be valid if I thought OP was trying to do anything beyond literally making an "interest thread" to "test the waters." To ask OP to be even more... muted? ... in their request would, in my opinion, be equivalent to demanding that they grovel and debase their own right to suggest anything that they -gasp- would personally like. The worst part is, @ShadowKatt.6740, we're in the same ideological boat when it comes to DIE issues. I just don't think what OP did comes close to what you accuse them of having done. As for the addition of heterochromia options, I believe it should be quite low on the list of development priorities (for reasons a bunch of us have already mentioned), but I have no inherent problem with such an option being added.

I believe a currency cap makes it less likely that a player will disengage earlier from a system, when the primary attraction of a system is the rewards. I run dungeons a lot, many of them solo, most of them speedrun style. I have currently 106K of the dungeon currency (which doesn't even include the stacks of dungeon currency chests I have laying around). If rewards purchasable via dungeon currency were what I cared about, I could have stopped running dungeons a long time ago. The 1300 AA cap essentially guarantees I'll never reach a similar point with the Vault. If I'm ever interested in several high-ticket rewards in a Vault season, I will always have to actually care about farming up AA again. Thankfully it's not hard to cap out AA, which means Anet has come up with a great compromise - you will always be forced to have a level of engagement with the system to obtain the coolest rewards, but on the flip side the level of engagement demanded is quite easy to meet.

I personally enjoy the classic rpg-fantasy of adventurers being specialists who commit to a single class. Thanks to how dramatically (some) elite specs can change a class, we even have the multiclassing aspect of things partially covered. While it would be kind of cool to not have to swap characters for group comp reasons, I'm more than fine with the status quo.

Yep. In fact, Peitha hit me so hard with this one, I felt insecure about liking R'tchikk so much. However I think our response to the Peitha jab explains the rest of your post. We thought we were involved with everything that actually mattered, but it turns out there was a whole demons vs wizards thing going on that we had no clue about. I'm still a bit miffed that we were brought on as Wayfinders so quickly. I understand that titles like Commander and Wayfinder make writing much easier, but the Commander/Wayfinder has proven to be a living weapon quite difficult to control (from the perspective of established institutions). The fact that the Wizards seem pretty organized and capable without us is one of the things I like best about SotO.

I've gone through a few phases on the matter of player housing. At first, I really liked the idea of including it. I've liked the housing system in most other games I've tried that have such a system, and I'm confident Anet's version of it could be good. Over time, I just made peace with the fact that the guild hall system is the closest we'll get, and stopped supporting the idea of a separate player housing system. It wasn't hard at all to round up a few people from LA to help me cap a guild hall for my solo guild, and that's now my "player housing." However, I've kind of circled back to the "add player housing" camp. It seems kind of lame that the game has great infrastructure for it in place, but we're forced to intrude upon an entirely different system (the guild system) just to simulate player housing. Moreover I can imagine that a newer player might not be too keen on the idea of hiring strangers to help capture a guild hall, or really even think to do so in the first place. As long as housing is instanced (so nobody ever has to see anyone's home in the middle of the open world somewhere) and doesn't require a massive effort to implement on Anet's part, I'm all for having it in the game.

I agree that I haven't seen a compelling argument for why things should remain as they are, but to me, that's missing the point. Rather than needing to defend the status quo, I think those wishing to change the way GoB is acquired need to say something other than "I don't like WvW." I have yet to see anything that isn't some form of that complaint. And no, I don't consider that argument compelling in the least.

Yeah I noticed this as well, and really thought it was quite an extreme change considering there's no official explanation for it. It always made more sense to me that when we rub the ground next to downed players and NPCs, we're actually performing some form of CPR to 'reactivate' a body that is not beyond saving. To put it another way, I always saw reviving as more like jump-starting a car that was otherwise fully capable of functioning, while 'resurrection' would refer to taking a thoroughly wrecked car into the shop to have a proper mechanic replace parts/make repairs to restore functionality. Any driver with some cables and a suitable power supply can perform a jump start, whereas 'resurrecting' a dead car requires specialized training and parts - not something just anyone can do almost bare-handed on the side of the road. As for Magdaer, it would have been nice to have it show up in the Wizard's Tower. However, I think one of the best things about SotO is that because they made the Wizards enough of a full on organization as they have, if they wanted to, I could easily see them releasing a side quest where someone figures out where Magdaer might be and we go off to find it and add it into the Vault.

People have already said it, but I'll remind you again: low population. The matchmaking algorithm does initially attempt to match people of similar MMR together; but after it fails to within a certain window, it just opens up the MMR range and slaps together a match. This is not a problem the matchmaker can solve. Anet would have to rework sPvP somehow to attract more players legitimately interested in the mode, not just afk reward seekers and cheaters. I'm not sure that's even possible at this point.

I simply do not have anywhere near the bank capacity to take his 40 accounts' worth of stuff.

I've been impressed with SotO overall, the only sore spot being missing relics (and potentially never getting back some relic functionality, although that remains to be seen). However I am especially impressed with the story, for reasons a lot of people have already put in the thread. Above all else I think the levity/humor moments were done better in SotO than anywhere else in the game thus far. No slapstick or endless teenage-grade banter - just stuff like R'tchikk fangirling from time to time. Overall I have to say I'm very pleased Anet proved me dead wrong about my initial pessimism for SotO. I was concerned that the replacement of dailies with the Vault was just change for the sake of change, and I was completely wrong about it. I was concerned that grinds like rifts hinted at the same old "Anet can't figure out how to put out enough content" issues, but I feel this is some of most pleasantly replayable content we've seen in a long time. I could go on, but TLDR is I was dooming on SotO, but am ecstatic about being wrong. Congratulations, Anet - you've regained my faith and interest thus far.