Guild Wars 2

Yes, you have to pay to have duels in peace. Yes, that is seriously kittened up. It’s like they saw the decaying state of sPvP and thought “You know what we could do to fix this? Lets charge them.” So many things are needed to help the sPvP scene, adding a cost barrier is not one of them. Of course, now if you want to duel or deathmatch or whatever you can kinda do that, if you pay for the right.

Oh my god, if ArenaNet made Custom servers free there would be 10,000 spam servers all of a sudden? That’s kitten there’s barely enough PvPers to fill up 30 servers in the first place. Where are all these mysterious custom server spammers coming from?

To all you kitten acting like people just want something for free, lick the hairiest part of my kitten Everyone here already paid at least $60. ArenaNet themselves said pre-release they wanted the game to be funded by regular expansions and the original box fee. There are something like 200 empty servers at any given time anyway, and now you have to pay to use them (and the right to tweak minor attributes). I understand that money rules all, but seriously just think for a second. Nobody is playing this game for free.

I’m trying to be excited by this, but I just see so much that makes me weary in it. The cost being the big thing. Maybe it will be cheap, which is cool, but now there’s a huge reason to not bother developing things like duels for the community because “They can be done in Custom Arena’s, pay us and do it there.” As far as I can tell Anet has been pretty quiet about the price of rentals, I’ll be very surprised if it’s less than 1600 gems.

It’s just strange to me that the most important thing to develop for sPvP was something to pad the pockets. PvP players don’t get the chance to make any gold, so more often than not it will have to be cash money to gems. Meanwhile, Paid Tournaments suffered a terrible death because the state of PvP is too abysmal to warrant spending real world cash on. This will be different? Maybe… but either way, it makes me very nervous.

It just seems like a move to monetize PvP rather than improve it.

I definitely play less now, though I’m far from stopping altogether. My biggest reason for dimished playtime is the fact that I got Halo 4 and Assassin’s Creed III last week, though really that’s not all. I was really rocking it before the FotM/Ascended fiasco, but ever since that patch I feel the game is headed down a path I’m not prepared for. There were so many things that could have been improved upon, expanded, implemented, or outright fixed, but all the effort went toward adding in a gear grind to appease the “Hardcore” whiner group of players. An infinite dungeon is clever and all, but grinding it over and over and over for a few pieces of marginally better gear… endlessly, to infinity even, is just too much.

All of a sudden I’m getting left behind for taking a day or two off, I can’t find a group for anything else I want to do (Still two runs away from that TA staff I wanted so bad), PvP is a ghost-town and I can’t get a decent tourny group together to save my life. It’s not the ascended gear itself that bothers me, it’s the effect it had on the community. It’s the fact that everything else became completely obsolete because of terrible drops and terrible gear, it’s left me with little to do when I log in. I can either PvP, WvW, or run FotM if I’m not leveling another alt. Even when I do decide to run a FotM, it’s rarely on my level (I’m sitting on about 150 tokens and only level 3), the community has become split to INFINITE proportions.

And the LA spam is only getting worse…

I’ve had some great times in WvW this week. Mad props to both Fergies and Kains on being great opponents. We’ve had some pretty gnarly zergs completely wiped out by great defenses and a whole lot of “wtf just happened.” I’d like to share a couple of my favorite moments in the last couple days.

A little Asuran Thief (I think Kain, though he could of been a Fergie) harassing our zerg like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It was incredibly frustrating, but man did he pull it off like a champ. He’d appear, down someone, and bounce. Recovered from multiple stuns and immobilizes just to slip away and come back minutes later to repeat the same action. At first it was just a nuisance, but over the course of a half hour or so it really started to take its toll. Eventually, we were just outside a tower and were killing that Champion grub, and still this thief was relentless. Other enemy players came and went, most died, but not this little guy, you could only even see him when he was mid-gank. At some point during this fight that thief managed to pull 5-10 of us away from the zerg, still harassing, still impossible to catch or kill. And then for some reason we see him over the hill, staring at us. At this point, we wanted him dead. Beyond dead, we wanted to kill him so hard his toon un-leveled all the way to level 1 – I’m pretty sure he knew this, we advanced on him hard. As soon as we give chase he turns and runs, not stealthing this time mind you, and leads a good half of our force right into a large group of invaders across the bridge, right in front of another tower. We were decimated, our forces didn’t have the strength to take either of the towers (though we did take out the grub eventually), and it was all due to the efforts of one incredibly annoying Asuran Thief. Props to you, nameless invader.

The second story happened last night, and it was a moment of personal pride and fail all in one. Our zerg just stopped an assault on Durios, and recapped the Umberglade Supply Camp just east of it. All but myself left the supply camp, and I stuck around to try and fortify the camp with a Ballista that had just dropped off the Guild Supervisor. I drop it next to the supply and start building on my own. It was around 60% complete when I look up and see a horde of Kains looking at me menacingly. I keep building, but it doesn’t take long for the first Kain to charge in (naked with a greatsword, I might add) and start attacking my precious ballista. It’s about this moment when all hell breaks loose, it’s just me, a few NPC guards and a half-built ballista verses 10-15 Kains hell bent on wrecking my face. I’m going in and out of DS like a boss, I see someone fall and manage to pull off an execution, trying my best to fear people off my ballista and still try to build it all at the same time. I knew if I could get it up I could rain down at least some death, and I wasn’t about to give up that mission. The next kain falls right at the feet of the ballista, and someone was already trying to rez, so I fearbomb and execute. I know I won’t survive much longer, but the fight goes on. Finally I see a third down, try my best to get the execute but fall short and get put down myself. I’m promptly executed and swarmed, only to see my precious ballista destroyed before it could ever be born, as I lay lifeless on the ground. So while I held out longer than expected, I ultimately failed horribly, but for a few amazingly glorious minutes I soloed a Kaineng Zerg.