Curse

DreamWind · Nov 21, 2008, 09:52 PM // 21:52

First I should say it is nice that Anet is finally giving explanations for most things they do. Its a step in the right direction. Now onto the criticisms!

Quote:

Originally Posted by ArenaNet

We are aware that inventory space was already at a premium and that the new Storybooks only add to this issue. Prior to adding this feature, we did look into adding a Storybook tab to the Xunlai storage boxes. However, when we looked at available server space, we found that this was not feasible.

Uh...are you serious? As others have said before me, this sounds a bit unreal that after 3 years this was just now noticed. Adding a tab causes server space problems? And if so, why not just cross-reference a player's storage id with the book id (as was stated earlier). But I don't care about this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ArenaNet

However, we decided not to allow players to purchase the pages of missions that were completed prior to the update. This was a difficult decision to make, but an important one.

SO it WAS a decision to make. It wasn't the technical issues or the "it is impossible" argument that was being made several times? Then why were certain people there proclaiming it was impossible/too hard...

Quote:

Originally Posted by ArenaNet

We monitor the economy closely and found a significant fluctuation in how much gold players had on average after the addition of the M.O.X. quests (which give a 10 platinum reward). If we allowed players to purchase those pages, any character that had completed all three campaigns in Normal Mode would be receiving 18 platinum and 42,750 gold for Hard Mode completion for a grand total of 60,750 gold. In light of how much the economy was affected by just 10 platinum, the inflation caused by giving out 60 platinum per character was too significant for us to allow.

I'm glad you gave us the numbers and reasonings behind the actions here as this doesn't usually happen and if it does its long overdue (shadowform). Here's the problem...you are worried about giving 60k to people who have already conquered the entire game, yet you aren't worried about giving 60k to everybody who will conquer the game from here on out? Sounds pretty fishy to me. Extremely fishy actually.

Not to mention this doesn't solve the problem that most people just want the faction bonuses instead of the gold. The gold was secondary.

It ALSO doesn't address the point that it adds grind in a grind reducing update.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ArenaNet

Luxon and Kurzick Faction Points...

...Unfortunately, now that this has gone Live, we don't believe there is a fair or reasonable way for us to change this, so the issue will not be addressed further.

Hum I guess....

Anyways its interesting to have an update just to have one, but it seems as if the least requested and easiet to answer problems were addressed while nothing else was. I wish balance was always discussed in this much detail with this much haste over the years.

Konig Des Todes · Nov 21, 2008, 09:53 PM // 21:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stuart444

tbf, at least they learned something from the M.O.X quests and based their decision on that.

Ditto.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Storybook Retroactivity

Storybook NPCs allow players to purchase the pages of missions completed without having the book in inventory. However, we decided not to allow players to purchase the pages of missions that were completed prior to the update. This was a difficult decision to make, but an important one.

We monitor the economy closely and found a significant fluctuation in how much gold players had on average after the addition of the M.O.X. quests (which give a 10 platinum reward). If we allowed players to purchase those pages, any character that had completed all three campaigns in Normal Mode would be receiving 18 platinum and 42,750 gold for Hard Mode completion for a grand total of 60,750 gold. In light of how much the economy was affected by just 10 platinum, the inflation caused by giving out 60 platinum per character was too significant for us to allow.

I'm fine with the Books not being retroactive. However, I would like to see the books become retroactive but also charge the prices to equal that of what would be gained or reduces the money gained greatly. Such as:

Normal Mode:
Prophecies: 400g per page
Factions:350g per page
Nightfall: 300g per page

Hard Mode:
Prophecies: 650g per page
Factions: 500g per page
Nightfall: 500g per page
Young Heroes: 500g per page

By filling pages with that, you pay 48,350g.

By turning in all books for max gold rewards (i.e., Young Heroes to Gordon) you get 51,750g (not 60,750g, unless wiki is wrong). So you would end up with 3,400g per character. Assuming people got Legendary Guardian on 8 characters, that's 27,200g per account. Much much less then M.O.X. And that is giving Young Heroes to Gordon, which most people would not do, as they would more then likely want faction. Not to mention most people would have only gotten Legendary Guardian on one character, NM however, could be on all characters (not so likely with Prophecies though), so the outcome in money would be much lower.

If that is still sound like too much, then what can be done is what Arkantos said, remove the gold reward, for any books filled out with just one page by the NPCs cannot receive gold. If that is at all possible.

Either way, I don't mind that much, but would love that Faction.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Storybook Storage

The addition of seven new Storybooks is putting a lot of pressure on player inventories.

We are aware that inventory space was already at a premium and that the new Storybooks only add to this issue. Prior to adding this feature, we did look into adding a Storybook tab to the Xunlai storage boxes. However, when we looked at available server space, we found that this was not feasible. To increase player storage by adding new tabs, we would have needed to expand our existing server space or purchase additional servers. We are actively exploring alternative ways to relieve inventory pressure and would like to reassure players that this is an issue very much on our minds.

The Book Storage, all that's needed to do is add more tabs, 5 tabs can be placed in the Storage, just make a second row of tabs, done.

You get 100 extra slots right there!

They still need to nerf Shadow Form. -goes to farm ecto before it gets nerfed- I might hate farming but my Ritualist needs his armor. >.> Please nerf Shadow Form before I get my 205 Ecto and 205 O. Shards.

Lycan Nibbler · Nov 21, 2008, 10:05 PM // 22:05

Thank you for listening and responding - thats a good sign in my book (oops, shouldnt mention books should I).

I am happy with the explanations - they are the ones with the server information in front of them after all - not anyone thats posting here that seem to think they know better.

The dif. between Xunlai and book rewards is the fact one introduces gold and the other doen't. with Xunlai, you still have Xmil gold in the game (with which items are bought and sold), if the past book reward was introduced, there would be XMil + all the book rewards in the game, probably leading to spikes in ectos, shards and other similar items.
It wouldnt impact me either way, just trying to look at the reasoning behind the decision.

Kurz/Luxon - I dont really care, the additional amounts were bonuses to me, whether I get 1x the bonus or only 1/2 the bonus (from having to choose Lux or Kurz), it was STILL a bonus.

+1 for anet feedback.

Arduin · Nov 21, 2008, 10:07 PM // 22:07

I was writing a big post about the dev update, but at the end decided I didn't care.

ALF71BE · Nov 21, 2008, 10:11 PM // 22:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamWind

It ALSO doesn't address the point that it adds grind in a grind reducing update.

Adds? No, just changed the focus.

Grunntar · Nov 21, 2008, 10:13 PM // 22:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ctb

I've heard some pretty sorry things from companies, but I've never heard a viable company say they couldn't afford a couple hundred dollars worth of hard drives.

I'm guessing that you've never worked in an IT organization that hosted their servers at a hosting facility... I have, and we came up against this exact same issue: we needed to add extra storage because one of our business units increased their file storage requirements on our web and ftp sites.

It's not "just a few hard drives..." It's making sure that you have enough power in your server rack, new RAID storage boxes, extra rack space, manpower to travel to and from each co-location facility, (and some could be thousands of miles away), to install and test the new hardware... Oh yeah, *and* a couple extra hard drives.

In the case of my old company, the total estimate to install "just a few hard drives" came to over $24,000 (for both sites, Los Angeles and Atlanta).

(And by the way, any IT organization worth it's salt wouldn't spend a just couple hundred dollars on a hard drive that Joe Consumer puts in his home PC. They use high performance units that are certified by their system manufacturers, so that they don't invalidate their service contracts. They pay big bucks for the ability to have 4 hour turn on priority service calls, ensuring that their servers are up 24/7/365.)

Issac · Nov 21, 2008, 10:27 PM // 22:27

Well, I guess it's good lol.

Aldric · Nov 21, 2008, 10:29 PM // 22:29

So in summary

1) ZOMG wheres all teh server space suddenly gone???? Why did noone tell use these last 3 years that space was getting tight?

I would have thought checking the storage issue *first* would have been appropriate then change it to some kind of multilayer quest may have been more suitable personally rather than fudging up my storage space with 100 new books and then saying "oops".

Yeah I also know, Do the missions and when you're all done go get a book and turn it in, problem solved. That kinda defeats teh purpose of implementing a Mission Book in the first place though, doesnt it ?

2) The decision made not to make it retroactive was purely due to financial concerns only. Despite the overwhelming feedback of those in favour or retrobooks being cool with no monetary gain for it or retro pages being charged at a rate which negates any monetary gain. Faction was the overwhelming issue thanks to the 10M grindfest title that people wanted at least a few ranks in. A few 100k faction for everyone wouldnt have screwed with anything in the least.

If the influx of 10k a character so completely messed up the economy then why the 7-20k a month keyless chest free money. This is not a complaint , I just find it incredulous that the economy was used as the reason when patently Anet have shown no real issue with economy screwing skills or issues in the past.

As for my chars, my main is 17/25 HM missions done in Tyria so i need to redo them for any reward. Gee thanks for reducing that grind, its gonna be so much fun finding PuGs for HM missions once again.

But seriously, I wont bother, I wanted this update to let me play all my character (who are all 50% or more through at least 1 campaign) more often so I will probably bin all books and just play for no rewards. Repeating everything *again* is not what i want to do,especially in HM and especially with PuGs...

3) We arsed up and have no idea how make it better.

Yeah figured that out myself. As someone already said , suck it up and lose 50%. Maybe by GW2 some thought will go into these things before they are implemented.

garethporlest18 · Nov 21, 2008, 10:41 PM // 22:41

Enough with the Z-Keys. They do not add more than 8-10 million into the games economy that gets spent fairly fast I'm sure by most folks. A lot of people use their keys. With the rewards from the chest adding probably under 10 million. 150 million>20 million.

However having 500,000 people getting 30-60k in under 2 days is huge.

So if they make the books retroactive they gotta remove the gold for people who want to buy pages or make them cost more like that person above suggested.

People doing the book quests now are not getting large amounts of money fast because unless they play all day which very few people actually do, it will take them 1-2 weeks to complete HM and NM books. For the average person I'd say a month, maybe 3 weeks. Which is still not as bad as over 150 million in 2 days.

Oh and the M.O.X quests> anything Shadowform has done to the economy. Shadowform is not doing anything from what I can see, maybe in the past, but surely not now. 600/smite does just as much damage. In which the damage is small.

IlikeGW · Nov 21, 2008, 10:52 PM // 22:52

Funny update. TBH it doesn't sound like they have enough people left on GW1's 'side' to do anything constructive though. They probably went and asked "hay guys can we change this?" "HELL NO that costs money" and that's it. As far as the storage anyway. Let's be honest storage has always been frickin crap and it's not really a new issue with them, they just didn't design the game well for a functional inventory over time.

As for the economy, what else can you say but sheer blind ignorance. *WHAT* per se gets 'inflated' in price? Name names. What's the issue? You can't just say inflation when nothing is changing for 99% of the playerbase. The only thing that inflates is the amount of ecto you need to buy something super rare, because they have never ended ecto farming and it always gets worse. That's it, that's the "economy," the regular game doesn't even have one to speak of. Unless you take the nickels and dimes at rune traders and whatnot seriously, but why? Who actually can't handle those shifts?

Cluebag · Nov 21, 2008, 11:01 PM // 23:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Miss Drops Az

The dif. between Xunlai and book rewards is the fact one introduces gold and the other doen't. with Xunlai, you still have Xmil gold in the game (with which items are bought and sold), if the past book reward was introduced, there would be XMil + all the book rewards in the game, probably leading to spikes in ectos, shards and other similar items. It wouldnt impact me either way, just trying to look at the reasoning behind the decision.

I disagree that z-keys aren't money, but I'll play along (my position being that z-keys have a value like any other commodity, regardless if a majority of them happen to be consumed on the z-chest, the fact that they might not make it onto the market directly is immaterial).

If this is how Anet really thinks, then fine, make the book rewards z-keys instead of gold, if they insist on keeping some sort of "compensation" along with the faction and experience. Nevermind the fact that the primary concern is the faction here, not the money, if the devs happened to be paying any attention to the other update thread at all.

Apart from the complete disregard for the concerns about retroactive faction with respect to the storybooks, the addressing of the other issues was a welcome change. Altho I never had any intention of carrying around many books, its nice that they are considering some sort of storage options for those. As far as addressing the faction that they did retroactively credit sloppily, well, kudos to owning up to not necessarily having the smoothest implementation of that. I think most people were generally forgiving for that situation, however, the bigger butt burner is the aforementioned non-retro faction crediting storybooks, which is the root cause for most of the noise on the threads covering the update. This aspect has yet to be addressed.

Aldric · Nov 21, 2008, 11:06 PM // 23:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by garethporlest18

Enough with the Z-Keys. They do not add more than 8-10 million into the games economy that gets spent fairly fast I'm sure by most folks. A lot of people use their keys. With the rewards from the chest adding probably under 10 million. 150 million>20 million.

However having 500,000 people getting 30-60k in under 2 days is huge.

So if they make the books retroactive they gotta remove the gold for people who want to buy pages or make them cost more like that person above suggested.

People doing the book quests now are not getting large amounts of money fast because unless they play all day which very few people actually do, it will take them 1-2 weeks to complete HM and NM books. For the average person I'd say a month, maybe 3 weeks. Which is still not as bad as over 150 million in 2 days.

Oh and the M.O.X quests> anything Shadowform has done to the economy. Shadowform is not doing anything from what I can see, maybe in the past, but surely not now. 600/smite does just as much damage. In which the damage is small.

Was this in reply to me? if so then I wasnt talking about Z-keys , which dont really add to the money within GW but Keyess NF chests which do.

[if it wasnt then ignore me

]

R_Frost · Nov 21, 2008, 11:43 PM // 23:43

Quote:

Storybook Storage

The addition of seven new Storybooks is putting a lot of pressure on player inventories.

We are aware that inventory space was already at a premium and that the new Storybooks only add to this issue. Prior to adding this feature, we did look into adding a Storybook tab to the Xunlai storage boxes. However, when we looked at available server space, we found that this was not feasible. To increase player storage by adding new tabs, we would have needed to expand our existing server space or purchase additional servers. We are actively exploring alternative ways to relieve inventory pressure and would like to reassure players that this is an issue very much on our minds.

wow that totally is unbeliveable. you cant add one or 2 tabs to the storage window claiming server issues, yet if we choose to we can buy more character slots, create the character, give them the necessary bags and turn them into a mule to hold items and that doesnt take up server space? umm am i missing something?

Fril Estelin · Nov 21, 2008, 11:54 PM // 23:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by R_Frost

wow that totally is unbeliveable. you cant add one or 2 tabs to the storage window claiming server issues, yet if we choose to we can buy more character slots, create the character, give them the necessary bags and turn them into a mule to hold items and that doesnt take up server space? umm am i missing something?

In the case you describe, you'd be giving Anet/NCsoft the money to buy more space on the server (not directly, penny for penny of course). If they were to implement a specific book storage, it'd be something free to everyone, thus it can't be bought on the budget they have to run the game for the coming months, not without changing their plans (to possibly release other stuff...?).

trankle · Nov 21, 2008, 11:56 PM // 23:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by R_Frost

wow that totally is unbeliveable. you cant add one or 2 tabs to the storage window claiming server issues, yet if we choose to we can buy more character slots, create the character, give them the necessary bags and turn them into a mule to hold items and that doesnt take up server space? umm am i missing something?

Offhand I'd say you're forgetting the $10 you'd pay Anet for that mule, versus the $0 you'd pay them for two more tabs of storage. That $10 can pay for server space, while that $0 can't.

fenix · Nov 22, 2008, 12:08 AM // 00:08

I would just like to say this;

While Shadow Form exists in its current form, there is NO ground to stand on by saying that retroactively allowing players to buy pages would negatively affect the economy. This is just a poor excuse.

It doesn't surprise me that you went along with this excuse, but seriously ANet, fix Shadow Form before you start talking about the economy, because clearly you have NO idea what you're talking about. Which again, doesn't surprise me.

Pwny Ride · Nov 22, 2008, 12:21 AM // 00:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arduinna

I was writing a big post about the dev update, but at the end decided I didn't care.

I cannot count the times this happens to me now.

Well, time to perma-pre it. It's alot more interesting there.

Takeko Nakano · Nov 22, 2008, 12:25 AM // 00:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arkantos

To be honest, I think the majority of people who want the books retroactive don't really care about the gold. We want the faction, we want the reputation points. Give us that and the experience, leave out the gold. The Guild Wars "economy" won't suffer, and people will be able to get the other rewards. You wanted to reduce grind, and this is going to give a lot of people a lot less grind. I see no reason not to give us the faction/rep points.

Someone predicted they'd say something like this, ignoring the suggestions to scratch the money benefit. I'm sorry to say they were proved right....

Hollow Gein · Nov 22, 2008, 12:26 AM // 00:26

Well, a pretty 'blah' update still the possibility of extra storage is promising.

Rocky Raccoon · Nov 22, 2008, 12:28 AM // 00:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamWind

First I should say it is nice that Anet is finally giving explanations for most things they do. Its a step in the right direction. Now onto the criticisms!

Uh...are you serious? As others have said before me, this sounds a bit unreal that after 3 years this was just now noticed. Adding a tab causes server space problems? And if so, why not just cross-reference a player's storage id with the book id (as was stated earlier). But I don't care about this.

SO it WAS a decision to make. It wasn't the technical issues or the "it is impossible" argument that was being made several times? Then why were certain people there proclaiming it was impossible/too hard...

I'm glad you gave us the numbers and reasonings behind the actions here as this doesn't usually happen and if it does its long overdue (shadowform). Here's the problem...you are worried about giving 60k to people who have already conquered the entire game, yet you aren't worried about giving 60k to everybody who will conquer the game from here on out? Sounds pretty fishy to me. Extremely fishy actually.

Not to mention this doesn't solve the problem that most people just want the faction bonuses instead of the gold. The gold was secondary.

It ALSO doesn't address the point that it adds grind in a grind reducing update.

Hum I guess....

Anyways its interesting to have an update just to have one, but it seems as if the least requested and easiet to answer problems were addressed while nothing else was. I wish balance was always discussed in this much detail with this much haste over the years.

Would you really have been happy with anything other than what you wanted? Thsy explained their situation and if you didn't believe them then that is your perogative. It's just that I feel I should always give anyone the benefit of the doubt that I may be having. Maybe it's my age but call me crazy, I have an inherent trust for what I feel I am being told.