Tag: Guild Wars 2

NCSoft Q1 2013 Finances


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(I apologize for the outdated screenshot. I will update with a graph once I’m in front of a real computer.)

NCSoft has released their first quarterly report for 2013, and I’m sure we are all wondering how Guild Wars 2 will perform following the initial rush, so let’s dive in. Sales remained strong in 2013 thanks to Guild Wars 2, Aion, and Lineage. Profit is understandably down since last quarter’s launch of Guild Wars 2, however NCSoft’s year over year figures are amazing: 31% higher sales, 348% increased profits, 256% pre-tax income, and 322% net income over Q1 2012.

Lineage 1 continues to be NCSoft’s big seller, consisting of 38% of the total game sales in Q1, with Guild Wars 2 at 21% and Aion at 16%. Aion and Lineage saw an increase in sales quarter over quarter while Lineage II, Guild Wars, and Blade & Soul saw a mild to heavy loss. NCSoft as a parent company has thankfully recovered from being in the red last quarter for pre-tax income and net income.

Korea remains NCSoft’s largest market at 64%, with North America and Europe dropping by about half to 13% and 8% respectively, Japan’s 7% percentage share remained the same even though sales dropped. Sales in Taiwan increased slightly, remaining at 1%. Royalties dropped about one third in total, remaining at the 6% percentage value from the last quarter.

As usual, Guild Wars is bundled in with the “other” and is not represented by its own category. For legal reasons, I must remind you that these results are un-audited and may be subject to change during the auditing process.

Guild Wars 2 Flame And Frost Finishes This Month


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Flame and Frost is a multi-part living story in Guild Wars 2 which began way back in January and is currently on part three of four. The story so far is that back in January, the sky began falling in the northern regions, resulting in entire villages being destroyed and families left homeless. Players were asked to aid refugees making their way south through Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau, rebuilding destroyed signposts and aiding wounded refugees, as well as collecting personal belongings and returning them to their owners. The Flame Legion and Dredge, two races that had previous stayed in the background, now began assaulting Tyria.

Each update brings with it some pretty major changes to the game, for those who don’t care about the story, including the end of culling, major changes to the achievement system, and more. The final part of this mini-series is coming April 30th, according to Arenanet, and tasks players with striking at the heart of the Molten Alliance of the Flame Legion and Dredge. Attack their foundries deep beneath the Shiverpeaks, and perhaps face some frickin sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

Check out the main Flame and Frost page below.

(Source: Guild Wars 2)

NCSoft Q4 2012 Records Historical High Quarterly Revenue


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Click me for a bigger picture.

Talk about springing back. Strong sales in Lineage, Guild Wars 2, Blade & Soul, as well as mobile games, NCSoft has recorded historical high quarterly revenues for the fourth quarter of 2012. In the latest report, NCSoft marked a 56% increase in quarterly sales, a 208% increase in quarterly operating profit, 110% increase in pre-tax income, as well as a 116% quarterly increase in net income. The fourth quarter saw moderate to high increases in sales for Lineage, Lineage II, with the sales from Guild Wars 2 nearly tripling during the same period. Aion, as well as NCsoft’s latest title, Blade & Soul, saw marginal decreases over the same time period. Lineage II managed to reverse, at least for this quarter, a downward trend in sales that began in Q4 2011 while the original Lineage continues on an unpredictable, yet averaging upward, trend in sales despite its age.

Guild Wars 2 has already proven itself as NCSoft’s most successful product to date, breaking the record set by Aion during its peak sales by a long shot. NCsoft’s parent-company reports are, sadly, not as inspiring. While sales went up 15% quarterly, quarterly operating profit went down 1% with pre-tax income and net income both falling hard and ending up in the red for Q4.

And to wrap this up, we’ll look at everyone’s favorite part of NCSoft’s quarterly reports: Demographics. As expected from the launch of Guild Wars 2 and Blade & Soul, sales in Korea shot up with North America and Europe also taking a dramatic shift upward. Sales in Japan and Taiwan mostly remained the same while sales from royalties were boosted slightly.

Less Than 200 Banned For Guild Wars 2 Snowflake Exploit


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I hate writing articles on bans related to exploits, they just serve to confuse players and just those who found some interest in the article. Terms like “mass ban” and “widely exploited” are thrown around when the actual numbers of how many people were using the exploit, and consequently how many were banned for it, is much less impressive than the terminology surrounding the announcement. So let’s dive in and try to not confuse those of us who haven’t been playing Guild Wars 2 recently. I’m going to try to explain this the best I can, but don’t take the description of events below as 100% accurate. Ultimately all you need to know is what is quoted by Arenanet.

Wintersday is the event Arenanet holds in place of Christmas, and just like its real life counterpart, we can’t get through the holidays without someone getting stabbed (unless that’s just my family). According to what I’ve seen in news reports and from players, an exploit surfaced early on in the event which allowed players to use snowflakes from the event to convert several absurdly cheap items along with a black lion salvage kit, to generate endless amounts of ectoplasm, which is used in creating many of the high-level items. The exploit was closed and when Arenanet came back from holiday vacation, the team set off banning the worst of the offenders.

As I’ve already said, less than 200 were banned according to Arenanet. According to the North American Community Team Lead Regina Buenaobra, the banned players knew exactly what they were doing:

The number of accounts terminated as a result of this exploitative activity is actually very small—fewer than 200. However, these people are the very worst offenders, and engaged in this exploit to egregious levels—hundreds and even thousands of times. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew that their activities would damage the economy.

Gaile Grey, Arenanet Support Liason, posted to explain why the exploit should have been obvious to anyone making use of it:

Any time you take one thing and can make two, and then four, and then sixteen… ya gotta know that’s just wrong. (I won’t quibble on the odds, but overall, that form of doubling was not outside the realm of possibility.) And to perform that action hundreds and hundreds of times? That’s call “exploitation,” and that’s against the User Agreement, the Rules of Conduct, and all that is holy.

(Source: GW2 Forums – Number banned)
(Source: GW2 Forums – Understanding Exploits)

Guild Wars 2 Talks Bots, Gold Farmers, And Bans


As many players of Guild Wars 2 will tell you, a recent explosion in botting has blown into a serious problem for Arenanet and its community. In a post on the official forums, Security Coordinator Mike Lewis went on to discuss recent bans and action taken by Arenanet to curb the legion of bots currently taking up space in his game. Over the past week alone, Arenanet has banned over 1600 bots, and are currently tracking the most commonly used bots while gathering information on additional programs.

We are actively improving our means of detecting ‘bot’ activity in the game automatically. This includes tools for our customer support team to help them verify ‘botting’ reports and efficiently issue account terminations. Recently we have also hired a team of data specialists who will be helping us create more effective tools for analyzing reports of ‘botting.’

Sadly, many of the bots being used are likely through stolen accounts. Remember to practice safe surfing, kids. And if a bot approaches you on the street, don’t get into his van.

(Source: Guild Wars Forums)

Reminder: Guild Wars 2 Does Not Allow Mods


I noticed recently that a mod is gaining some notice in the Guild Wars 2 discussion. The mod makes several changes to the way combat and targeting function, with the goal of creating a more fluid, faster paced system. As several have pointed out, Arenanet has strictly prohibited any form of modding to Guild Wars 2, as written in the Terms of Service.

While no one has reported being banned for using this mod yet, the possibility that Arenanet could strike the mod as illegal is still very real. The somewhat vague response from CC Eva in the Guild Wars 2 forums should serve as a warning:

Hi everyone.
As Diva points out, the use of third-party software is not allowed in Guild Wars 2. Thypari, if you feel this is something that would improve the game, then we invite you to post your ideas on the subforum Suggestions, where they will be looked into.

Guild Wars 2: Now On Mac!


Blah blah blah, no gamers on Mac, etc etc. With that out of the way, Arenanet has good news everyone! As of right now, Mac players will be able to download and play Guild Wars 2 on a native client. Currently in beta, the client supports all of the features that Guild Wars players enjoy on Windows. In order to download the client, players need an active Guild Wars 2 account, and the game can be downloaded through the account management section of the Guild Wars website.

The Mac Beta client is available immediately for all Guild Wars 2 players. It shares the same features and connects to the same live game servers as the PC client. Anyone who purchases Guild Wars 2 can now play it on both PC and Mac.

Check it out. Keep in mind that this is a beta client, and may have bugs that are not present in the Windows client. Guild Wars 2 on the Mac requires OSX 10.7 or later, Intel Core i5 or later, at least 4GB of ram, 25GB of hard drive space, and runs well on a variety of Mac computers from iMacs, Macbook Pros, and Mac Mini.

(Source: Guild Wars 2)

Monday Night Cap: Daily Questing


Welcome to your night cap, for Monday September seventeenth, star date two zero one two. Daily activities are a great way for MMOs to keep their communities interested and playing. From a design stand, it directs the more casual crowd to a list of chores that can be completed even if the person doesn’t have much time to play. They can also introduce players to certain features that they might not have found or tried on their own.

Take Guild Wars 2, for a recent example. Every day players are tasked with killing x number of mobs, x type of mobs, collecting x number of materials and completing events. With fast teleportation, the entire daily list can be completed in a half hour or less, and offers a nice reward for completion. By spacing out the events, players are essentially pushed into exploring the world.

Daily quests are especially nice in sandbox games, where the player might be overwhelmed by the vast number of choices of activities, but don’t have much in the way of guidance. RuneScape is introducing its own list of daily activities, to give the player a set of tasks to get them going, offering bonus experience for participating.

And yes, daily quest timers are also used to herd players and place artificial limits on content. Certain MMOs place timers on when you can raid dungeons, or how much experience you can obtain in one day (Final Fantasy). Some titles limit how many times you can pull a reward from a boss. This is a controversial, and well disputed issue among various communities.

A developer would tell you that the reason is wealth difference, and that they don’t want a player who can only raid once or twice a week to feel at a disadvantage to someone who has the time to raid ten times a night. The player’s side is that they pay the subscription (or whatever the model is) and therefore should be able to raid as much as they want. Another argument by the community is that MMOs are a time investment, therefore the players with more time should naturally have an advantage over those with less.

So dailies aren’t perfect, but they do aid people like myself who often quit MMOs not out of bad quality, but simply because they lose our attention. On the other hand, having dailies linked to multi-day events can result in an alienated player if for some reason they miss a day and have to start over.

How do you feel about dailies?

Guild Wars Hands On Part 3: More Crafting!


In the second part of the hands on, I may have said that GW2’s crafting system was rather familiar. Well, you can string me up and beat the candy out because I missed one key part of crafting: Discovery. But first, I want to talk about why Guild Wars 2’s crafting system is superior to your own.

I Can Craft Whatever I Like

First, crafting is incredibly convenient. While other games allow you the power to craft virtually anywhere you please, Guild Wars 2 does force you to use stations scattered over the main towns and villages. That said, I submit that the ability to remotely deposit your crafting resources, one that is available without the need for a cash shop item (which admittedly would sell like penicillin in the gonorrhea dimension), easily negates the inconvenience of crafting stations.

And inconvenience is a harsh word at that. When you can salvage your items on the field, and then transfer those items directly to your collections box (without taking up precious bank space), and then at your convenience teleport directly to a town and walk the twenty feet to a crafting station, withdraw your crafting items right there at the station and then immediately sell/deposit the goods you’ve made either to an NPC or on the open market, there is no inconvenience. Or about as inconvenient as having to pull that plastic tab out of your Furby before it will begin learning your voice (yes I’m making 90’s references).

2. Discovering New Recipes

This is the feature I wanted to talk about most, and one that I just dived into yesterday after I stupidly punched out my second part preview. Every skill has recipes that are gained as you level up, but each skill also has a set of recipes that can only be learned by “experimenting” with crafting materials and even some finished products. Any item you produce that carries another skill(level) tag is an ingredient for another recipe.

So let’s take a look at some examples. I’m a chef, which means I can bring food into this discussion as much as I like and none of you can complain that it is random. The most basic recipe offered to chefs is a loaf of bread. The bread, however, experimented with can be combined with butter to make buttered toast. Or you can combine bread with red meat and make a hamburger. Or combine yeast, flour, oil, and milk to make biscuits (don’t quote me on this recipe).

I suppose where this falls short is that the whole system is rather casual. When you add your first ingredient, the game tells you outright what could be combined and what cannot. For instance, adding bread to the pool will result in “9 unknown recipes left,” even with a notice as to what cooking level you would need to craft the recipe and have it added to your recipe list. The hand-holding side of this is that the game will just block you from crafting anything that isn’t compatible, or above your level. So you don’t have to worry about wasting ingredients while crafting or looking it up online, you can’t waste ingredients or have experimentation fail, the game won’t allow it.

I’m sure players will decry it as care-bear or hand holding on this feature (oh wait, I already did), but it is an interesting feature that adds an extra level of depth and exploration to crafting. It also gives an incentive to gather as many raw materials as possible, rather than picking one or two recipes still capable of offering crafting experience and leveling those.

Other than that I have no opinion

Guild Wars 2 Impressions Part 2: Crafting, WvWvW


First off, I would like to apologize to the servers currently fighting Blackgate. Sorry we are completely dominating the board, that is. I kid, but seriously my server is whooping some major ass in the world vs world scene. Anyway, in the previous hands on I had a chance at discussing the questing of Guild Wars 2 and the overflow servers. For today’s hands on I looked at the World Vs World Vs World and crafting.

1. Crafting Myself A Better Headline

Guild Wars 2 allows you to take on two crafts at a time, but with a catch: Apparently you can swap them at any time and still retain the levels (don’t quote me on this). Additionally, it doesn’t matter what your professions are, you are able to collect resources from any skill as long as you have the requisite tool. Each tool has a certain number of uses before it breaks and needs to be replaced, and each tool has certain tiers that must be purchased in order to gather higher level items.

Crafting should be familiar to anyone who has played an MMO. You find materials by salvaging items (which, like Guild Wars, is done with a kit and is not its own profession), gathering resource nodes, and gutting mobs for their delicious flesh and skins. Unlike its fellow games, however, Guild Wars 2 has a fancy ability to deposit your crafting goods remotely. So if you are running around and suddenly find yourself filled up with ingots, fibers, pelts, and more, you can hit a simple button and deposit them in your collections bank. Later on when you are at a crafting station, you can just as easily withdraw said items.

Naturally some of the materials you won’t be able to get at all from the wild, forcing your hand to purchase from the many in-game NPCs. Certain resources also can only be purchased with karma points, which are obtained by completing live events. Additionally, crafting is quite a bit more involved than your average MMO. Most crafting skills have raw materials that are crafted into components, but also require another step before they can be turned into armor/weapons. For instance, in order to make a leather vest, one must first create a couple of vest parts which are then crafted into the vest.

The monetary restrictions of crafting prevent you from out-leveling your character in skills.

2. World Vs World Vs World: My Word

There is a word for Guild Wars 2’s world vs world vs world mode, but I’m too busy beating down the hordes of the other servers to think about it. World Vs World allows players to represent their server against select opponents in rounds that last two weeks. At the end of the two week period, the scores are tallied and the servers with the best scores win. This takes place on four massive maps where players fight for control over various territories. The zones act as any normal Guild Wars 2 area, so there are also mobs (both passive and aggressive) and resource nodes to be mined for goods, as well as merchants, trainers, and profession zones.

The number of options to help your team in World Vs World is truly astounding. You can fortify keeps, protect caravans, attack enemy keeps, defend your own keeps, operate siege weaponry, and rebuild after a devastating defense. Handy markers on the map let you know where battle is taking place, and keep assaults quickly turn into massive sieges with well over a hundred players present. The experience of being in one of these sieges, both as attacker and defender, is quite difficult to express without experiencing it for yourself. The guilds already in place are doing their best to make the experience as epic as possible.

It is also possible to gain drops off of your enemies. You aren’t stealing any of their loot, but the game treats it as a mob kill and will spawn loot bags with random materials, weapons, equipment, etc. You won’t gain much experience or loot from PvP in this fashion, but it does provide an incentive for players who might otherwise not bother.

3. Daily/Monthly Achievements

I can only assume my monthly achievements will be reset at the end of August, a pity considering the game only launched the 25th. Guild Wars 2 offers daily and monthly achievements, with rewards for completing sets of achievements as well as the whole list. Daily achievements are rather easy, from number of kills, variety of kills, gathering, etc. Monthly quests are a bit more involved, including salvaging items in mass, experience without death, number of invaders killed, and completing events.

The rewards for completing these events is well worth the effort required, however.

4. Next Time…

Next time I hope to talk to you all a bit more about the auction house. As I said yesterday, it is still offline.