[Dev Update] - 21 November 2008

People that wine about anet that doesn't have enough server space are dumb. You don't have any idea how many characters are out there that need space for all books. Books will take quite a lot server space, if it will say take 1 kb each book, (it will probably more) it is like 20 books = 20kb a CHARACTER. Which will be ~10 a account will be 200 kb/ account and that times 5 million is a lot of space. Don't tell me that it will be less used, as they have to have space for the maximum usage and still have more then enough left.

EDIT: and do think about 1000 gigabyte (1 terabyte) is alot for just some books.

I know that me saying this won't make it any better but...Kurzick and Luxon titles are like the Hero/Champion/Gladiator title. You spend 2 1/2 years or more trying to get them, not something you do in 5 months. Since Anet was a bit late, it's just gonna take you 2 1/2 to 3 years from now to max them, unless you want to force yourself to grind and get bored and cause mental infliction to get the titles in under 5 months. But hey Guild Wars 2 probably won't even come out till mid 2010, so you have your time.

Wrong, you dont "make money" from Xunlai - you get RP's that you make keys for and then TRADE for someone elses money therefore no no gold into the game, just recycling.

Absolutely not - just because I dont log into a storage char that may be a low level for a month, does not mean I do not want the items or the char.

Do those titles have PvE skills tied to them?
What you are describing are PvP titles - designed to take ages to max.
What we are dealing here regarding the Allegiance title is a PvE title! The 10 million is just too insane.

Yes, some of us do know those costs.
Thats funny, you the anonymous poster on the internet are doing exactly the same thing to anet that you accuse others of doing to you -thats funny - I guess you must irritate yourself then .

You and I dont know their structure, their budgets, in fact very little of anets particular workings.

A dumb idea? Have not anet made money from the F2P to prove it DOES work?

Exactly what do you consider a reasonable length of time?? - Isn't 3+ years more than reasonable for a game?? Id suggest it is and doubt there are many off the shelf games you could get 3 years entertainment from.

It's not hard to get the first 4-5 ranks in the title and that's all you need for the PvE skills. But yeah it's a PvE and PvP title. Because yes I'm sorry to say it, PvP means player versus player which you are doing in AB/FA/ and Jade Quarry. Even though most people seem to consider those PvE type games, which they are as well I suppose because you do fight NPCs. (Which is what you also do before HA coincidentally and in HB, but hey).

I still stand by what I said, I don't think they were made to max like the rest of the PvE titles, but more like a PvP title. Kind of like a hybrid between the two. You have 2 different types of play to make points for the title.

Yes, you're right. They weren't MADE to be maxed so easily.
But once they added Factions PvE skills then their functionality changed.
They went from being a PvP title that will takes ages to max - to a PvE title. That still takes PvP(!) ages to max. And that's the broken part here.

I fullheartedly agree with the above. QFT.

Just out of curiosity, can anyone speculate if a book holder akin to the incubator kit for baby moas would use less, more, or the same server space as a new storage tab?

And on a side note, I would gladly pay double the gold reward just to get more rep/faction. Expensive, yes, but my time is worth it.

Great the QQing has been started again just when it started to die down a little. Some of you people act like kids. I want more! Bah, where is the paddle.

Yes, it's a lie, the real reason is they are "cracking" Guild Wars to make things not even imagined in the past, and I congratulate that work, that's hard my friend.

Who the hell are you, grandpa.

DING DING DING, WEDDING... I mean, winner.

I like that they're looking for a solution to book storage, but I am very sad to hear that pretty much more storage tabs aren't feasible. I really, really, REALLY think that Anet need to realize that with the HOM our storage was already under pressure due to armour, as well as the new addition of new books...

Why?, Fail..

There is a positively enormous difference between letting players play through a campaign fully and get 60k for their efforts instead of spending their time farming, and dumping 60k*(number of characters you play) into every player's storage in a single day. Please tell me you can see that...

@auch...mayhaps you should read the rest of the update for the "why", eh?

Why even reward players for NM? They should only give money to people in HM or make the purchasing more expensive. (Or vice versa and give a little money to a lot of people) The MOX thing was different simply because it was a runnable quest basically and people just did it for fun. The quests were pretty darn simple and if you fully explored it with that char - there should have been no problems. the hardest part would be getting to Zhinn if you didn't have ventari's refuge, but then again that was simple to find a runner to do it and pay him 1-2k (not hard).

This is different, most people who go throught the game the normal way go through normal mode and then get max equipment and then play HM - they should get rewarded for HM. Plus increasing the amount of money in the accounts would probably make people buy more, which would get more people into the game spamming WTS xxx / WTB xxx

No you don't make a quest per mission. You make an objective per mission. You make ONE quest that has an objective for each mission. Take the Sorrow's Furnace quest for example. You have to complete 4 other quests to complete the main one.

Same thing you have to complete every mission to complete 1 quest, which is essentially all a book is one quest with several objectives.

Nope. The only difference I see is players who already played the campaign now have to grind through it again to get the 60k. The 60k will go into the economy regardless. I fail to see how whether it goes in now or later matters.

Sigh...
1. It's a guaranteed 60k, multiplied by the number of characters who have finished the chapter. For me, that would currently be 480k, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this (or even the highest). Multiply that by the number of players who have done the same, and that's, what, a couple hundred million gold? More? How many players will ever actually complete 8, 10, or more books? I'm going out on a limb here and saying significantly less than the majority. That means that less total gold will be put into the economy.

2. It's instantaneous. Yes, it matters if the gold all comes into the game all at once or over a long period of time, because everyone would get their gold in one day. That would overnight change the buying power of every player in the game, and would therefore alter prices at traders, prices that players sell materials at, even prices that player sell high end weapons for.

3. Most importantly: it's money for nothing. From now on, if you max a book, you are doing it using time that you could have spent farming. Time spent doing missions is still less profitable than time spent farming (though less so now), so you're putting less money into the game than you would have otherwise. In contrast, if we could just fill up a couple books and get the rewards instantly, we'd be getting paid for effectively doing nothing.

I have an idea, give us the 60k and make a dragon circle afk weekend.

Nope, you're wrong. First of all 60k is NOT changing the buying power. 1 set of 15k armor costs more than 60k with materials. 1 high end weapon costs more than 60k or it's not really high end. High end is 100k+ecto. Material prices would barely shrug. Guild War's economy isn't real. There's almost no necessity and lots of low income opportunity (collector item, dirt cheap greens and golds, end game reward, tomes, faction) not to mention the game itself throws cash at you if you pick up all your drops and merch them, PLUS it throws the materials at you. Whatever numbers Anet looked at to determine their "economy" hurts over something like this, they've certainly never said that billions being generated on zaishen keys and ecto is a problem. Ridiculous.

Well it wouldn't be 60k, it'd be more like 400k+ For nearly every person. That's around 200-300 million GW gold in 1 day. Personally I don't see what that would do, I don't think it would have a negative effect. I don't think many people would buy something that would effect the economy.

Also, the money made from monthly Zaishen Keys is under 500 million since they started giving them out monthly. You cannot say it's more because that would be a silly thing to say, not everyone in Guild Wars knows what the Xulani is, not everyone sells their keys, most people get shit drops out of the chest that go to the merchant. Now if you meant all Zaishen Keys made, you would be a little closer to 1 billion.

As for ecto, if you're talking about Shadow Form farm, when it first came out I'd be inclined to agree with you, but as of now SF doesn't make ecto anywhere near as good as it used to, so it's really just not a problem now. If you're talking about ecto gotten in all forms, including power trading, well then yeah maybe it's in the billions range. But that's Anet's fault for being silly and allowing there to be mini pets (which are completely and utterly useless btw, besides what they might add in GW 2) that cost more than 5000 ecto.

60K per completion isn't that much. Considering that people played long for that, and that gold would've already been in the economy if the books where there already. ( although not in a spike ) I find it hilarious that they care about such a minor thing when there are much larger problems for the nearly non-existant economy. Such as a player base obsessed with farming and grinding. Now thats an issue worth adressing. Not removing a reward for doing missions.

Its STILL a guaranteed 60k. The only difference is you have to do the missions over again rather than getting it for what you previously did.

I don't see how changing the buying power overnight is worse than changing the buying power over time. You still end up with the same result.

Besides, I'm not even convinced it changes the buying power. By giving us the ability to get 60k (no matter when or how we get it) it still gives the general player more money thus keeping the buying power mostly the same. Farming is what causes the most economy fluctuation (other than major changes to the system like inscriptions or loot scaling).

So it is very very unlikely that it would significantly change the buying power in the big picture. I'm also not convinced on the 400k number for most players. Most people I know went through every mission with their main character and that was it (even less people on hard mode). The thing that changes the buying power most is when an effective and consistent method of income is in the game such as shadowform farming.

Its money for missions you already did...but that argument was made in the other thread and not worth bringing up here. What you say here really doesn't make much sense. We know that farming still brings more money into the game than missions. You are basically saying since people are spending time doing something less profitable, it is better for the economy. Doesn't that mean farming is the bigger problem and the money from the missions is much less of a problem? The people who want the most money can still get the most money.

I would say it is no more than just study and I don't see it happening if this was the case.I wouldn't of made up these books which have no relevance to the game what so ever story line or just gaining XP.The premise of the game is to develope a char for competive play not for this.

I would personally like to see the books gone as I already trashed 2 of my MoX books already and probably won't do the quests even for the 10K.I will probably will be trashing more as my space is getting very limited(sp).

First off, as gareth said, it's 60k multiplied by the number of characters you play. That's a significant sum, considering that most players have less than 20k in their storage or something like that. Zaishen keys and ectos do not "generate" any money, at all, they merely move money from those who farm for drops to those who farm ectos or sell zkeys. I make basically all my money from merching drops, but I've never gotten 480k instantaneously from merching junk.

Oh, and if the economy doesn't matter, then you shouldn't care about not getting "worthless" gold.

No, it's not, because all players will not necessarily play the missions over again, certainly not once per character they have. In any case, that's all potential future money, not present right now.

Because a sudden change in prices can significantly screw over large numbers of people, while making a few players exceedingly wealthy. Every time the economy changes quickly, whether on ectos or items such as voltaic spears, we have seen that happen.
Any player can make more than 60k in the same amount of time they spend filling in a full book, if they want to farm. Adding books has not in any way increased the player base's ability to generate gold; it may have, in fact, decreased it, as now players will be farming books for the gold and title points instead of just farming for gold.
You've almost have it, but your lack of appreciation for how much a large, instantaneous addition of gold into the system can change the economy is skewing your conclusions. Farming is going to happen, and I really can't see how it could be stopped, or why it needs to be. People who want to earn money the fastest will always earn it faster than a normal player; loot scaling toned down farming's efficiency to be somewhat less ridiculous, and I don't have a problem with it now. The fact that ecto prices really only change after large updates that significantly alter farming builds (or the buying power of most players) is proof that the continuous influx of gold from farming is not really that big of a problem. The fact that people have been farming since the game started, yet you can still buy most weapons for under 5-10k, is more proof.

Farming doesn't really damage the economy, and these books will push even less gold into the economy than farming could do, so they're perfectly fine. The issue comes when you dump huge quantities of gold, hundreds of millions, even potentially billions, into the system all at once. ANet specifically said in their dev release that their was a noticeable change when they allowed everyone to earn 10k per character relatively quickly with the MOX quest. Letting us fill books retroactively would have constituted an even greater quantity of gold, in a shorter period of time.

Where did you people get the 60k figure from? It is 18k (20 - expenses) for completion of all three chapters. Though it can be expected that players finish normal mode for multiple characters, everyone doing so in Hard mode is not very likely.

1st post of this thread:

Some people do not know what CR is.
Its not part of Regina's work to babysitt you, if Gaile did, well... im pretty sure Gaile did not recived for that.

Get real people.

It seems you are ALSO one of those people who do not know. Sure, Regina's job isn't to babysit, but she's SURE doing her job wrong at the moment.

A small mistake: golden items drop from the Zaishen Chest. When these items are sold to the merchant they create gold coins.

Someone at A-Net please hire this guy!

Why didn't I think of this!?!


Love the idea, just like the main EotN quest chain, but with a book-type reward.

The benefit of books is that you can hand them in after completing some of the quests. That way you're not stuck on some of the harder missions like eternal grove if you don't have a guild/friends.

Those people who have the Guardian title and would get more money probably have so much gold on their account anyway that a mere 40k wouldn't feel anywhere. And for those with Normal mode Protector, heck, what's 20k, one piece of elite armor? Hardly economy-breaking. Probably been said already, but considering that SF is still alive and kicking, their worries about the economy seem very superficial.

When comes to the rewards all what the books do is save a variable, e.g. EotN_missions_done=6. If the value is high enough, you get the appropriate reward. That should be possible to do for a quest too.

For the last go red engine time, SF IS NOT WRECKING THE ECONOMY ANY LONGER. That 1 month ecto farming interval was the only time. It's not doing any more damage than 55 has in the past, than Ettin farming for runes has in the past, then 600/smite is doing now. It's not SF, stop blaming SF.

personally for me it is the missed oppitunity of turning in books in hm/nm for gardian/protector / vanq for the luxson/kurzic faction value that is more dissapointing the fact i miss out on 60k does not mean jack missed faction to the title means more.

maybe a one time only token for each character that have allready done these titles before the introduction of the books, which in turn can be traded with the luxson or kurzic bard to get your faction reward that having a completed book would have given you.

Token customised to char therefore only that account gets faction reward not plat reward therefore GW economy will not get afftected at all.

Because permament 95% invincibility + large amounts of damage OR total invincibility (A/E or A/Me with a self-heal) and weak damage OR just the best tank ever isn't OP.

Just FYI, A/E can remain invincible with one monk for an eternity. The only thing that can possibly harm him is Signet of Humility, but that's the death of all tanks.

The only thing that got nerfed was E/A. A/E's still work, they have only a bit less damage and energy than E/A.




I still see no reason not to give us JUST FACTION, which is a lot.

Because it's unfair to those that want the money.

Retroactive Faction/Reputation: If you have been playing this game for any decent amount of time then you shouldn't need retroactive Faction/Reputation. You should be able to get R8 Sunspear and R5 (at least) Lightbringer just by playing through the campaign in NM. I play VERY casually and I'm near max on Lightbringer and and Sunspear without those books. It's not hard to do. If getting those points is so important to you, then do the damn books and get it. Here's a novelty idea: EARN IT.

I find it interesting that people are bitching about title-maxing not being made easier. Shouldn't maxing these titles take at least some effort? Besides, Faction title is account-based, so there's no need to get it on every character. Sunspear and Lightbringer (which are character-based) are easy enough to max already. With the books you now have another route, making maxing them even easier.

Not wanting gold from but getting retroactive Faction/Reputation from Storybooks seems like a fair trade-off, but separating the two would be difficult considering that the gold reward is intrinsically linked to the books, whether you/I/we like it or not. What's done is done, accept it and move on. There's no need to beat this horse forever.

Server Space: Since none of use knows exactly how much server space is currently being used, how much they have available and so on, your speculation means NOTHING. You have no clue and no insight on ANet's server state, making your observations completely worthless. If you think "well, they should have enough money to buy more," keep in mind that they are also working on GW2 and will need a ton of server space for that too.

Book Space: You know what would be grand? A bookbag. Similar to how the Black Moa Chick Incubator Kit worked, there are 7 slots. 1 for each book. Yes, it will still take up inventory space, but it will only be 1 slot and allow you to store other Storybooks. I don't know if they'd be able to give credit for missions when the books are still in your bookbag, so you might have to remove the relevant Storybook from your bookbag when doing the mission. That means 2 slots, but it's still better than 7. I don't know if personal inventory server space has the same issues as Xunlai Storage, but if not then this could be a viable alternative to a Book Storage in your Xunlai

Shadow Form: 55 Monk. Farming has been around for a long time. Whining about one while ignoring all the others is ignorant. If there is an area being heavily exploited by SF farming (like Chaos Plains was) then ANet can address that in other ways that does not screw over everyone who likes to farm with sins.

Conclusion: I'm not trying to talk down to anyone or flame, but people need to look at things objectively, reasonably and take a moment to think of things outside of just themselves. In the end, it's just titles and the ones being griped about aren't even that hard to max. Is it really that big of a deal that it will take 2-3 months to max your Faction title instead of right away? If so, that's rather petty, IMO.