[Dev Update] - 21 November 2008

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.

Ditto.

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.

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.

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.

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

Adds? No, just changed the focus.

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.)

Well, I guess it's good lol.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 ]

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...?).

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.

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.

I cannot count the times this happens to me now.

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

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....

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

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.

They don't have and either can't afford, or won't purchase, a few hard drives to store a new two-column database table. That's all I commented on, but your reply seems to have little do with that. Do you, or do you not, have anything to say about that subject? Because I have my opinions on the merits of the update too, I just don't care to discuss them here, which is why I didn't bring them up.

Some of us know how much a 500 gig hard drive costs, and some of us know what database normalization is. Either they're lying about the storage space, they're so low on funds they can't afford a few cheap hard disks, or they're not lying about being short on budgeted storage, and they just don't care.

You guessed horribly wrong. That's all the more of your post I read and all I'll ever read from you because you're on ignore now. Few things irritate me like anonymous poster on the internet who don't know me telling me what I do or don't know. Maybe you'd like to tell me what I want for dinner tonight since you're able to divine so much about me by analyzing my posts on a video game forum?

I doubt it's really that tight, otherwise there'd be some serious concern about new players. Granted, there can't be many new people signing up now, but there's probably still space budgeted. More likely, they have that space budgeted already and don't feel like buying a few new disks to add a new slot.

Free to play MMO was a dumb idea and this is why. You can't keep churning out new content without new revenue while also paying maintenance on your architecture.

I can't really hold this against ANET specifically. I'm beginning to think that F2P MMOs just aren't sustainable for any reasonable length of time know matter who does it.

The problem was that players EXPECTED content updates, and even more so that Anet MADE large content updates earlier in GW history. If it had been firmly planted in players minds that GW was an online only diablo with an emphasis on PvP instead of an MMO things would have been much better. Then you wouldn't get players complaining all the time about how they aren't getting a free lunch every other weekend. Well, you would still get a few but they would be laughed out of the forums along with the people wanting to raise the level cap.

Why don't they just make the mission marked as uncompleted after turning in a book? Assuming the player's mission completion title is permanent (like how after dieing you don't lose your survivor rank), I see no reason why they can't just unflag all mission completions and then then give you a reward when x number of missions are completed again. No need for a book at all. Then any complaints about lack of server space would be voided since the needed information (mission completion) is already stored. It would require quite a bit of work to overhaul a system they JUST put in though.

I kinda understand why A.net didn't made the books retroactive. The thing that interested me the most was the talk about a separate storage space for books.

Shadow Form says "I'm why you don't get retro books :P"

When I read this the Fireworks Crate popped into my head.
Make a crate or box or something that holds a slot for each book. It frees up what, six slots? More if they add all books to it. Double clicking the box pops up a list of books and when you click on one you proceed as you normally do now.
Is this not something feasible?

As far as the Retroactivity goes I think the idea of charging a total of between half to equal the of the reward is quite a good idea.

And the Luxon/Kurzick thing. Kind of sucks that we're getting screwed over by someone's foresight, but oh well.

Economy eshmonomy. I make more money now just from xunlai predictions than I ever did in 3 years of active play. And it's not like there's even anything to buy unless they add some new armor.

Why not simply make it cost the same amount to retroactively buy a book page as you would get from turning it in? I've never used that feature in EOTN except when they first added the books.

Couldn't care less about the luxon pts I lost while turning in all my free kurzick pts. It's not like progressing in both titles is useful, and the only other uses for faction can all be bought elsewhere with my free but useless xunlai lottery money.

Server space solutions: Delete characters after a set period of inactivity proportional to their level and automatically delete characters on perma-banned accounts. IE a lvl 20 takes a year to delete, but a level 5 takes only a month. I have like 6 characters on temp accounts from preview events that I can't log in to delete.

I would have been happier with a better explanation. They didn't even address the biggest point of all (retroactive faction books) and their not enough space and economy statements are odd at best and hypocritical at worst. I'd be surprised if anybody could walk away with a satisfied feeling from this "update on the update", but so be it.

I feel fine about this!

I agree: 60K pr. account with HM completed, would have affected the economy greatly. Not to mention, that it just would have put more money in the the "fat cats" purses (me included).
I can also clearly see, that the extra storage tab would have added extra strain to servers Anet really do not want to spend money on expanding at this time.
I'm guessing every dime is being spend developing a new game,- to keep people playing and employees working another 3 glorious years. (hopefully)

Nothing to rock my boat. But very nice, to actually get the feedback (and the concession about the faction loss ).

Go outside, smell the air, watch the sky. When you're feeling more relaxed, you will realize: it's just a game!

It's been said before, but here it is again:
3 years with unlimited access for 240$ (estimated from buying all 3 games (Special Edition) + GW:EN, in Denmark at the time of release.
Compared, WoW would have set you back an estimated 540$ in 3 years, if you subscribed in Denmark,- not counting buying the actual games and expansions.)
If you don't think, you've got your money's worth,- you've either not been playing enough or you demand much more than I do!

Speak for yourself,- I'm not going to get 35 maxed titles if I don't work both!

what the hell has shadow form got to do with the book not being retroactive?

i understand not wanting to get more server space for more storage, everyone wants to make money from their business, after all this is a pay for the game, and use our server for free for ever business. So as much as I like to have more storage anytime! I like the game being free to play forever more.

So, how about this Arena Net, Take the book out of the storage and put them elsewhere. Problem solve, hopefully.



and you know, you could put alot of things in here then in the storage.

for instant crafting materials it could be just a numbers recorded in the players account. this way you clear the material storage and turn the server space into Armor storage! or Pet Storage!


Unless off course, putting things in the progression bar is the same as putting things in storage.... then whatever hahahaha

The reason supplied for not making books retroactive was that it would ruin the economy. People are arguing that perma shadow form is worse for the economy.

ffs people, you can get 100k a month (give or take) from logging in once a month. If you really need the money, spend 2 or 3 hours and farm.

As to the server space issue... 1 tab for one person isnt much, but it would need to be probably character specific, and one per account. That would be alot of space.
Think about it... atm the number of items available to exist ingame is number accounts* (20 + 20 * average number of campaigns owned (assuming 1.5) (ignoring eotn), + 45*each character slot (say an average of 8 per account)). Approximately 390 slots per account (on average). If you add another 20... thats a 5% increase in storage capacity on the guild wars servers, may not seem much but since its free to play, and has been out for 3 yrs its fair to assume they are nearly at capacity... a 5% increase is definately plausible as being too much.

Also... seriously. You merch after each mission, if 1 slot is gonna hurt ur drops that bad get over it. Stop hoarding useless crap, sell all those stupid r13 weapons ur never gonna use. Dont bother holding onto the inscriptions that noone buys and even you arent going to use. I never have storage problems, and I have atleast 16 different armor sets on my account.

Like what was said when players wanted a way to lock there characters to prevent them from being delited if their account were hacked. Gaile basically said that it was fiancially feasable to get this feature.
Personally i think anet need to actually use it cash shop, and get features like character locking and extra storage in there. These wouldn't effect actual game play, just add useful features to the game that normally couldn't be added because of the game beign f2p.

Well said. I appreciate and respect honesty, even if it isn't always good news. The spin is usually way too overdone. Thanks Anet for being up front about this one.

Also good to see that inventory is on the mind. Then again, there's no way I'd be crazy enough to fill out the 80 Shiro's hard mode books for the title anyway, so I don't really care. Too much grind is too much grind.

^trust me, people will complain even more if a cash shop is added. I've played my fair share of "f2p but with cash shop MMOs" to know.

I did, but you ignored completely the content of my message. You've obviously never looked at how online games are managed, you simply don't go "let's grab a 1To HDD and plug-in a DB" (or grab 10 500Go HDDs), because you don't do that at all. You buy all these resources (HDD AND bandwidth/latency/availability) to storage providers all over the world, because you have customers all over the world. Thus you need synchronisation between all these remote places, which costs you money and efforts too.

This is what I meant by "economic model" and I've only described it in very simple terms, sketching the surface of the problem. Anet has done a feat to keep the servers going on with no monthly fee, and I guess they've also done some planning on how make sure that they don't run out of money before GW2 comes out. And this means that I have to manage my books, either using a mule or making sure I'm not working on too many of them at the same time, that's fine by me.

(funny fact: the best illustration of this fact is youtube, which I studied for my research; youtube actually doesn't store anything at all, they pay around 10millions$ a month to store TB of data and most importantly ensure that the data is available at all times and at a decent speed)

(and btw, as someone mentioned before, server don't manage HDDs like on PCs, they use racks which cost more)

I agree, but at the same time you have to realise that you don't know how GW1 was programmed and managed (neither do I but it seems that I have a better understanding of it). It's like if someone came here and said that hardware controllers are like any piece of software code.

It's basic business sense: if you use this space to implement Xunlai storage space, that means less space for people to create their chars, including for new customers. You have to look at the problem not only at a given point in time, but over the period of years.

I think the commercial success of GW1, and how Jeff Strain and Patrick Wyatt climbed to the top of the newly createrd NC West proves that they were right. And I'm not very surprised, given how good the 3 guys that created Anet are. They created a niche market and did an excellent job. Of course this doesn't show in the microcosm of Guru, which is a different beast.

Casual players love it. Of course, for a serious gamer, it's a different story, but I agree that F2P online games are not for everyone. Nevertheless, I appreciate that Anet has given us the opportunity not to be cash cows (just a little bit of provocation here ).

Anet has already done this as many people buy more characters for STORAGE mules. All the extra characters I buy are PVP only storage mules. I use them for PVP, but, they are all FULL of items from PVE as well. I only play a handful of characters in PVE anymore as PVE has become boring and dull and not fun to run differenct characters through the same content. I never could do that with offline rpgs and I certainly don't feel or want to do it in an online only game.
Also at the igmo who said get rid of your r13 items blah blah doesn't realize everyone isn't rich and those r13 work just fine in heroes hands. As well as the different mods that pvp players won't use, but, heroes gladly enjoy them and use them well. I run 13>50 on some items I give to heroes because a flippin point or two is not going to make enough difference in the already easy PVE game.

You do know that you don't need to take the weapons off heroes after you stop using the guys?
You only play a few characters in PvE, yet you keep hoarding stuff for them?
Yes, crap is good enough for PvE - but you can dump the crap onto it's designated location.

Yes, more storage would be good - but saying that you need it because you decide to keep every piece of crap you find is just a bit out there.

Haven't read through all of the pages here, but some way to get rid of mini-pets would help me a bit. Maybe an npc like the festival hat trader, or a trader with a similar mechanism to the celestial pig to get rid of unwated pets, e.g exchange 5 whites for a purple pet or such.

Oh please.
This is like asking
"what is the difference between Apples and Pears, they are all fruit aren't they?"

bad arguments are the juice of the internetz.

Like others have said, I don't mind about the gold rewards from a retroactive book. Hell, I wouldn't mind paying for the pages to fill a one-time retroactive book so I can reap the faction rewards.

Although the new faction earning methods are a major improvement, it is still unreasonable to expect players to fill around 90 Shiro's Return books to max the title.

I'd rather do 90 Books than have to do thousands of HFFFing. It's much quicker no matter how you look at it.

It's not unreasonable as books are not the only means of obtaining the faction.