I suppose there are three things that may lead to this very wide difference in opinion:
1. The kind of previous experience you have with grind, and negated max-tier equipment.
It took me a year and 2 months to max-lvl (99, btw) everything in RuneScape, and in that time I still didn’t have enough money to afford the BIS melee gear (lvl 80). Not to mention, there are three sets of BIS depending on your combat style.
Then recently they created level 90 equipment…
Not that that was the first time they did that. The lvl 80 gear invalidated the previous lvl 70 gear tier, etc etc. Every time a release like that happened, players lost hundreds of gold.
And I am one of the fastest people to ever max-lvl RuneScape without using any form of money trade. Back then, money trading for ingame currency was illegal – there was no official channel to do so. Most players, after spending 2-3 years at it, are barely level 80 everything, and the scale is exponential.
After getting used to that, this is a cakewalk. Especially given how much more fun the combat here is.
I can’t comment on what WoW would be like since by the time I got to try it, the game has become so ridiculously boring that I quit in less than a day. Even Ragnarok Online 2 occupied me for longer.
2&3. The economy between lvl 80 and pre-lvl 80 in GW2 is leagues apart, and the difference in resource-earning efficiency between players in lvl 80 is also leagues apart.
It took me 30 levels to earn my first gold, spending all my mats on crafting. It now takes 10 minutes via harvesting permanent locations for rich ore veins – which I don’t need to use to level crafting anymore. All of that goes directly into cost reduction for ascended gear, making it a cakewalk. Especially with multiple alts – each which can harvest the rich ore veins once.
Dungeons are fast as well, especially CoFp1. There is no such equivalent for a lower levelled player. And the more you uplevel your gear and abilities, the faster a dungeon run becomes, making gold per hour even greater.
To a player who’s only been around for a month, seeing a 500 gold price tag plus timegated resources plus the cost of levelling that craft in the first place looks truly ridiculous. But once you get used to gold farming at high speeds, it looks more reasonable, and the main problem now becomes the enforced timegate (because skipping the timegate by buying Damask is really, really expensive).
Furthermore, new characters don’t only need to pay for ascended, but also for 500 in the crafting stats; existing high level characters can sell all of the non tier 6 mats they have, and all the food mats… which generates more gold. This also leads to another major difference in perception.
P.S Zudet, you are correct though, in that my viewpoint does not take into account the previous situation. Still, I’d view the reduction in required effort to be a Good Thing, as long as Anet doesn’t magic up another +5% tier, call it Resplendent, and invalidate the entire Ascended tier with that.
However, we’re not talking 500 of each ascended tier resource every 9 days. To achieve the full set in 32 days, you require 1000 for weapons and 1800 for armor, or 2800. 2800/32 is 87.5 of each per day.
That requires only 5 dungeon runs to get for the empyreal crystals. This takes about 2 hours, if you run CoFp1,2 CoEp1,2,3.
Only 5-6 world bosses to get for the dragonite. This takes 1 hour.
To farm enough mats to get 12.5 gold per day… the dungeons already give you about 7 gold after taking into account the tokens that can be converted to ecto. 5.5 more gold at 1 gold/10 minutes takes another hour. This will definitely unlock your daily laurel as well.
And the chests you get from the above will give you double the amount of bloodstone you need. I’ve so much additional bloodstone dust lying around I was happy when Anet finally created Toxic consumables as a way which I can actually use them up with.
To get full ascended everything in 32 days, all you need is a level 80 character in a guild with missions available, and to play 4 hours a day.
To kit out all 8 classes with full asc requires 8 months from this point on. Given not everyone plays for that long, we should be seeing most efficient players having ascendeds on all slots on all characters by new year 2015, assuming current prices persist. And this is through playing alone.
People who know how to work the market have multiple legendaries by now, and wonder what this whole controversy is about. Remember that each legendary costs enough, when sold, to kit 4 characters in full ascended everything.
