Guild Wars 2

And that’s the thing… soloing vs. party.

When I’m solo’ing and using wps, chances are I’m in Orr or Frostgorge… maybe going to do a CoE or dungeon run where the dungeon isn’t in a start zone. Point is, I’m doing me and I know I’m getting a profitable return.

When I party, I’m basically just tossing silver away when I should probably just give my friend the money instead and be like “get some boss twink gear instead”.

I “horde” gold because the prices of stuff is expensive. Maybe I don’t want to sit there and farm all day. Hey, I can enjoy helping my friend or doing my own stuff and be able to afford TP stuff? NOOOOOOOO

Bruno Sardine.2907:

“get some boss twink gear instead”.

Man, I wish people would stop using that word, especially when they don’t know what it actually means. x.x (Don’t google it at work.)

Actually, the term has been used since the ole paper n’ pen days and was the term to mean “munchkin”…. Who were basically people that just wanted to dominate the game at the expense of the roleplaying aspect; the “power gamers” of pen n’ paper if you will.

So… it’s perfectly applicable in the gaming world since it has a history of it’s own pre-dating video games and independent of the term you’re referring to?

Or if we really want the PC version (excluding the munchkin term so we don’t offend all those folks from the land of OZ as well)… “get some boss level-appropriate gear”

There ya go. :P

You spend a couple of extra minutes porting back to Lion’s Arch for free via Heart of the Mists and using the asura gate to go to the nearest capital city for free before using waypoints that actually cost money. At 80, you recoup the use of a waypoint to travel within any zone with just one event, plus extra with all of the trash drops.

Issue not found.

I totally agree with you. However, right now, there are not a lot of ways to spend your money to the system. (Repairing, waypoint or buy cultural sets?) Trade Post is not one option because money just goes from you to another player, it doesn’t disappear but creates more money. If making waypoint to be free, you are expecting to see the gem prices sky-rock and your gold basically worth nothing. I think Anet should think about other ways of spending the money than charging waypoint. Like OP said, it really prevents people from moving around because you may have to pay 6+ silver for just one round trip. Maybe when you use tokens to exchange the exotic set, pay some money in addition to the tokens?

Well I don’t think we have to go to the extreme of “free”, but at least scaled appropriate to what a player can reasonably earn. 1.50s between wps within the Frostgorge and Orr zones might be ok given how much you can make… 1.50s between wps within Queensdale or whatever is a little high relative to what you can reasonably earn within the same amount of time.

You get down leveled, yet the costs remain constant?

This could be fixed, especially if there is going to be additional content that will extend the map geographically. Pay to use the teles, so the money sink is still in place. Offer mount rentals for in game currency, again for the money sink. Offer to buy mounts using gems. Put up a bunch of different mount types to chose from, run some specials here and there on a featured mount at a discount. If you want to make the world seem more vast, then slow the mount movement speed a bit. Some of the fares for traveling within the same area are rediculous.

Personally I am playing this game solo, more than any other MMO I’ve played, even more than some single player games. Even with a certain single player RPG you had 3 other NPC’s to play with and control. I RARELY even see players running in packs of 3+ all. No one wants to pay to go all the way across the map and all the way back or hoof it which takes a pretty good wait. Oh and what if a person has not discovered a certain area yet? How are they supposed to portal?

I haven’t discovered the LA area yet, so places like Queeensdale, Sparksfly were completely buried for me so I hoofed it. By the time I got there, I dreaded walking back. So at 94 silver, and needing to buy fine mats to craft, cause we all know how plentiful they are, you start missing a freakin mount.

I do see one issue with mounts though. The Land itself is closely populated. There are more mobs than I’ve ever seen packed together in such small areas. Paths are not save traveling havens, so I could see people kiting minitours by the dozens towards unsuspecting players unless they change the code to not attack another player when the mob is removed from their general spawn area.

I don’t understand why people feel the need to come in here and tell the OP that he needs to play their way in order to cope with travel costs. He’s somehow “doing it wrong”. People seem to enjoy telling him he’s wasteful, or a bad player because he doesn’t enjoy being taxed harshly for travel.

There’s advice here, to port to the Mists to save the silver. But how many loading screens is that, or how is he supposed to get from LA to the place he wants to be without spending more? … and then there’s the return trip.

Or they say Run, and enjoy the scenery! Great, if that’s what you want to do and have time for it. But what if you don’t?

Travel costs are high enough that many people just don’t move from the spot they’re in — which in my opinion is the exact opposite of what you want to encourage players to do.

There are other things about the game that people complain about. I can overlook them all, except this one issue. It seems like a means of keeping people poor in order to encourage us to buy gems. And once I realized that, my love for the game diminished greatly.

I wonder if the people in this thread who support the travel tax so strongly, do the same for the real world taxes they must pay.

There is only one thing I’d like to see, some form of free WP when it comes to ressing, placed at a central spot for those that dont mind running back from the “GY”.

No one has ever declined to do an activity with me because it would cost money to waypoint to where I am.

Furthermore, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with suggesting ways to defray the cost of travel. When all you have to do is kill a few monsters or mine a few nodes in order to recover the cost, that’s a very small price to pay considering how much time you saved by quick traveling.

Sure, it may cost 4 silver to waypoint to a dungeon on the other side of the world. But you get 26 silver for completing the dungeon, and that’s before you include drops.

You mean to tell me… you don’t enjoy paying 3 silver per waypoint then getting rewarded a whopping 1 silver xx copper for a large scale event in orr? BLASPHEMY.

You aren’t awarded 1.xx silver for an event in Orr. You’re awarded 1.xx silver and a bunch of xp and a bunch of karma and all the drops and xp from everything you killed along the way.

XP and Karma aren’t money. Drops? Maybe, depends on what it is.

All drops can be turned into money, Karma can get you many of the same things as money, XP gets you skill points needed for MF recipes as well as being something people are obviously willing to spend money on since crafting is generally a net gold sink for most players.

foofad.5162:

No one has ever declined to do an activity with me because it would cost money to waypoint to where I am.

Furthermore, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with suggesting ways to defray the cost of travel. When all you have to do is kill a few monsters or mine a few nodes in order to recover the cost, that’s a very small price to pay considering how much time you saved by quick traveling.

Sure, it may cost 4 silver to waypoint to a dungeon on the other side of the world. But you get 26 silver for completing the dungeon, and that’s before you include drops.

No one is debating that you can recoup the costs. Of course you can. The point is that you shouldn’t have barriers placed in your way of moving around the map and socializing. And who said anything about dungeons? Most of the time when I want to go somewhere, it’s for something silly like to meet up and admire something a friend wants to show off. Personally, I find it kind of boring having to go farm things to cover costs.

If the costs to travel were as they were initially proposed (“small”), then there wouldn’t be so many people debating this. In fact, I can’t think of another game where this topic is such an issue. Kind of makes me think there’s a problem for at least a segment of the population.

While I don’t think the price is hurting my gold pouch too much I do find the waypoint tax kind of strange, and I definitely think it stops people from warping around to help each other. Like most of you said, if its silver you’d rather not lose, don’t warp around too much. Of course that would mean not going around helping much when people ask for it.

Also, they said their goal was to keep wealth somewhat fairly distributed, but the tax on waypoints and armor repairs hit the poor hardest and are almost meaningless to the rich. Think about it, a 4.5s a death (3s repair+1.5s waypoint at lvl 80 using exotics) is around .5~1% of what I carry in my inventory, whereas to a richer player it’d only be around .01%, so small they can ignore it. While it does take money out of the economy, it takes the same from everyone (thus a larger % from the poor), so it doesn’t help even out the wealth distribution.

Those are just some thoughts though. The price is pretty low so it doesn’t bother me too much, it just stops me from traveling around much. While I would prefer it was based directly on distance rather than a base fee+ distance, it’s not too bad. On a side note, a heart can take a few minutes to fill and there’s a limited amount. Most (lvl 80) people aren’t gonna spend 10min finishing twp hearts just to cover warp fees :p
P.S. I support the notion of low lvl opinions not counting toward because the fees are so low back then

It’s so easy to make money. Average player can easily make a gold an hour.

If you can’t get gold fast enough, to the point where 3 silver is a lot to you, you need to focus your energy into learning how to make money properly. What to vender, what to salvage, and what goes on the trading post. Its not hard.

But instead of learning how to make money, you want to nerf the game. Wouldn’t you rather learn to not be poor?!?

But thats gamer’s these days. Give them any sort of challenge, and instead of learning and growing as a player, they just cry nerf to the devs.

I’m not even talking about hard core players. Casuals can easily make money. If you’re not, you’re doing it wrong.

What I find interesting, is people just refuse to learn. Instead of trying to learn to be successful like everyone else, you would rather cry to the devs to nerf things.

If everyone had issues, yes. nerf it. But most do not. But you don’t care?! You don’t want to make money? You like being so poor that 3 silver is a lot? WHY!? Why not try to improve as a player? Why do you refuse to learn? Why do you insist on staying bad?

This is no different then “I got killed by class X. Nerf them, they are op.” Or building a glass cannon build and then complaining there’s too much damage in the game and people die too fast because you refuse to put any defense in your build at all.

When you face a problem in game. Work to over come it. Learn from others. Problem solve. Demanding nerfs is the last step. Not the first.

This game is all about making lots of money, spending it all and making more. This is not just make money endlessly till your insanely rich type of game.

And why do people talk about money from hearts and events so much? Because they are bad. Your money comes from harvesting and loot drops. NOT hearts and events, thats a little bonus. Learn to loot. Learn to harvest. And learn to sell for maximum profit.

I think the WP cost are okay so far except that if i am doing a jumping puzzle and I died. The nearest WP also cost me 1S 50C which is a bit high.

Can Anet consider adjusting the cost of travelling viz WP according to the distance you are away from it?

iboeng.6847:

I think the WP cost are okay so far except that if i am doing a jumping puzzle and I died. The nearest WP also cost me 1S 50C which is a bit high.

Can Anet consider adjusting the cost of travelling viz WP according to the distance you are away from it?

I think the idea was to turn it into a tax. By scaling the cost for Point A to Point B based on level, you take a portion of higher-level income and help try to stabilize the gold ceiling in the market.

I don’t use the WP unless I’m forced to. I run to where I want to go. Did you know that if you followed the roads, the opposition will be minimal?

I also agree that WP costs should scale based on distance. Or a combination of distance and map level.

Can’t imagine how you folks would have got on in the early days of MMOs.
Can you imagine having to walk to a location, learn how to make runes, learn how to mark a rune, create a run for your location, add it to your spell book, and then cast an interuptable spell before you can get back?

I don’t think you can call lowering or cutting out waypoint costs a “nerf”.

Anyway, I am more interested in the “social” impact on the game, and most of you seem to think I need to ltp, having some 450 hours on the game I don’t think I need to ltp.

For me personaly it does affect my social experience, with GW1 I had an urgency to log in, join up with my mates online, GW2 hasn’t got that urgency for me.

Of course I would like to waypoint about, find where the action is (Might take a fair bit of travelling about to do that), join DE’s quickly, get in on the action quickly, hook up with people, join parties, help other people.

I don’t want to walk about and look at the scenery, I’ve seen it all by walking every zone.

GW2 should be much more of a social game, not a single player game such as Skyrim which sometimes GW2 feels like.

So my whole point was not about making gold, looting, farming, trading, or “learning to play”.

Think “SOCIAL” impact.

Voqar.2349:

PvP tab go to heart of the mists take portal to Lion’s Arch – that makes one leg of going to the bank/merchant/changing zones free

I don’t like Lion’s Arch. It looks cool. But it has a poor layout for crafting/bank/tp, and the map chat there reminds me why I hate so many MMORPG players – it’s intellectually insulting.

So I don’t usually want to be in LA, and the number of loading screens involved (even with SSD and fast internet) is punishment for going the mists/LA way.

I have plenty of gold so travel costs are no biggie to me but I can see how it would suck for people who don’t have as much time to play, who suck at accumulating gold, or who aren’t as good at playing and die way more than they should.

I agree here – I actually wish each character gets a “racial town recall” of some sort. Not only it would spread out the population and make the racial towns seem alive, but it would also provide an alternative to Lion’s Arch.

Palleon.1657:

Can’t imagine how you folks would have got on in the early days of MMOs.
Can you imagine having to walk to a location, learn how to make runes, learn how to mark a rune, create a run for your location, add it to your spell book, and then cast an interuptable spell before you can get back?

Didn’t need a lot of money for that in UO though, not after the initial cost of training skills.
Unless you got PK’d while casting.

Either way the Waypoint costs in GW2 aren’t a huge issue unless you are really bad with your money.
NPC the Blues and Greens instead of salvaging them. Salvage White items.

Sell for “Lowest Sell Price”

Don’t use crafting unless you have extra money to waste.
The items are much cheaper to buy off TP.

Don’t bother repairing every time 1 armor piece gets Damaged.
If you are low/mid level chances are you’ll just find an another armor piece with the same stats and can wear it to replace the damaged piece.

Also I wouldn’t bother with getting Rares/Exotics until lv80 as the stat differences aren’t that huge anyway.

I am quite shocked actually how so many of you have missed the reason behind this thread, and continue to tell me how to make in game money.

Completely ignoring the fact it’s not about how much you can make, have or how to make it.

I know about the “Free” travel to Lions Arch.

You seem to ignore the possible impact (That I feel) that waypoint have on the social aspects of the game.

I don’t overly use waypoints, I’m not broke, I don’t continually die and have to repair armour, I don’t want waypoint costs free so that I can hoard more in game money.

Bit it does feel like a very single player game at times, when we should all maybe have the ability to travel cheaply, when we have completed an area, to have fun, help people out, party up, groovy on down, whatever you want to call it, with OTHER PEOPLE.

MeyaEnyo.2580:

I haven’t noticed the cost of waypoints since level 1 to about 20, to me this doens’t stop me from traveling around at all.

if you havent experienced traveling around @ 80, you have no say in this argument

the point is , the travel costs scale too much with level (to the point where the distance is irrelevant, i can pay 5 silver to go to the next zone over, or 5 and a half silver to get to the other side of the world, simply put , its stupid) and that they cost too much to move in the same zone (at the very least, travel within the same map should have a 1 silver capped cost regardless of level )

I agree with the anti-social part. In GW1 I would zone all over the place to help out people here and there, and that was what made the game fun; interaction. 80% of the time I would not even play GW1 unless I knew I had someone to play with or I could group up with some random players.

I already feel alone enough in GW2 (most events are so void of players), why do I need to pay to go to my friends?

Solid Gold.9310:

Bit it does feel like a very single player game at times, when we should all maybe have the ability to travel cheaply, when we have completed an area, to have fun, help people out, party up, groovy on down, whatever you want to call it, with OTHER PEOPLE.

Cheap and expensive are subjective.

I used to think that the Waypoints are so expensive that I don’t want to visit any zone that I can’t make the money back from.
I now think that this is an issue with the loot scaling rather than the Waypoint costs.
…although I wouldn’t mind a discount for traveling to a low lv zone, either.

These days I tend to have anywhere from 50 Silver to 2 Gold with me at any given time.
I make all the Waypoint costs back many times over from Dungeons and there’s nothing I desperately need the Gold for anyway.
In other words I can Waypoint wherever I wanna go whenever I wanna go, which seems to be what you had an issue with.

That’s why I figured that if you had more Gold you could easily visit anyone you want and shrug off the measly cost.

What about Anet doubles the WP costs, but brings in mounts? I could live with that…

I don’t see the love with mounts some people have… Are you invincible when you’re on a mount? Sounds very boring to me… Only steering…. Whenever I walk across a map, I’ll follow the main road, attack a critter now and again, follow a DE, mine that ore, chop that tree, pull those roots… And before I know it, I’m at my destination (or somewhere completely different, but that’s because I usually forget what I was doing :P)

I for one am glad they have found ways to eat money out of the game. It keeps item prices in check in Auction halls. However I have heard of the steep price at high levels, and havent experianced it yet. So its hard to comment.

How about removing some of the waypoints and lowering the price? Would that be a possible fix? IE make it cheaper to travel, but add some of the actual boot leather express to the game. It would be a 50/50 fix help in some ways. The maps I have been on are loaded with so many waypoints. At mys level its still pretty cheap to travel, but I could take 3 extra minutes to run it. That woulddnt bother me… Then again I loved Vanguard and it had huge expanses I had to travel to get places. So maybe its just my mindset.

AcidicVision.5498:

Follow these easy steps for total mitigation of WP fees:
1. Waypoint.
2. Pick a direction and run until you see an orange circle (usually 15-30 seconds).
3. Enter the orange circle.
4. Do the thing that the circle demands.
5. When the circle is satisfied then you are given money, karma and experience + all the loot from monsters if the circle required killing.

Yeah, good idea. If you’re in a high-level area. Unfortunately, travelling costs scale with your level, not the area’s level. Which means you gotta kill quite a lot of mobs when helping out low-level players in their respective areas, while you don’t have problems in zones around your own level. Which is pretty much the opposite way of how it should work, considering this game is eventually meant to be social.

computertrucker.4635:

I for one am glad they have found ways to eat money out of the game. It keeps item prices in check in Auction halls. However I have heard of the steep price at high levels, and havent experianced it yet. So its hard to comment.

There are tons of other ways to achieve this, including raising repair costs. ANet should also find a way to punish players running around naked to circumvent repair costs. You could also have to pay a fee to be resurrected, that would mitigate the “die and run in again” problem and effectively punish bad players so they’re forced to do better.

I’m okay with the way it is now. The ends justify the means in this case. I mean, I only have to do one event(with loot selling not even that) to get the cost for a WP back. I thought I would have problems when I started playing, but now that I can judge better how much money you make in an average play session, the costs are in the Goldilocks zone. The less money in the pockets of players, the lower the inflation rate is going to be, which means if things go awry in another sector of the economy, it’s way easier to compensate for.

The main reason why people want mounts is to show off, which is something mini pets already fulfill without being so “in your face” about it like mounts are in other MMOs.

My play habits are fairly average, and I port around when I need to. I don’t grind events in Orr, I don’t run one dungeon after another(just did my first explorable yesterday), and I end up with a steady income of about 1 gold per casually played hour, despite the waypoint and TP tax.

What did make a difference in how much money I earned was the size of my bags. Up until a week ago I was running around with 8 slot bags, but I upgraded to moderate 15 slotters since then. You wouldn’t believe how much of a difference it makes having to visit the Merchant every 45-60 minutes instead of 15-20.

If they could pull off a dynamic way point cost system, that could let you travel to let’s say one of the major cities for free for a short amount of time to increase player density, I wouldn’t say no.
With Halloween they have shown that they can dynamically place zone portals in a map that leads you to other places. There could be an event chain in certain maps that let’s player unlock access to an Asuran portal that randomly leads to one of the major cities(preferably underpopulated ones). I think that playing with this might be useful in the long run without hurting the economy too much like a flat cost decrease would.

Are waypoints really working as a gold sink when players just avoid using them or use the sparingly? And, if waypoint cost is discouraging players to help others, wouldn’t that be hard to see since players just won’t respond in guild/map chat when someone asks for help? I mean, they wouldn’t say “no, it costs too much.” They’d just be silent.

Costs of waypoints are too expensive, and this game has the most ridiculous, unfriendly mob density I’ve ever seen in a video game ever.

It’s a bad combination. The game needs mounts ASAP.

ArenaNet thought they were smarter than the room by getting rid of mounts. They weren’t. It was a dumb decision.

ASB.4295:

I mean, I only have to do one event(with loot selling not even that) to get the cost for a WP back.

I said above why this isn’t true in many cases and isn’t social.

I’d prefer it if the travel costs scaled with the area you’re traveling to. So if I’m hopping around a low level area, the costs are relatively low. If I’m going to a high level area, it’s expensive. If I’m returning to a city, it’s free.

I totally support what Mancub and Jam just said. Some people just come in here and say why the way it is now doesn’t really hurt them, and it doesn’t if you just stay in high-level areas, but nobody replied to these valid arguments yet. I don’t see why it wouldn’t make sense or hurt the game if a system like me and Jam just proposed would be implemented. It would be a very easy approach to just limit the traveling costs by area level or scaled down player level, not the real player level. I somehow even feel like this was just overlooked by ANet, since player levels and rewards are scaled down according to the area you’re in, traveling costs should be too.

“It’s been stated multiple time in this thread but this isn’t really a “recoup the costs easily” issue it’s a “social interactions with other players” issue.”

Thank you Mancub.

“I’d prefer it if the travel costs scaled with the area you’re traveling to. So if I’m hopping around a low level area, the costs are relatively low. If I’m going to a high level area, it’s expensive. If I’m returning to a city, it’s free.”

Thanks Jam, that would definately help the social side of things, which I feel the game is severly at the moment.