Guild Wars 2

As a very casual player I do feel the push of buying gems to exchange for gold to achieve things. I have achieved most of the simpler things and now I am faced with the choice of doing things I don’t like very much or buying things with gold. For example:

Cultural armor – tier 1 and tier 2 are simple enough, tier 3 for all of the races and all three armor types takes more gold than I have ever seen.

Ascended armor – I have managed after years of on and off play (I pre-ordered the main game) to collect enough silk to make 1 piece of the coat and the insignia. Now I am facing 300 bolts of silk and bunch of other cloth and after achieving this I don’t think I will be able to craft any other ascended pieces, because I am sick of trying to get cloth. I would have to buy the materials, which are not cheap.

New HoT stat gear – right, I need for those the insignas from the vendors. Well that’s not so bad, right what else… random drop books. Yeah right, I do not have the patience to run the new zones for that much so if I want those stats, I should go to the trading post. More gold again.

And buying all the materials for my crafting off the trading post just feels wrong for me. I don’t want to buy stuff, I want to put in reasonable effort to get those things myself, but currently the effort I have to put in is not reasonable.

I do think that ANet went a bit wrong with their gem store from the beginning. They should never have made everything buyable with gems, there should have been bunch of cosmetic items that can only be bought with real money and those should have been their main income. Bank, bag and character slots should still be sold for gems, so people could buy them with gold and there should be piles of chest pieces, legs and shoulders sold for real money (additional to the ones in game). I think that there is currently problem with people who are in a way ‘opposite whales’, as in people who have a lot of time to play and who have managed to amass piles of gold and now are converting those into gems. Basically denying ANet any income from them. It might be that the balance between ‘opposite whales’ and ‘whales’ is off right now and as such ANet tries to lessen the overall gold from the system to make ‘opposite whales’ buy gems. But what do I know.

Oh yes, I do have a third choice, not to play the game. Unfortunately that’s what I am doing mostly lately and so I do not feel very inclined to actually give any money to GW2, even if I actually like quite a lot of elements from that game.

tryme.6295:

For crying out loud… you all forget that we don’t have to pay a dime but the initial price! While MMORPGs like WoW pay 15$ every month and they don’t get much more content than us in their expansions. While we will continuously get more and more FREE content + progressive story. Oh and please don’t go with the “but the gem store waa-waa-waa” you can buy gems with gold and its not that expensive.

Nothing is ever free, somebody has to pay. Yes, it is possible to buy the base game and play without paying for anything else, but if everybody did that then there would be no game. It is impossible to pay the wages and server based expenses only from the game sales. So basically the only reason why there is a game and why some people don’t need to pay besides the initial cost is that there are some people who spend way more on the game than they would have done in case of a subscription based payment model.

After spending time in HoT and constantly feeling that I have to buy gold to actually get anything or spend absurd times grinding the maps I do think that the expansion cost way too much for what it offers. I did pay more for HoT normal version than I did for the base game normal version and I pre-ordered both of them. Also, there isn’t even a comparison with other MMO-s, which give more new zones, new skills and rework their basic systems for every expansion. The talent system in WoW has changed with every expansion, if not always for the better, but it has always changed. Not to mention all kinds of other mechanics they add in.

Too much gold in the economy? You could have fooled me I barely manage to have 100 gold and I haven’t even bought all the faction armor skins that I want. It’s kind of silly that some people buy legendaries with 2000 gold and then there are people like me that don’t even dream of ascended gear because of the amount of materials needed and not enough money to buy them.

GW2 is the first MMO where I just can’t make money, farming Silverwastes is something I just can’t do because it after doing it for a few times it loses all the fun.

Hello friendly, helpful and nice forum goers. I recently started doing some pvp and I noticed that while I am generally able to stay alive for quite some time as a bunker guardian, there are occasions when I am almost one-shotted. I am really really curious about the professions and builds that make this possible. I mean, I know that I am a noob so it’s not really that much of a surprise, but really, some players just go through others like a warm knife through a butter and… well.. how?!?

So, what professions, and what builds are capable of one-shotting other players? And what can be done against them?

I am willing to bet that most of the people who are saying “Speak english” in map chat are not english themselves.

Guild ads in native language ok, asking help once, ok, but very often there are long conversations in all kinds of languages in map chat. Why, exactly why do those chats need to be there? And well, frankly if you are going to the most public channel, which most likely everybody is following and then continuing to talk in a language that they don’t understand, thus being impolite towards them, why should they be polite towards you?

Somehow I have managed to mute out the vendor sounds for myself when crafting. In my head that is. I really do like the idle conversations and all the voice, it does make the world seem more alive.

However, “Take heed,… Take heed, I have not taken leave of my senses” My dear lady, you have taken very much leave of your senses as this is the only sentence you say, every few seconds >.<

“More violets, less violence” is also something I have heard quite a lot, but I think the issue with it is that there are lot’s of Sylvari saying that one. It doesn’t bother me to the same extent as the take heed one though.

All I can say about this change is: Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Really, my discovery process is the same as before, but I just don’t have to worry that I don’t have enough room in my bags to chuck in everything from the collectibles (well those suitable for artificing) nor for things I make. Not to mention that I also don’t have to try to remember what I already put into my bags for discovery and what I didn’t, thus actually allowing me to discover new recipes.

A very needed and good improvement.