Guild Wars 2

I purchased the base game back at launch.

I was pretty put off that I had to buy bank tabs and that there is no way to expand that in game.

Now, im looking back into the game. What realistic cost is involved in playing?

I know ill have to buy the xpac’s but what else?

Does it cost money to play the living story?
How much have you spent on bank tab?
Is there anything else I will need to buy?

Thanks

You don’t have to buy gems with real money if you don’t want to. You can always farm gold in game and then convert to gems. If you haven’t logged in this entire time, then yes you will need to use gems to unlock the past Living Stories (not including Season 1, which is not available). The biggest QoL things to get are the bank tabs and bag slots. Shared inventory slots are nice too.

Azuset.5804:

I purchased the base game back at launch.

I was pretty put off that I had to buy bank tabs and that there is no way to expand that in game.

Now, im looking back into the game. What realistic cost is involved in playing?

I know ill have to buy the xpac’s but what else?

Does it cost money to play the living story?
How much have you spent on bank tab?
Is there anything else I will need to buy?

Thanks

Five years of play most have spent about $200-500 total for that time in gear that makes sense that you buy one time and then never again.

Five years of WoW on the other hand is and was and will be without any ‘gem store purchases’ over $900.

You make choices when you play games – the company makes money on expansions to create the next chapter/ex-pac/updates.

Until a game beats its model, I am here. Only game I play and Anet knows it.

How many bank tabs do you think will do for a lvl 80 character?

xarallei.4279:

You don’t have to buy gems with real money if you don’t want to. You can always farm gold in game and then convert to gems. If you haven’t logged in this entire time, then yes you will need to use gems to unlock the past Living Stories (not including Season 1, which is not available). The biggest QoL things to get are the bank tabs and bag slots. Shared inventory slots are nice too.

This is so true but not very well known.

Making gold may take a while to get rolling but once it is, you can do the game without money except for the expansions.

Azuset.5804:

How many bank tabs do you think will do for a lvl 80 character?

I have 3 tabs, I think it originally comes with 1?

I’m finding it really cramped, will need to get another or two more :/

@atheria Im not opposed to supporting games.

I actually hate the F2P model and micro transactions. I would just rather pay for a quality game.

Having all that said… at the time I dropped $50 (or whatever it was) on the game just to find out I will probably be spending another $30-$40 just to have inventory space……. That is not really F2P and a HUGE part of the game. Micro-transactions, at the time, had the cosmetic only theme for most games.

I have 12, I believe, Bank Tabs, and spent not one cent on any. That’s the great thing about this game; anything offered in the Gem Store can be acquired through just playing the game (Gold-to-Gems exchange).

It costs nothing to play this game, other than purchasing expansions (even Living World Seasons are free when live, purchased with Gems when not).

Some players with L80 characters get by with1 or 2 Bank Tabs, some prefer the max. It’s really up to you and your inventory management. (There are other ways to store items than the Bank.)

Good luck.

Azuset.5804:

How many bank tabs do you think will do for a lvl 80 character?

1 tab works fine for me.

Do you know about the material storage?

Kalk.5143:

Azuset.5804:

How many bank tabs do you think will do for a lvl 80 character?

1 tab works fine for me.

Do you know about the material storage?

Yup I do.

Got 8 bank tabs and 3 maxed out bank tab guilds for my hoarding needs.

I’m a hoarder so I maxed out all the bank tabs. Hell, I would buy more if I could. lol. I also have a personal guild that I use for extra bank space (have it maxed for all the bank space available).

If you aren’t a terrible hoarder then chances are the few bank tabs will be fine. Plus there is materials storage which helps a lot.

Inventory expansion potentially costs nothing, you can do it with gold in game via gem conversion. To be honest, unless you are a compulsive hoarder like me, it’s a non-issue. You can easily get by without buying any extra space at all. I reckon 90% of what is in my bank with nearly maxed out tabs is never used by me.

Material storage is more useful though. Not essential, but def a QoL upgrade.

There is nothing you need to buy beyond Story episodes which I would say are worth spending money on even though you can use gold-gems.

How much money does an average 80 have/make?

Azuset.5804:

How much money does an average 80 have/make?

Average? Couple of hundred. Maybe one thousand gold at most.

But if you really go at it and play this game “hardcore” you can easily make thousands of gold in a matter of weeks. Nothing crazy like WoW though. 1 gold is still actually worth something in GW2.

You don’t “need” more bank tabs or more bag slots – want and need are two entirely different things. I’ve played since pre-order launch, so I’ve bought the standard edition of GW2, then standard edition of HoT, and will get standard edition of PoF. So I’ll have spent something like $120 to get all of them and play all this time. I bought an extra bag slot with gold > gems in game.

After purchasing the base game and any expansions you want (it sounds like the expansions are each stand-alone (at least so far), and don’t require the previous expansion to play the latest one). For instance, it sounds like you can purchase Path of Fire and not have Heart of Thorns and play just fine like that (though you will be missing the HoT content, and I believe you won’t have access to Living World Season 3).

Now, as far as how much it costs to get in to the game… Well, short of purchasing the base game, and HoT (when it first went on sale to $25, as I thought that was a fair price for the amount of content), I haven’t spent anything else. I have picked up a couple of extra bank tabs, but those were funded totally through in-game achievements (getting 2K gems for a major achievement chest, I believe) – so I haven’t even worried about converting my gold to gems.

Honestly, I find the largest cost I sink in to games being the computers I run them on. I like the graphics to be high/ maxed if I can afford it

Now, as far as how much money an average max-level character makes. I am currently sitting at 500+ gold in my wallet, with the ability (if I am playing a night and TP all my rares/ exotics, and any excess materials I get) to make around 15-20 gold in a night of play (once the items sell from the TP), and this is all with undercutting the other people selling the same items to help ensure they sell quickly.

I’m a hoarder with 9 lvl 80s, and currently have 3 bank tabs (you start with one, I believe) plus a personal guild bank (but I don’t think that’s very easy to get anymore?), a few shared inventory spaces, permanent salvages, and permanent harvesting tools. Of those, bank space is probably the thing you’ll need most, especially if you’re going to go after legendaries or other things that require a bunch of mats/account bound things. You can also buy expansions for your material storage, which might be handy. The other things I listed are pretty much just conveniences, and like I said, I got along fine without any of them for a while. I haven’t bought any inventory expansions because my main has all 20 slot bags (there’s collection items to get the bags cheaper than buying or crafting, if I remember correctly) and I regularly spend a couple minutes emptying them out so space there is rarely a problem. I don’t switch gear/builds as often as other people do, though, so I don’t need to carry a whole lot of equipment at once.

As far as making money-there’s a bunch of ways to do that. I’ve made a few runs through HoT metas, salvaged the loot, sold the materials and made 20+ gold in maybe 3 hours. You can make more doing fractals, and farming various materials (leather, wood, metal, blood, flax) can make pretty good money too, but personally I enjoy the Auric Basin and Dragon’s Stand metas more.

A lot of things moved into collections tabs over the years – most of my bank tabs filled up with stuff like ‘x bonus XP for y time" consumables, or ’boost one character by x levels’ items – that I avoid throwing away “just in case” I remake a character for some random reason…

That said, I’ve not been playing this game since about 3 months after Heart of Thorns launched… “might” come back with the new expansion finally giving us Elona back (Nightfall was what kept me going during Guild Wars 1)…

As noted, you can fund stuff by converting gold to gems. There are some pretty active podcasters over in WoW by the way that haven’t paid their WoW subs in a year or more because they gold farm and then buy tokens for a sub…

You “can” play a lot of these MMOs free now… it’s just more convenient to put some cash into it.

Consider the argument that finally convinced me an MMO sub was not a waste of money back in 2005… A movie ticket back then was about $8-10 bucks. Add in the popcorn and drinks and you’d bust past $16-20. An MMO sub was about $15.

So for the same price I could spend 90 minutes watching a badly made Hollywood flick and eat unhealthy snacks…

Or spend as many hours as I wanted playing an interactive game with people.

The costs made a lot of sense put that way.

And the MMO is even cheaper these days…

About tree fiddy.

At current gold → gem exchange rates, it costs 150-160g to get a bank expansion slot. There are plenty of guides that teach you how to make gold… that amount won’t take too long. When PoF goes live, there’s likely to be good opportunities to make even more… guild hall related mats were a nice money maker when HoT initially went live.