Case in point, last Sunday’s Triple Trouble Wurm kill:
The group at Cobalt killed the phase 2 wurm head in, if not a record-breaking time, still a very good and respectable time.
Once Amber had killed theirs, it was the usual. Grab champion bag from the dead wurm, collect Golden Chest from the sidebar, take portal to big chest and get a whole lot of not very much scrolling down the side of the screen…
…except…
…is that something pink I see in my bags? Did I maybe get an Ascended chest (that will soon be able to switch stats to something useful) to sweeten the day?
*flips to the chat channel I’ve set for game messages*
Oh wait, it IS the last regurgitated armor chest (of three) that finishes my skin collection!
Feeling suddenly very celebratory and cheerful, I start the process of tidying up my inventory, which means breaking open the big golden chest to reveal more blue and greens and salvaging those, and then opening up the 5 champion bags that came out of the chest and getting even more blues and greens (plus crafting odds and ends) and salvaging -those-…
… Then I do a double take at the exotic that dropped out of the last champion bag.
Something I’ve been oohing and aahing over for a long time and had my eye on, but hesitated to get at 60g on the TP. (It’s now worth 80g on the TP.)
Thank you, RNGjesus.
You have no idea how hard it is to decide whether to sell it or keep it – selling would give me enough gold to buy a Scientific skin (my new ‘chase’ goal in GW2, aka collect as many Scientific skins as possible) and keeping, well, saves me 80g and gives my future mesmer the most stunningly stylish sword one could ever ask for.
Being the hoarder that I am, I’ll probably go with the latter. Gold can be earned by other means, after all.
T’was a very fruitful weekend for me in Guild Wars 2.
The last carapace chest finally deigned to drop for me during a Vinewrath on Sunday.
I’ve pretty much lost count of how many I’ve done prior to this. You know those lucky bastards that get 3 carapace chests in like, 4 Vinewraths? I’m their polar opposite. Someone’s got to draw the short end of the RNG stick, I guess.
While banging my head on the wall of innumerable Vinewraths, I ended up with about 6000 crests in total across weeks of Silverwastes, minus a thousand or so for one of the Ascended accessories that needed to be bought for the collection, and not including the ton of Mordrem parts I haven’t got around to exchanging for crests taking up room in my bags.
It worked out quite nicely, as I decided to be lazy and buy my last carapace headgear instead of running a third character through the storyline.
Minus another 1000 for the last Ascended accessory that needed to be bought, and I had 4000 left over to pick up all the buyable Mordrem tonics and minis.
Turns out both the Mordrem husk and troll tonics are pretty good for screenshots, as you can scroll directly into first person view with them. The husk camera is set a little higher than the troll’s. I think I prefer the troll overall, but I’m sure there will be times I might find the husk one handy.
The most delightful thing for me about finishing the Luminescent collection is the title. I’m madly in love with it ever since I saw it, and ever since playing its namesake in the Personal Story. Happily wearing it now.
I’m really not sure what to do with the Ascended armor chest that was its final reward. I already own a Zojja’s chestpiece that was a lucky drop from a Wurm kill. If I continue decking that warrior out, each piece only increments by such a minute amount I feel almost sorry selecting a wear location other than the chest.
Or I could pick another Zojja’s breastplate and give it to my guardian main… except that would make all the colors not match and feel a little weird. It’s not like he -needs- Ascended, since he doesn’t WvW or do fractals.
Or maybe one of my many other alts could use it? What stats? Who? *brain shuts down at this point and I just throw it in the bank to think about later*
Yep, finally managed to pull enough fossilized insects after some weekly patient attendance at DTOP’s regular Fri/Sat ‘one hour after reset’ runs. (Or Sat/Sun morning for me.)
I almost didn’t think I’d get it done this week.
I lucked into an insect during Saturday’s two hours, and then promptly failed miserably to get one on Sunday, despite opening some two dozen chests over the two hours.
I bought my final sets of keys (about 12 of them all told) and logged out, intending to catch another sandstorm some other time and just run around opening chests, and never got back to it on Sunday.
I also start on about 14% of the Maguuma Wastes PvP reward track. Eventually, I’ll get the last fossilized insect that way, worse case scenario.
Monday morning, I wake pretty early before work, intending to get a blog post about the Luminescent collection done, and see that the clock says :57 minutes. Hmm, there’s three minutes left of a sandstorm! What if…
So I log on (thank you SSD for quick load times) and run around like a mad charr with CTRL held down, hoping to spy at least one chest before the sandstorm’s up.
I see one! It’s on a cliff! I grab the blue crystal and fail the jump several times, cursing under my breath, watching the sandstorm time tick down.
I get up there at last! I open it!
No insect.
Some random recipe that actually overloads me.
Baaaaaah. Much deflated, I look around for another chest. There’s under a minute of time left.
Encumbered, kinda half blind while walking around and scanning through my open bags settling on something to throw away to make room, I toss out some grey junk, and then another piece of grey junk to make one extra slot… just in case.
There’s another chest! Under half a minute left!
I run over and with 15 seconds on the clock, I throw it open and BAM, a golden fossilized insect slides into that slot I just opened up, while 8 bits of sand overload me.
THERE IS AN RNG GOD.
I fling 16 copper more of grey junk out my inventory to let the equally worthless sand slide in, then cradling the last insect, dash over to Divinity’s Reach to pull out the other three I’d been hoarding in the bank.
One quick waypoint to trade all the insects into the appropriate form, another waypoint back, and the celebratory crafting began.
Blog post? Err… Nevermind, I’ll write it in the night.
—
Besides those little bouts of satisfaction, I also got in a bit of leveling time during double xp weekend.
There was a spot of time the servers were being rather dodgy and the Silverwastes map was pretty much unplayable, so being neatly stymied in my attempt to get the last carapace chest, or do anything (like kill Tequatl or Wurm) that required a stable connection without dc’ing, I decided to power level my charr mesmer instead.
Boy, was that a little insane.
I’d never eaten so many boosters in my life.
Usually I settle for an experience booster and a killstreak booster at most, and food and a wrench consumable.
Since double xp was going on, I threw on a celebration booster from the log-in rewards too, for another 100% xp. I made some candy corn cake that gave 15% xp rather than the usual 10%.
I’m still too cheap to waste 5 experience boosters for a single improved experience booster, so I held off on that, and just nommed my usual stuff. Plus a speed booster, because what the heck, I was starting to accumulate too many of those.
Then I ran off to find yellow untouched mobs and hit one.
That 64xp mob? Coughed out some 500+ xp in bonus experience, and steadily rising from the killstreak booster.
Man, did that experience bar jump.
I calculated that 3 moas would move the bar by one tenth of the total experience bar. So 30 fully xp laden mobs equated to one level.
In one hour I jumped around 7-8 levels, and that was while wasting time chatting to a friend.
Said friend wanted to come along in the next hour, so that was what we did, scoring another 8 levels.
Level 25 to 33 to 41. Craaazy.
What eventually screwed up the streak was a whole spate of maps that we were in crashing and restarting, resetting all that sweet sweet bonus xp back to essentially zero (or the same amount as the mob’s usual xp.) Fields of Ruin? Crashed. Lornar’s Pass? Crashed. Harathi Hinterlands? Crashed.
WELL. That’s pretty much all the maps that are good for that level range. (Yes, we could downlevel, but you don’t get the maximum amount of potential xp that way, you get a lil less. And we were already spoiled from the crazy numbers we were scoring with each mob.)
So we ended up taking a break and it turned out that was all the time I could spare during the weekend for leveling because I got distracted by the Vinewrath once the servers stabilized.
Oh well, plenty of time to level at leisure now that my crazy collection obsession is sated, and I can slowly make a little progress on my Great Screenshot Project. (No mention of mass carnage and destruction for the expansion, so I guess I don’t have to hurry on this. Phew.)
I’m kinda looking forward to seeing what the whole horde of newbies who grabbed GW2 during the $10 weekend sale are making of the game.
The only thing that frightens me is the quality of mapchat in the low level zones. Prior to the newbie influx, they’ve tended to make my brain rot from the inanity and barrens-chat worthy phrases (I figure that many of the people still leveling lowbies during this time are not…hmm, shall we say very devoted GW2 players or veterans – vets are likely to have so many tomes of knowledge they have to use up or are perfectly fine crafting or EoTMing their way to 80 – and thus carry a bit of their usual MMO culture with them back into this game.)
I’m not sure I want to find out if it’s got worse or better or stayed the same.
I -am- having quite a bit of fun with the influx of newbie posts on Reddit though. I’m a little too hermit-y to consider helping random people in-game, but y’know, give me a soapbox and a comment space to write in and I can’t resist giving my twenty cents of advice.
Guess we all do our part to try and live up to that “fun, welcoming, inclusive community” moniker.
After seven days of barely logging into GW2, just long enough to get dailies done and the odd dungeon or two, I found myself bored on a Saturday afternoon and not feeling in the mood for any other game.
“Self,” said I, “you haven’t set foot in the Crown Pavilion in a week, and while it’s probably a bad time to find a good Boss Blitz at 4am NA time, you do have some two hundred tickets that need converting into festival tokens.”
So I walked into a random Crown Pavilion map and bashed on Halmi a couple times.
I got to about 49 Gauntlet Chances before utter boredom from repetition set in, and decided to stop for the day before it got to the point of “feeling obligated” grind.
Opened them without really looking, fully expecting 49 tokens, and oh hey, a Toxic krait hybrid whatsit miniature popped among the last few Chances opened.
“Guess they really did improve drop rates some,” I mumbled to myself as I checked the TP price for it. (I already got the original during Tower of Nightmares.)
“Bah, barely 1 gold.”
Shrugging, I dumped it into my bank stash instead and went to repair.
(Little known fact for you high FPS people, Halmi’s model doesn’t render very quickly when you’re at 13 FPS with a zerg underneath you trying to kill Pyroxis or Sparcus, which makes predicting a telegraphed attack from an invisible model “interesting.” One usually just blinds and blocks in sequence and hopes for the best.)
Then I did a double take in the sell window. Or maybe it was the sell tab from the TP… I was just in clean-inventory-before-logging-off mode and not really paying attention.
What is this PINK item that is in my inventory?
That has the words “Chaos” and “Lyssa” in it?!
Cue a minute of perplexed bag scanning and searching (yes I keep a bunch of crap in my bags) before I finally found a Recipe: Chaos of Lyssa having nestled itself somewhere between the various gear sets I own, minis and random gathering resources that no longer fit into the stash.
Cue very surprised blinking, “when did THAT turn up?” and quick switching to the chat tab that logs game messages and keeps track of loot, to discover that the sneaky thing popped on the 5th bag I opened.
I stared at the TP price for the Chaos of Lyssa recipe for a little while longer…
… read the item description one more time…
“Many have eyes, but few have seen. Of all here, you saw the beauty behind the illusion. And you alone shall be blessed with My gifts. – Scriptures of Lyssa, 45 BE ”
… and then I ate it.
This is how suckers for collecting like me are never going to get rich.
You know what they say about being a sucker for a pretty face…
All good.
That’s 22 more days of a lot less stress.
And my mesmer will look really pretty one day if I ever get around to leveling him again.
So here’s another one of those confirmational anecdotal stories about how you should just say “eff you, diminishing returns,” log off for a fortnight, come back to the game and pop a precursor or something.
Fine print: I take no responsibility if you get nuthing.
After running out of bank space, the rest was slowly converted into cobs per 1000 until the magic number 14 was reached. Eagerly waiting for this moment, it was time to grab the rest (and have a bit left over for any other emergency recipes.)Not really sure, no. Point of no return. (Though it was pretty much game, set and match once the candy corn to cob conversions begun. Suppose I still could have sold ’em on the TP for another gullible fool.)He’s a little shy. Bad parental upbringing, I suppose.
So.
Proof of concept: I suppose it -is- possible to attain within 30 days.
Each stack was bought at buy order rates of 1.3-1.5 gold, which makes a grand total of 120g spent, around 5 gold a day without too much pain but yielding zero accumulation of wealth through the entire month.
Bright side, I did actually get a rare souvenir from the event this time via token-buy, rather than rabidly running a dungeon over the course of one month and not even seeing one of the super-rare skins, thanks to RNG.
Additional silver lining: all of the other exotic minis on the TP now seem obtainable after this, though it may end up taking a month per.
I was “encouraged” (well, pushed by economics) to visit more dungeons and get familiar with them, which is an overall benefit.
My final 1.5 gold for the last stack was hard-earned in a memorable Ascalonian Catacombs with four low AP newbies (three of whom were non-80 lowbies) where my bleeding heart walked a barely 500 AP level 65 warrior through running through mobs without dying. It involved coaching about stunbreakers and stability skills, running with him and even putting on high toughness gear at a few points to soak the aggro. The total party dps was so poor that we did the run to the final boss so many times that visible improvement in running skills were seen across the board. I was pulling out more fire elemental powders than used in Teq fights to try and up damage further before everybody squished. The really amazing thing was no one gave up. (Just please don’t ask me to do it again any time soon.)
Is asking for 20,000 candy corns still more than a little nuts?
Yeah.
I spent 120g on way too many sweets and all I got was an expensive pumpkin decoration.
I didn’t bother writing much about the rest of the Canach event. It was uneventful and there wasn’t much to comment about. And now the Dragon Bash is upon us.
If there’s two things I’ve had a revelation about, it’s these.
1) I really like ArenaNet’s art, especially for seasonal events.
2) It all ultimately revolves around gold in the end.
Lion’s Arch is in fine form. The fountain has been replaced with a holographic projector featuring a Shattered Dragon hologram flying around terrorizing the nearby ship towers. (That poor lion fountain, I wonder where they keep it in between festivals and how many dolyaks or golems it takes to haul it away each time?)
The Mystic Forge is, to quote the words of a guildie, “looking badass even as it eats my items.”
I’m extremely impressed with the small immersive touches, especially the dragon themed street art. It looks chalked in, like a denizen of Lion’s Arch actually sat down to draw it. There’s a bridge in the center of LA that has an entire dragon head to tail graffiti’ed on and looks great in-game, even if the entire thing doesn’t fit in a screenshot.
The varied pinatas look great (if you could study them properly before they disappear in a fit of everyone racing each other for their achievements, what’s with the lack of node sharing with those, a bug?)
The decorative dragon billboards all look like they’re made of wood and painted. It basically all seems “real” rather than just magically plunked into place. (I suppose “it’s magic” is a good excuse for Wintersday and Halloween.)
As for the gold thing, well, I seem to have reached a stage of resignation cum acceptance regarding it.
It’s in-game currency. I earn 1-3 gold just playing and doing the stuff I like to do each day. Yes, while it has a real-life money equivalency, it cannot be converted back (through any legal means anyway.)
So gold is for spending.
It is just a matter of what I want to prioritize it on. Other people may really value working towards their shiny Legendary, and so throw all their gold there. Some may really be into their costumes, or dyes, or minis, or what-have-you. Still others are content to sink it into the great WvW goldnommer of siege and upgrades, or spend it playing with RNG and gambling.
Conversely, some may be better at earning gold, through activities like playing the TP, doing lots of dungeons or making Legendaries and selling them. As a result, they may have more gold to play and spend with. (And let us not forget the big spenders, who think nothing of throwing $50-100 real life bucks each month into the cash shop and converting it into in-game currency in whatever way best suits their efficient fancy)
It does not matter. It’s like real life, some people are always going to have more than others. And still others will be worse off than you. What’s there to get worked up about?
What matters is that one spends within their means. Fortunately, there is no going into debt in-game. You can only become temporarily broke or bankrupt if you are spendthrift or make a foolish financial decision. At most, you may regret prioritizing buying one thing first over another.
There’s also the great equalizer – the TP and the currency exchange, which are great economic tools for at least sharing -some- of the wealth if you can find a niche in the economy to contribute to.
In my case, that’s solo farming. It’s probably not as profitable as social farming, where a bunch of people find an event and farm the increased mob spawns together, but it’s okay, I accept that it’s good for an MMO to have bonus encouragement for people to get together every now and then.
The Dragon Coffer drop rate has been especially kind to my particular favorite playstyle too, in that they’ve made it a pretty frequent drop from pretty much anything and everything that can be attacked and falls over dead giving xp. It reminds me of GW1 seasonal events, with a much nicer drop rate. I’ve been having fun just putting on some music, and genociding everything in my path, with stumbling across holograms as an additional bonus.
Apparently it’s not most efficient way to get coffers. Some have found chain waypointing to holograms better – supposedly the profit from selling the coffers offsets the cost of waypointing. Some brag about getting 60 or so coffers in one event. I have no clue whether this is exaggeration or just being very good at finding dense spots of mobs. Whatever floats your boat, I figure.
For myself, one of my goals is to level up a warrior. (Two, actually, but one will do first.) I found it rather fun to use up a killstreak booster (all that stuff that drops from free black lion chests and keys that I end up hoarding in the bank and never really using) and chomp a 30min food and a consumable in a minigame of keep the streak going as long as possible. The on-kill, gain a buff for 30 secs food works in perfect tandem with this. Then I rampage around in a whirlwind frenzy of axe chopping from boar to moa to skelk and anything else. It’s more than a little hectic and tense, especially when some other guy swipes the mob you were aiming for and your lowbie can’t do enough damage to get kill credit. Luckily, it seems no one but me kills yellow mobs. And the game-within-a-game steers me towards more deserted, quiet surroundings, which I enjoy.
Less hectic and with more breathing room for stopping to sell to a merchant (you haven’t lived until you are trying to kill a yellow mob next to a karma merchant with your inventory up blocking your entire view trying to sell as quickly as possible and get to the next mob within 60 seconds or so) is the simple experience booster which lasts an hour.
It’s win-win. I use up boosters I never thought I’d get around to using. I’m gaining xp in a less boring way than going from heart to heart (subjective opinion, yes.) I get the bonus of being thrilled every so often seeing a Dragon Coffer drop and selling the proceeds nets some extra silver and gold. Sure, it’s not as instantaneous as power leveling to 80 with crafting, but it’s a lot less expensive – every level I gain now is one less I’d have to craft up later when I get bored and impatient, and I might be able to divert and garner more xp from a dungeon or WvW when more developed later on.
I’ve been netting around 16-18 coffers per half hour on the lowbie warrior and about 1.5 levels per hour. On a whim, I ran around with my level 80 guardian with 160% odd magic find and gained around 22-27 coffers per half hour, though I don’t know if this depends on the area I visited or if magic find has an effect too. (Downside, the warrior gains no levels if I spend time on the 80.) It’s probably not much compared to the really dedicated who will find the best farming locations, but it’s good enough for me – I tend to burn out when obliged to play -too- efficiently.
I watched the ectoplasm rush pass me by too. I was online when the patch news hit, and watched with bemusement as the ectos took off from 19 silver all the way up to 27 silver or so – all the while wondering if I should buy (at first) or sell (remembering my stock market lessons on selling when everyone else wants to buy.)
I suppose the savvy managed to make a tidy profit per ecto, and I wasn’t among them, but on the other hand, I’m not among those that bought ectos for more than the price they’re selling for post-patch (last I looked, still 20 silver or so) either.
Boring status quo for me. I earn gold like a slow and steady turtle. I’ll spend it on stuff I enjoy and want, even if not bought at the cheapest price.
I gave in and picked up the miniature Firestorm I’ve been lusting after. Removed the 55 gold buy order, added a 15 gold top up (which had naturally accrued again after days of normal playing) and you may all laugh at me now for buying a miniature worth 71 gold or the equivalent of $23.67. But it really is pretty.
The gift of free miniatures made my decision to feed in $10 to the cash shop this month easy. I was already considering supporting the straight buy of miniatures, but was hesitant about the mystic forge deal to get another mini. Buying two sets just to throw one into the mystic forge just seems dumb. In this case, I just needed to buy one set and could throw in the other without qualms. I bought a Risen Knight for around 2 gold for this purpose. Waiting would have been cheaper, as they’re now hovering around 50 silver and are likely to plunge further, but really, 1.5 gold is not a big deal in the larger scheme of things, it’s an hour’s worth of in-game earnings perhaps.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there can be a limit to searching for the absolute optimal, and that time is also a tradeoff in the equation somewhere, and that regret is a wasted emotion as long as you’re sure about what you want to begin with.
I also used a buy-order for the holographic flappy wings, which netted me a set at 24 gold. I am positive this will get cheaper as the days pass by. So others may prefer to wait. On the other hand, I knew I did want them for my asura because he has a ‘hologram’ theme going on with the super adventure staff, and it just seems to fit. (Whereas it looked downright weird previewing on the charr.) Now I have a certain peace of mind, and can spend the rest of the weeks farming to sell off coffers to earn profit and will be in time to run around this weekend all dragon-themed.
I’m not going to bother with the jade skins. Yeah, they look rather nice. I like the jade stone effect especially. But I don’t own any Canthan-themed characters that’ll make me kill for a bunch of those, fortunately. And while the jade sword complements the Blood Legion Charr rather nicely, I already own a perfectly passable crystalline blade that also looks good, and a fiery dragon sword, so I neither “need” or want them. Which is great, because the drop rate apparently sucks. I’ll be content to make some steady profit off the sale of hopefuls that are searching for a ticket and the RNG kick of opening a bunch of lockboxes. I may open a few for the fun of it, and if I get lucky on that or a kill drop, wonderful, but I won’t be expecting anything.
Which, imo, is how to treat lotteries and lockboxes in MMOs. Like buying a real lottery ticket. It’s essentially throwing a small sum of money away for a worthless piece of paper and a certain hopeful thrill that maybe this time you’ll get lucky. Don’t hope for anything more than that, throw away money within your means, and that’s that.
Some people will think it stupid and illogical, some people will think it acceptable, some people will get carried away to the point of insanity or bankruptcy. That’s life.
I bought 5 Rich Dragon Coffers with the leftover gems from my $10 input for the minis. I made up the difference with gold converted to gems. Got absolutely nothing out of it but some candies and the food consumables. $5 down the drain? Or a little extra speed boost for the Zhaitaffy achievement. Wasn’t expecting anything, so not surprised or regretful. Just a little extra support for ArenaNet – take it as a show of my appreciation for the art, perhaps. Not getting carried away either, it’s just about self-discipline stopping where you want to stop. In my case, $5, for others, they’re ok at $20, $30, $50 or more.
If you don’t have that self-discipline, then well, best learn the lesson about gambling addiction in a video game, I guess, and I pray the consequences won’t be that catastrophic. (Bright side, I hear Anet limits purchases per month to $300. That’s a lot less than some people can lose in a month in a real world casino.)
Moa racing is a funny application of this with in-game currency. I suspect it’s rapidly goldsinking quite a bit of gold out of the general economy. Assuming it’s set up for 20% even odds per bird, people playing hoping to earn money will probably lose a small trickle of gold on average, with some people getting lucky and profiting and others being unlucky and losing more. Some will play enough to get the achievement and write off the loss as the cost of the achievement. And the temptation of getting the moa mini may appeal to others to stay on longer and feed gold into it. I believe a rough back of the envelope calculation is that the mini will cost an average of 28.4 gold or so, with large fluctuations depending on luck – or $9.50 a mini. (If one converts gems to gold though, the exchange rate is poorer, say 100 gems for 2 gold, and the mini will cost $14.20 if your luck is average.)
I’m still trying to decide myself whether I want to just cash out the tokens I have and take the small loss for the achievements, or continue throwing gold in to get the mini. It’s a cute enough mini that I won’t mind owning it. But it’s not something I want immediately on looking at it. I could leave it, no problem. ‘Cept there’s nothing else more pressing to spend gold on either and there’s the rest of the month to play with the moa races. So I may just do a slow trickle of gold into it and essentially pay up a bunch of gold for a mini. Will it prove to be cheaper or more expensive than buying it off the TP? We won’t know, it’ll be just a matter of luck and RNG.
Like most everything else in this game. Take it or leave it. The choice is up to you.
I haven’t tried Dragon Ball yet. Too busy farming. Yes, I like mob grinding that much that I made a beeline straight for mass genocide when given the least excuse to. (Yes, I’m serious.)
I leave you with two other things that I got a big kick out of. (God, I love Lion’s Arch on Tarnished Coast.)
Was seen racing with the other moas before placing bets.
The above was probably power-leveled, as the Master Crafter title might suggest.
Nor was I aware there was an NPC named Shodd, having never played the asura personal story until after making the character. (We certainly sounded like a legal firm together during that though. Shudd & Shodd, your go-to associates for world domination.)
Only bookahs are confused by asura names. There are subtle pronunciation differences between Shud, Shudd and Shodd that only big ears can discern.
Why I Game 