Guild Wars 2

Thank you, Anet! I really wanted to buy HoT (even though I suspect it’s overpriced), but I couldn’t in good conscience buy it when it seemed the deal was so awful. Just purchased it now, though.

Edit: Oh, and even though I wasn’t one of them, thank you for doing right by the people who bought the core game based on the FAQ.

ChoChoBo.6503:

Furious.2867:

Unless you are Blizzard, the MMO business isn’t as profitable as you believe. Scammy free download mobile gaming apps make more than large developers

Like how you think that a company that makes an average of 20 million USD quarterly and 80 million USD annually isn’t profitable.

Anet has sold over 3.5 million units, even with their discounts. Selling 3.5 million units = a crap ton of money.

I have no idea what Anet’s finances are like, but just because a company is pulling in a lot of money doesn’t mean it’s profitable. That same company may also be spending a lot of money.

Because we are having to effectively buy the original, from the looks of it. The vanilla game doesn’t seem to be for sale anymore. Going forward, it appears as if Anet is only going to be selling core + HoT, not core on its own. In which case, original + HoT is the core game as of now. This is forcing existing owners to repurchase an entire software package if they want to upgrade, and then not even giving them two useful copies from it. Even Microsoft gives me a better deal than that.

Palindrome.8904:

There really is no free bonus. Here’s a breakdown:

1) You can’t buy vanilla on its own anymore.
2) Heart of Thorns standard edition is the base game now.
3) New players pay $50 for the entire vanilla world and the expansion area.
4) Existing players have to purchase the base game as it stand now to get the expansion.
5) The only people that won’t have access to new features are existing players that are too put off by this inequality of value.
6) Other people purchased the game because the FAQ specifically stated (prior to yesterday) that it would be required for Heart of Thorns. The only solution offered to people in this situation is to request a refund and buy the game again. This results in their current account being terminated (and all progress lost).

Exactly. The base game isn’t free. HoT + vanilla is the new base game. I don’t know why more people aren’t hammering on this point. Everyone who already owns the game, whether they bought it three years ago or three months ago, is being asked to repurchase something they already own. (And those people who bought it three months ago probably did so on the basis of the FAQ, which proved to be false.)

Except it’s actually even worse, because you’re not even really repurchasing vanilla GW2. You’re just paying for it. Unless you’re willing to leave your current account un-upgraded, you don’t actually get a second copy of the game.

I can’t think of any other software I’ve bought that works like this. Most programs I’ve purchased, unless they’re a $10 shareware dealie coded in someone’s basement, don’t make me rebuy the whole thing when I want to upgrade to the latest version. Of those that have made me repurchase, all of them have resulted in me owning two fully usable copies of the software, one upgraded and one not. And, absent major compatibility changes between the two versions, I can use all of my files and work from my original copy on the newer, updated one.

Anet is telling me that I need to repurchase everything and will only end up with either a) one fully upgraded copy or b) one non-upgraded version, and a fully upgraded version that can’t use half the stuff from my original copy. (Oh, and I have to pay $10 more to use one of the new features of the upgrade.)

I’m not upset because I’m a veteran who thinks I’m owed something for that. Anet doesn’t owe me anything for sticking around. I’m upset because this is a raw deal, and it’d be a raw deal if I’d bought the game a week ago. If Anet wants to change things so that it ceases to be such an insultingly poor deal, I’ll happily buy the expansion. As it is, though, I have no intention of paying for something I already own and not even receiving a proper second copy.

I pre-ordered the base game the first day it was available. I waited eagerly for the BWE events, and started playing at midnight on the head start day. And though I’ve had some doubts about the amount of content we’ll be getting in HoT, I still had every intention of buying it. When I saw that HoT was available for pre-order, I rushed over to the page, credit card in hand… then blinked and wandered over to reddit and the forums to see if anyone else was disappointed.

As it stands, I’m not sure I’ll be buying the expansion. I don’t buy that the core game is a freebie. As far as I can tell, Anet isn’t selling it on its own anymore, but only bundled with HoT. This means the no-frills HoT version is the new core game, effectively. You want GW2, you buy the base GW2 + HoT package.

This is fine when it comes to new players, and helps keep the playerbase from fracturing. However, I’ve already bought the core game. I resent being forced to buy something I already own in order to see the new content – and then asked for $10 on top of that for a revenant slot!

Disappointing.

A couple tips from a not-that-great mesmer for when you’re playing a guardian, in addition to what’s already been said:

• If clones or phantasms start running at you, you’re going to get shattered on. Pop a block or dodge or otherwise get out of the way. You can also try popping stability, since a standard shatter tactic is to send in a bunch of clones to daze and interrupt you (which will apply vulnerability to you and possibly damage as well), followed by another shatter for damage. Avoid the daze, avoid the vulnerability, and any subsequent damage shatter will hurt less (if it happens at all).

• If you’re heavily dependent on boons, you’re going to have a harder time. A lot of mesmers can boon strip. If you really need your boons to be effective, it might be better to disengage.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Before this new algorithm, the problem was having no middle-ground intermediate community. It was all elite MMRs going against each other and rabbits/deer having fun being placed on teams together. As soon as they hit around Dolyak, they would quickly become discouraged from being more and more frequently qued again Shark, Phoenix and Dragon play. They would receive a swift boot out from the world of Rabbits & Deer, only to find that there were no intermediate players playing, only older veteran players and this makes them ask themselves “why try? these guys have +3 years of experience on me” and that is exactly why there were no intermediate level ranks/MMRs out there.

I’m not even sure it’s doing a great job of fixing this issue. Maybe it’s just me? I’m not precisely new, but I’m not very good. (To everyone who’s had me on their team: I’m terribly, terribly sorry.*) The thing is, I was doing pretty good in unranked! I wanted to improve, and I wanted more challenge, so I started joining ranked… and promptly got steamrolled. Repeatedly. Like I said, maybe it’s just me being a crummy player and I need more time messing around in unranked, but I feel like the existing system hasn’t done a very good job of handling the transition from beginner to intermediate.

That said, I completely agree that the situation high ranked players are dealing with is unfair. I think all of these issues with the matchmaking system stem from a combination of a) a low population of PvPers and b) a desire to keep queue times down. Personally, I’d rather wait longer if it meant fairer matches, though I think that in the end, the population is the bigger problem.

• Unless you were a jerk.

Could I get an invite, if there’s still room?

6/13 here – Lornar’s Pass didn’t update for me. I’d not done it before, and we’d killed Scarlet, but my achievement didn’t budge. I was not in an overflow, but I did crash partway through the invasion. When I reconnected, I was in an overflow with no invasion, so I joined my party back in my home server. I was probably missing for a couple minutes at most. Otherwise, I was there from beginning to end.

Disappointing – this achievement already relies so much on luck.

I used three gambits – Frailty, Squeamish, and Hamstrung – while fighting Dunwell. I’d never used gambits on a tier 3 opponent before, and had none of the achievements related to that. When I finally beat him, I got Humble Victor and Triple Threat, as expected, but not Risk Taker. I now have the achievements for beating a tier 3 enemy with three gambits, and with two particular gambits, but not with one gambit. Is this intended?

Fix the downscaling, for one. This isn’t the only thing they need to do, but it’s probably the easiest in terms of effort vs. reward. (Not to say that the effort would be small, but there’s a huge amount of payoff.) Right now, there aren’t many reasons to go back to lower level zones – i.e., the vast majority of the game. The karma rewards (IIRC) aren’t quite as good, and I’m guessing the money rewards aren’t either; half the loot I get is level appropriate for the zone, not me; and things die too easily. Make the rest of the game as profitable and challenging as Orr, and suddenly there’s a lot more endgame.

Yes, we need other things, too, but this is one way to dramatically expand the content available to level 80s without having to create a bunch of new content for level 80s.

Count me in as another voice that’s very, very disappointed in this. I’ve sunk about $40 into the cash shop since release, and I doubt I’ll be spending any more after this.

I don’t care that the stat differences between ascended and exotics are small – those differences shouldn’t be there at all, and if Anet had stuck to the manifesto they’d been touting for years, they wouldn’t be. It’s a troubling development on its own, and even moreso because it’s the kind of thing Anet said they wouldn’t do.

The implementation for infusion is also making me uneasy. It was a perfectly fine mechanic in GW1 – but in GW1, you did a mission or found an out of the way NPC, and bam, all the armor you were currently wearing was infused. That was it. There was no fussing around with crafting materials, new pieces of armor, or new upgrade slots, and infusion didn’t improve armor stats (all it did was afford you protection against one particular monster skill from one particular monster). Furthermore, after Prophecies, lack of infusion didn’t keep you out of the endgame (War in Krytra excluded). There was a whole lot of content – difficult content – that you could complete without touching infusion. Here… well, I’d like to say I expect the mystic forge recipes to not require grinding for components, the new armor pieces to not require fine transmutation stones, and infusion to not gate off substantial amounts of endgame content from here on out, but I don’t have faith that none of those things will happen. Maybe if Anet had stuck to their word, I’d have more trust in them.

Chris.7653:

Besides this is something that is in EVERY mmo, at least here it doesn’t scale with every respec, just with how many trait points you have.

As pointed out earlier, the original Guild Wars didn’t have this. Besides, wasn’t part of the idea of GW2 that it not be like other MMOs?

Chris.7653:

There is so much more for them to focus on, and to me this seems very petty.

For those of us that enjoy mixing up our builds, it’s not petty at all. Guild Wars 1 had literally hundreds of skills, a variety of attributes, and the ability to switch between them quite freely (at least after the initial period of making respecs cost). Creating different builds was part of the game; while it was optional, it was expected that players would do it, and the game design encouraged it.

And then Anet went and basically removed that aspect of the game from the sequel. So no, it’s not minor.

I agree with the general gist of the original post.

I don’t have much of a problem with respeccing’s current cost in coin – even at 80, it’s only 3.5 silver. That’s a little over the cost of repairing two damaged pieces of armor (it’s 1.6 silver for one at 80, I think?), and equal to some waypoint costs, so it’s in line with the other goldsinks in the game. I think a bigger issue is the other costs, in time and energy. You have to haul yourself to a profession trainer, and there aren’t many of those in the world. It should be as easy to switch your trait points as it is to repair your armor.

Yes, yes, you can go into the Mists and test. But that’s not the same as actually going out and playing PVE – and even if it was, I know testing isn’t the primary reason I want easier respecs. I like changing up my build and trying new things. One of the things I loved about the original GW was how easy it was to alter your build and playstyle. You could change everything but your primary profession in an outpost, for free, and the vast majority of zones connected directly to an outpost. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right places, but I’ve literally not seen anyone say that it hurt the game or made the professions less distinct. On the contrary, I personally found that it made the game more enjoyable, and kept it from getting stale. I feel that moving away from this idea in GW2 was a mistake.

runeblade.7514:

Do you want to test your builds? Use the Heart of the mist zone, you can freely experiment anything.

Clearly, they want you to stick with that build instead of respeccing every single minute.

As has been pointed out, testing in the Heart of the Mists isn’t the same as playing PvE.

Additionally, I think pushing us to stick with one build is a mistake. I find it fun to mix things up and try something different (not to mention the fact that I’d really like to be able to swap to a more support oriented build for dungeons). For a game that usually tries to remove impediments to fun by breaking MMO conventions, making it so hard to respec seems out of place. I don’t see any particular upsides to locking us into one build like this, particularly since GW1 had incredibly easy respeccing and I’m not aware of it causing issues.

One of the things I loved about the original GW was how easy it was to experiment with different playstyles. For those of you that didn’t play the original, you had attributes (sort of like trait lines) that you could change, for free, in any outpost. The vast majority of zones were connected to outposts, and you were always moved to an outpost when you disconnected. You could even easily save builds and swap between them. My main was usually a hexes necro, but if I wanted to do something different for fun or to handle a particular challenge, I could do that easily. Did I feel like minion mastering that day? Is a condition heavy build a better way to succeed in this zone? No problem, just change my attributes before heading out. I found that it added a lot of longevity to the game for me, because the experimentation was fun, and it was easy to switch to another playstyle if I got bored.

In GW2, though, I can’t do that, and it’s a major disappointment. While I can fiddle with the individual traits I’ve chosen, trying out a completely new build requires hauling myself to one of the few locations with trainers (paying in either time or coin), talking to the trainer and paying, then hauling myself back to where I intended to play (again, paying in either time or coin). Furthermore, there’s no way in game to save my previous build, should I want to swap back to it later. You might say that remembering one build shouldn’t be a problem, but what if it’s been a while? Furthermore, this makes it much more difficult to try out multiple builds. Keeping one build in your head is different from keeping four.

While I wish that we could respec for free whenever we’re out of combat, it seems that ANet doesn’t want to go that route. So here are my suggestions, keeping that in mind:

• More profession trainers. Changing my trait point allocation should be as easy as repairing my armor: a small trek is usually required, I pay my coin, and that’s it. Stick profession trainers near most or all of the armor repair NPCs (except perhaps the ones in dungeons, if you don’t want people changing builds mid-dungeon), and it would go a long way towards making the game respec friendly.

• Allow builds to be saved and easily retrieved, much like in GW1, where you could load them with just a click. Swapping to a build that simply has different traits should be something that can be done for free at any time (like it is now), while accessing builds with different trait point allocations should require visiting a trainer.

I know GW1 was originally much less respec friendly at the beginning, so I’m very much hoping this game goes the same route.

Wild suggestion that I just have to share: when we get guild halls, I’d love for one of them to be an aloft airship. I just finished Arah story mode, and it was so pretty up in the sky. C’mon, it’d be awesome.