Guild Wars 2

Anyone remember the times when when you saw a legendary, it meant that the person crafted it himself? Or when you saw a Wintersday weapon, it meant that that person spent hours farming for it during the 2012 wintersday festival?
Personally I highly dislike the fact that nowadays, people can just either spend real life money and convert it to gold, just merchant all day, or spam CoF for gold and just buy whatever they like. A Legendary weapon is supposed to be a huge feat of accomplishment: map completion, over 1 million karma farmed, thousands of materials collected, etc. Not just, OK, lets run CoF a few thousand times and buy one!.
Because money can pretty much get someone whatever they want now, so much of the game is virtually untouched. All people do is just whatever is the best way to make money. So much of the work Anet/NCsoft put into developing the game just goes unnoticed or unappreciated (except being rushed through just for achievement points).

Okay, enough of that, time to get to the point.
My aim is to go through this game without the influence of money and try to appreciate all the aspects of Guild Wars 2. The idea for this is (rough sketch) to create a guild where players pretty much go from ‘Rags to Riches’:
Create a new character to get from 1 – 80 and then earn yourself a legendary.
During this process, one cannot ‘trade’ with other players.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xm51s0zYmsriXmiELVk4PEY32e5C5iAsKcBOMaOPdpU/edit
for a more detailed description.

Posting this to get a sense of whether there’s any decent amount of other people that might have the same philosophy as me. If this thread actually gets a bit of attention, I’ll probably put a lot more into this.

Having a real job is an accomplishment.

Wanderer.3248:

Having a real job is an accomplishment.

Glad to hear you finally got one if that is what you are hinting at. Congrats on your accomplishment.

Yes it is feeling good swinging a legendary crafted by a loot precursor and self gathering. I did that but there is no way to tell how a player obtain a legendary.

Unless the skin of the legendary can be idenitfied by self craft / bought. Players around will still accuse you bought gem covert gold and got it from TP.

It was a terrible no life jounery to craft a legendary to me. If i am lucky enough to loot another precursor i will list it on TP in a heart beat.

I’m really hoping the new-generation legendaries will follow such a pattern, where it’s your journey through the living story that will earn you the (account bound) precursor.
Now if it was only available through the living story it’d have to be done in a really nice way (perhaps something along the lines of how armbraces worked in gw1).

A sense of accomplishment is entirely personal. For example, back in GW1 I earned my Legendary Survivor title the hard way, by taking my Paragon through all 3 campaigns, both NM and HM, and doing every single quest along the way. Even the super dangerous ones. I eventually got it halfway through Nightfall. (For the record, my Paragon continued being a survivor all the way until he went into the Domain of Anguish. Curse you, Lord Jadon!)

Then EotN came out and the title got trivialised by Fronis dungeon speed clears.

Am I upset about it? No. I have the satisfaction of knowing that I got my title the hard way. That’s something nobody else can ever take away from me. What does it matter how other players got their title or shiny? I really don’t care what they do or what they have. They can have their fun in their own way; it doesn’t affect my own enjoyment. If somebody spends 2000 gold or long hours grinding to get a bow that shoots rainbow unicorns, my only reaction is “Enjoy it.”

Wanderer.3248:

Having a real job is an accomplishment.

I’ve always sort of stood by the philosophy that people who make a chore out of the game to make money should consider getting a second job if they’re working that hard anyway. It’s much more profitable – and that’s the goal, right?

I’m sure I’m in the minority on this, but there’s a part of me that likes the fact that you can buy/sell Legendary weapons. They’re valuable to the person who made one, but there’s an implicit undermining of anyone who tries lord it over others.

There are some titles and items that are difficult to obtain, and not just time/gold/money sinks, but if you really want to make an impression on people, it takes a real sense of style, a memorable personality, good battlefield tactics, etc., rather than just a card you can flash and expect respect.

Forming a guild that plays to certain rules is probably a good way to give you a like-minded group if private achievement isn’t enough for you. (Which I realize sounds a little condescending on my part, but isn’t meant to be! People play different ways.)

I abandoned worrying about how something looks to other people in game a long time ago. That’s why two of my legendary weapons are underwater weapons. I like how they look. Why should I care if anyone else can see them?

After playing years of the original Guild Wars and seeing how easy it was to get achievements you didn’t work for (there were plenty), I just learned to care for what I had myself.

I don’t care if people buy legendaries because I don’t own legendaries to show off to other people.

i aggree every piece of gear is common and easy to get now. anet needs to stop re releasing stuff from the living story and make it so that once you have missed the event or promotional sale you NEVER get it. too bad so sad. this might seem to anet like they are losing money but in reality they are expanding teh longevity of their game because people wont get bored like they are now.

So instead of changing Legendaries if they introduced a retroactive title: Legendary Crafter, they could keep everything the same but allow those who crafted (instead of bought one) an avenue to proclaim this?

Feel free to try farming up 250 Giant Eyes for an Immobulus, and see if that “sense of accomplishment” is still worth it.

..Snarkiness aside…

The sense of accomplishment is ultimately determined by the person in question, not by the rarest item they can make or what temporary reward they were around for. While I’ll admit that being able to sell Legendary weapons kinda takes the “legendary” out of them, that is still the player’s decision to do that or not, and denying them that choice is even worse. And temporary content/rewards should be able to return, so newer players can have a try at it as well.