Guild Wars 2

Honestly I’d rather they introduce a new ‘map’ chat equivalent specifically for them. That way if you want to hear the new players ‘map’ chat, you can enable it, or leave it disabled.

UNO.4906:

gw2 rip, ppl already saying they’re gonna stop helping new players bcuz f2pers come and go like random ppl u see on the street. see what u’ve done to our community anet.

If players are choosing to not help other players it isnt Anet who has done something to the community in this instance.

Where are the ones saying it would be limited?

Mike Obrian talking now. He surely talks like he’s gonna make the game free. pretty sure of it.

And my gut feeling was correct….

Free to play so bad, even with limitations.

Trolls, jerks, spammers, spies, cheapskates, gem>inflation causers…

Influx of this Mike Obrian/Anet. No way to filter it out. Bad decision.

5 years of work thrown in trashban.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

And as a economical analyser: just no. The base game costed 5 years of hard work, and contrary to what some people say it’s content for a basegame is massive (try map completion for one).

There’s the flip side to that as well. In a Buy to Play model, ArenaNet doesn’t need to rely as much on the cash store since they have at least the money players used to buy the game. When going full free to play, ArenaNet will have to rely even more on the cash store, which means they will likely invest even more in the Gem Store and even less in the game itself.

So don’t expect to see new armor sets reliably any time soon. ArenaNet will focus all artists on making outfits for the Gem Store. The same regarding weapon skins. It will become even worse than it already is, and that’s with HoT being released with only 3 new legendaries.

So you want the new players to be fully in the dark with no way to help themand disallow parties for them as well? Risk you must take to make them feel welcome without having a rampant bot problem.

I don’t like bots either, but treating these free accounts [further] like kitten and as second rate citizens and not having any avenues for them to be helped, is just as bad for the health of the game.

Would you like it if I denied you access to a party as your only way to have help? Use your head and put yourselves in their shoes!

gw2 rip, ppl already saying they’re gonna stop helping new players bcuz f2pers come and go like random ppl u see on the street. see what u’ve done to our community anet.

For those afraid of the dark:

? Fear not this night
You will not go astray
Though shadows fall
Still the stars find their way

Awaken from a quiet sleep
Hear the whispering of the wind
Awaken as the silence grows
In the solitude of the night

Darkness spreads through all the land
And your weary eyes open silently
Sunsets have forsaken all
The most far off horizons

Nightmares come when shadows grow
Eyes close and heartbeats slow

Fear not this night
You will not go astray
Though shadows fall
Still the stars find their way

And you can always be strong
Lift your voice with the first light of dawn

Dawn’s just a heartbeat away
Hope’s just a sunrise away

Distant sounds of melodies
Darting through the night to your heart
Auroras, mists, and echoes dance
In the solitude of our life

Pleading, sighing arias
Gently grieving in captive misery
Darkness sings a forlorn song
Yet our hope can still rise up

Nightmares come when shadows roam
Lift your voice, lift your hope

Fear not this night
You will not go astray
Though shadows fall
Still the stars find their way

And though the night sky’s filled with blackness
Fear not, rise up, call out and take my hand

Fear not this night
You will not go astray
Though shadows fall
(Still the stars find their way)

Fear not this night
You will not go astray Though shadows fall
(Still the stars find their way)

And you can always be strong
Lift your voice with the first light of dawn

Dawn’s just a heartbeat away
Hope’s just a sunrise away ?

What’s happening:
When you load into a new map or underwater, your graphics options reverts to “Native”. It will still display Subsample.

How to Fix:
Change your graphics setting to Native, then change it back to Subsample. You’ll need to do this every time you go underwater or load into a new map. If you don’t want to deal with this, just keep your graphics settings on Native.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Ranael.6423:

Uriel.6310:

Im not sure how to feel about this F2P business… the first thing that comes to mind is League of Legends.

Dont get me wrong, its a great game.. but their community of players has to be the worst I have ever seen in online gaming.. Its straight toxic and they have not figured out a way to fix it.

Now Arenanet would like to go the same route? Lol.. man SPVP will be the new grounds for trolls especially with the introduction of leagues. If this goes through we can kiss our good little community goodbye.

I’m sure that this is not what you mean but I don’t see why there should be a correlation between how nice is a community and the amount of money people spent. Such thought could then be derived to say that CE buyers are nicer within the community while the 10 € players are some toxic newbies…. again not saying you said that but just that this would be an easy way to take.

More specifically for League, my experience was the higher rank you were the less toxic people were, even if all players were still F2P. On the other hand I played some PvP game on GW2 were some players were at least as toxic… so no correlation again.
I think the comunity is what the players and the game make it to be. This game and the previous one always had nice people playing for the fun, taking time to dress their barbie, exploring landscape, organising crazy events… there is no reason why more players arriving would end that.

It’s not a statement of “more money spent means they’re better people”
or “more people is bad”

The problem a lot of us have with opening the floodgates that is f2p is that there’s zero barrier to entry. Any troll can pick up an account to troll people, and when he gets banned he can create another free account, and then another, and then another.
Having a small fee to entry means the players are much more likely to honestly be interested in playing the game than just here to troll.

I’ve played a lot of games, many f2p, and there are a lot of people who get their kicks from ruining other peoples experiences.
Met one guy (or girl, who knows) who had decided his goal in the game was to troll people until he got 100 accounts banned. iirc he was on his 14th account when I ran into him.
He (or she) played the game, invested many hours, solely into ruining it for everyone he (or she) could. And while that individual’s goal of 100 banned accounts was an anomaly that mindset is anything but. Trolls abound.
And from the trolls perspective, given the choice between trolling in a free game that costs him nothing if he gets banned, and a game where he has to spend $10-$20 each time, even $10 can be enough to either convince the troll to go elsewhere or to reconsider behavior that might cost him that money.
People tend not to respect what they haven’t paid for in some way, I’ve seen it in nearly every aspect of life. Company laptop? It’s not mine why should I take care of it? Same thing with company cars, rentals, friends stuff, the game is free who cares if I get banned?

That’s why we don’t want F2P, B2P is a small but reasonably effective barrier that keeps a great deal of grief at bay. No it’s not perfect there are still people who would go for getting 100 accounts banned even at $20 bucks each. But there are a lot less of those.
When they get in for free there’s no monetary loss to give a ban teeth.

To exacerbate the problem, the company is hoping these people spend money in the cash shop. Which sometimes leads to GMs being more and more likely to ignore behavior.

More players is a good thing, especially if those players spend money on the gem store and that money goes to fund more content.
But more players isn’t so good when many of them are as I described above, only here to mess around because the game is free.

Ranael.6423:

Uriel.6310:

Im not sure how to feel about this F2P business… the first thing that comes to mind is League of Legends.

Dont get me wrong, its a great game.. but their community of players has to be the worst I have ever seen in online gaming.. Its straight toxic and they have not figured out a way to fix it.

Now Arenanet would like to go the same route? Lol.. man SPVP will be the new grounds for trolls especially with the introduction of leagues. If this goes through we can kiss our good little community goodbye.

I’m sure that this is not what you mean but I don’t see why there should be a correlation between how nice is a community and the amount of money people spent. Such thought could then be derived to say that CE buyers are nicer within the community while the 10 € players are some toxic newbies…. again not saying you said that but just that this would be an easy way to take.

More specifically for League, my experience was the higher rank you were the less toxic people were, even if all players were still F2P. On the other hand I played some PvP game on GW2 were some players were at least as toxic… so no correlation again.
I think the comunity is what the players and the game make it to be. This game and the previous one always had nice people playing for the fun, taking time to dress their barbie, exploring landscape, organising crazy events… there is no reason why more players arriving would end that.

It’s not a statement of “more money spent means they’re better people”
or “more people is bad”

The problem a lot of us have with opening the floodgates that is f2p is that there’s zero barrier to entry. Any troll can pick up an account to troll people, and when he gets banned he can create another free account, and then another, and then another.
Having a small fee to entry means the players are much more likely to honestly be interested in playing the game than just here to troll.

I’ve played a lot of games, many f2p, and there are a lot of people who get their kicks from ruining other peoples experiences.
Met one guy (or girl, who knows) who had decided his goal in the game was to troll people until he got 100 accounts banned. iirc he was on his 14th account when I ran into him.
He (or she) played the game, invested many hours, solely into ruining it for everyone he (or she) could. And while that individual’s goal of 100 banned accounts was an anomaly that mindset is anything but. Trolls abound.
And from the trolls perspective, given the choice between trolling in a free game that costs him nothing if he gets banned, and a game where he has to spend $10-$20 each time, even $10 can be enough to either convince the troll to go elsewhere or to reconsider behavior that might cost him that money.
People tend not to respect what they haven’t paid for in some way, I’ve seen it in nearly every aspect of life. Company laptop? It’s not mine why should I take care of it? Same thing with company cars, rentals, friends stuff, the game is free who cares if I get banned?

That’s why we don’t want F2P, B2P is a small but reasonably effective barrier that keeps a great deal of grief at bay. No it’s not perfect there are still people who would go for getting 100 accounts banned even at $20 bucks each. But there are a lot less of those.
When they get in for free there’s no monetary loss to give a ban teeth.

To exacerbate the problem, the company is hoping these people spend money in the cash shop. Which sometimes leads to GMs being more and more likely to ignore behavior.

More players is a good thing, especially if those players spend money on the gem store and that money goes to fund more content.
But more players isn’t so good when many of them are as I described above, only here to mess around because the game is free.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I think we will see why new accounts are required to activate this after Saturday.

Yep. If we needed early confirmation that F2P is going live Saturday afternoon, I think we’ve gotten it.

I think we will see why new accounts are required to activate this after Saturday.

I have to say I find his justification for not forcing existing accounts to do this plain laughable, the most valuable MMO accounts are LONG STANDING ones with capped characters and lots of in-game resources.

The reason you’re not forcing this on existing players is fear of losing players, like me, who don’t have an need for this extra ‘protection’ and view 2FA simply inconvenient .. having to use it to log into games forums as well as games, as some MMOs do, simply makes it hugely worse.

In my case my mobile has no coverage at my home, that’s not why I have a mobile, so sending me an SMS would simply fail anyway!

I have no problems with people given the OPTION, but if I were forced to I’d simply stop playing, and I suspect you fear many others would do too.

I have only one concern. For a game that made it a selling point to be so different, this seems to turn into yet another generic mmo step by step over the years. We will see i guess. Not sure what to do when we get those mounts though.

Khisanth.2948:

It will depend on how badly things blow up.

Just look at what happen with HoT and the character slot.

Heh, true. They could still make some kinda screwup in this switchover that needs some smoothing over. I just don’t see anything inherently wrong with going F2P that would call for it.

HoT getting that char slot was definitely needed with the offering to new customers. Even that is now changed though, with their “free core game” now seeming to be a baseline for anyone that wants it. I do think it’s an unusual time to do this, after making such a big deal over new players getting the game for free with a HoT purchase.

We went from HoT requiring GW2, to HoT including it, to GW2 just being free to everyone in 8 months time. It was barely two months ago when GW2 was announced as being a bonus to new HoT buyers. And now that’s already changing before HoT is even out. I get the impression that Anet doesn’t really know what they want to do with the core game. It just has a feeling of uncertainty and instability…is there some in-fighting over what to do with the game as a marketable product? (cough Nexon attempting another power grab)

Zalavaaris.5329:

Yea… the trailer wouldn’t advertise all of these max level activities only to limit them to lvl 15. They showed wvw so that also implies that the free players will also gain access to rhat. Guys I don’t think we are looking at a trial here. This looks like full on free to play.

Not necessarily. Hype videos are always full of the exciting things in the game. They aren’t going to show the players dancing to the cows at level 2 or keeping away from the knockdown bunnies in Wayfarers. After all, if that’s not accessible on a free account and they find out that they have to buy the game to access the exciting stuff, what are they going to do? Complain they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Zalavaaris.5329:

Yea… the trailer wouldn’t advertise all of these max level activities only to limit them to lvl 15. They showed wvw so that also implies that the free players will also gain access to rhat. Guys I don’t think we are looking at a trial here. This looks like full on free to play.

Indeed. The datamined stuff is like 1 year old, so this is likely something completly new.

Yea… the trailer wouldn’t advertise all of these max level activities only to limit them to lvl 15. They showed wvw so that also implies that the free players will also gain access to rhat. Guys I don’t think we are looking at a trial here. This looks like full on free to play.

Dhorghar.5249:

The restrictions were datamined by the almighty that_shaman long ago.

Only one or two character slots

Limit of level 15

Seems like a limit on how high a “rank” you can get (specific to trial or possibly PvP related)

Only able to send mail to friends.

Can’t send items or gold through mail

Can’t speak in map chat

Can’t access Team Arenas

Can’t access main WvW maps (EB and Borderlands)

Can’t sell items on TP.

Key phase there is “long ago”. No reason to believe this has anything to do with whatever is planning. And you ignore the sections that clearly use the work “trial”.

So we will have 3 tiers of players now?

1. People who bought HoT.
2. People who didn’t by HoT.
3. F2P accounts.

Didn’t they say they wanted to have less amounts of layers? I guess you can’t buy vanilla gw2 anymore though.

I can only hope it gonna be restricted free to play trial. Started my journey with GW2, because I was tired of F2P games’ community and wanted to try something different. Don’t kitten it ANet..

nehezbegar.1065:

I have never said that in any game forum i played in the past, but….

If GW2 goes full f2p on core game, i am really thinking about quitting the game.

Well i don’t want to take away the money and new players from ArenaNet, but i also don’t want to deal with toxic community. And we ALL know, that f2p games are source of evill and toxic community, thats why i dont play f2p games.

Exactly.
If gw2 goes f2p we can say goodbye to our great community and welcome masses of trolls and gold sellers. If that is true (but I still hope it’s not), then it’s really awful to announce it after so many people bought HoT already.

Agent Noun.7350:

More players = more potential gem sales.

And tons and tons fo problems for exisitng players. I defended ArenaNet when they included free core game with HoT. But this f2p nonsense (if its going full f2p) is not defendable, sorry.

I have never said that in any game forum i played in the past, but….

If GW2 goes full f2p on core game, i am really thinking about quitting the game.

Well i don’t want to take away the money and new players from ArenaNet, but i also don’t want to deal with toxic community. And we ALL know, that f2p games are source of evill and toxic community, thats why i dont play f2p games.

Everything but no f2p for core game pls it will cause only problems, gw2 have a lot of ppl don’t need f2p!!!!!

Not thrilled to hear GW2 core may go F2P. Sigh. Bot/spam incoming, if true. =(

Finally we are going to get raids.

As someone who just came back to the game and bought HoT… these two announcements worry me.

Raids make games super competitive and Raiders have a stigma of being negative towards casual players, which I am one of.

The Core Game being free… well that might mess with the economy, WvW and EotM (the latter where I spend most of my time) and invite even more gold bots and spammers.

I’ll wait before jumping the gun. Because Anet has to have obviously seen these issues coming and taken precautions against them.