Guild Wars 2

I would probably go with what I have for my main: a charr engineer.

The sheer physical strength of the charr would go a long way to ensuring survival in the brutal world of Tyria, although I would likely spend most of my time building things and showing the Charr and Asura what can be done with the technology they have (i.e. ranged weapons that can shoot more than 50 feet, vehicles, etc).

Then I would work to get all the warriors of the various races to coordinate (seriously, if an epic final world boss can be defeated by 100 or so players with the pitifully short ranged weapons currently in the game, imagine what could be accomplished by several thousand soldiers with modern weaponry, possibly imbued with magic for those foes that are supposedly immune to physical damage).

Once the various issues with the world are sorted out (wiped out undead, dredge, centaurs, branded, etc), I would try to coordinate with others to rebuild Tyria and upgrade the infrastructure to be more in line with modern standards and try to usher in a golden age for Tyria.

Or the races could get bored and decide to start fighting each other since there aren’t external threats to unify them anymore, in which case I would build my own airship and head for parts unknown and explore the rest of the world.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

I hadn’t realized that there was a crafting inventory and a button to automatically deposit crafting materials and that the different bags had different sorting purposes (or if I did, I’ve forgotten these things since I haven’t been on in awhile). I’ll take a closer look at those and it should help some.

Hoarding is an issue I tend to have with RPGs (I’m spoiled by my bottomless chests in Skyrim), I like the observation that holding onto items for other characters tends to be a waste of time, that way I can just salvage everything that isn’t useful for my current character. I’ll probably just sell the materials, crafting takes a lot of time and is a money sink since everyone else is wanting to craft so raw materials fetch a premium on the trading post, while most crafted items are basically worthless since the market’s flooded with them. The extra gold will also help with bags and eventually gems.

I hadn’t realized that the PvP lobby could be exploited like that to get vendor/bank access from anywhere, or that I could always access the trading post, thanks for the tips.

Thanks for the responses, my biggest issue is with the time it takes to sort everything and figure out what’s worth keeping and what isn’t. The relatively tiny inventories exacerbate the problem by forcing me to deal with it more or less constantly.

I don’t have a tremendous amount of time to play the game to farm gold or any endgame characters (my highest is somewhere in the 60s) so the higher level bags and especially gems are still quite expensive from my perspective.

I’ve used the alt bank method before in WoW, that’s great for rarely used items but gets annoying switching back and forth all the time.

For the time being I’ll probably take a break from crafting on all my characters and just sell all the crafting materials I come across, it should help keep my bank less full and provide a nice income to start buying the higher tier bags.

If we want ArenaNet to potentially do something about this, does anyone have any suggestions for improvements to the system? A few things I can think of right away are providing a crafting materials storage tab for the bank that’s treated separately and has unlimited (or at least very high) storage along with a special inbox for things like gift packages so you can put them there until you’re ready to deal with them instead of logging in and having to immediately free up a slot to even receive the package. The ability to see your alternate characters and their inventories from the bank would also be useful so I can know at a glance whether an item is worth keeping or scrapping instead of having to either just dump it in the bank or log into my other characters to see if it’s an upgrade for them or not. A combined bank/trading post/vendor would also be nice so I don’t have to run back and forth between them when dealing with things.

One of the biggest things that annoys me with MMOs (and rpgs in general) is how much time is wasted on inventory management. Unfortunately, this game is no different than many others and has fallen into the same tired and annoying routine of having to hunt for vendors to sell stacks of junk and frequently travel back to cities to transfer items to the bank which fills up far too quickly so you have to spend even more time sorting that, and ArenaNet’s solution is to buy more bank/bag slots with gems.

I get that since this game doesn’t have monthly subscriptions that there is a need for microtransactions, but these are not cosmetic things, sure technically you can just dump all your items and only keep direct upgrades and live with a tiny inventory, but realistically if you’re doing any sort of crafting you’re going to run out of space very quickly and having to spend more real money to get more storage just feels like a cheap shot cash grab, like they intentionally gave you a tiny inventory so you would basically be forced to spend more money.

I bought this game when it first came out, excited to hear all the new things promised but was disappointed to see that this broken system was chosen instead of trying to rethink it. After awhile, I simply stopped playing, in large part due to the extremely high down time involved in inventory management making the game tedious to play.

Recently I started playing again and got spammed with a ton of gift items, which is nice, except for the fact that my inventory is full so I had to spend a bunch of time sorting that out to even be able to resume playing. Not a good impression for someone looking to potentially get back into the game.

Am I the only one feeling this frustration? Are there any good tips on inventory management that doesn’t involve spending gems?