It use to be a lot cheaper in the earlier days. Earning coin was easier until everything was nerfed.
What you’re seeing is people flushing their gold in exchange for gems so that the exchange rate becomes attractive enough for people to exchange real money for gems.
Nothing used to be cheaper.
The gold used to be more valuable, that’s all.
I use to make a lot of coin in fractals and cursed shore. All that is pretty much gone now. Cursed shore use to have a lot of player activity around the clock; now it’s a ghost town. Fractals use to have 20+ groups under 5 minutes running; now you’re lucky to find 3.
It use to be a lot cheaper in the earlier days. Earning coin was easier until everything was nerfed.
What you’re seeing is people flushing their gold in exchange for gems so that the exchange rate becomes attractive enough for people to exchange real money for gems.
Arena Net wants death to be an experience instead of punishment. This design philosophy is really funny to me.
What they haven’t learnt yet is that punishment is an integral part of the experience. When you lose “something” valuable; you learn a valuable lesson in return.
Only a casual gamer would consider punishment an inconvenience. Something that’s in their way from getting their entitled reward. We have an entire generation of kids growing up without knowing what failure is.
They get medals just for showing up and participating.
Changing armor also changes the geometry of the models in GW2. It’s not a model on top of a model like it was before. I assume this was implemented to avoid clipping issues.
We understood a long time ago that repawn time and map design are what dictates the flow of combat.
In GW2 you have invincibility frames (dodging), powerful attacks that are NOT telegraphed, out of combat health regeneration, out of combat movement speed buffs, downed state and rally mechanics all mixed together in a completely incoherent mess.
It’s basically a PVE ruleset applied to PVP is what it is.
No PVP developer would’ve created these mechanics. There are way too many loop holes and ways to abuse this. The balancing is also a huge factor; let alone pace of game play.
…an item with the exact same attributes cannot be equipped more than once per character. Developers have difficulty when it comes to juggling game balance in PVE and PVP. The people who create items aren’t the same people responsible for balancing. The people who create items are just artists who create cool stuff. People who balance the game have to work with formulas and statistics. So basically the balance guys just add a unique tag to an item and call it balance.
Majority is casual and casual isn’t vocal about anything. I mean anything.
Minority is hardcore and hardcore discuss character builds, game mechanics, lore, and game balance. Hardcores makes community websites, lead guilds and are your commanders in WvW.
If you think we shouldn’t have any health regen increase, then I again point you to older games where you would have to wait to heal. We do not have the type of spamable heals that other games have, so this hastens the wait time to fight again.
There is a small window before it starts, so if you make too many mistakes you will be low on life for a short duration and stay vulnerable to attack and death.
That’s part of the risk of combat.
It seems that out of combat regeneration treats every encounter separately. There is less risk engaging in combat; knowing that I will regenerate back to full if I win.
In the absence of regeneration; engaging in combat comes at a cost. Even if I win I am weakened. If I choose to re-engage with less than 100% health I do so at a greater risk.
I believe when risk is part of design; the experience becomes more intense. The more risk you remove from the game; the more convenient you design your world; the less impact it has on the player and the less memorable the experience becomes.
I still think out of combat health regeneration and movement speed have no place in PVP. Silly convenience PVE features finding their way in PVP in every single MMO. Every single time.
Downed state and rally systems is another example.
I don’t believe for a second that a PVP developer came up with that one.
Every class moves at the same speed in and out of combat. There are traits and skills that effect movement speed but; I’m particularly interested in out of combat movement.
I don’t think the intent was to have the game slow down in combat. I think in combat movement speed is the default speed. Out of combat speed buff is a convenience feature to allow the player to cover distance in shorter time.
Remember when Thieves had out of combat movement speed when entering stealth? Aside from balance issues this caused; think of the massive convenience Thieves had in PVE where they could reset aggro tables and move at super fast speeds just by stealthing.
I wouldn’t disagree that these features provides convenience.
Out of combat health regeneration seems out of place with the existence of a healing ability with infinite use on cool down. Would players not engage if their health was less than 100%? What if the reason their health was less than 100% is because they made too many mistakes?
This ideology behind removing punishment for making mistakes is too convenient. This convenience would probably have a significant pampering effect on players.
I disagree with the idea that the pace of combat is to be controlled. If the pace of combat is to be controlled then there should be no need for different movement speeds. Running faster out of combat is “convenient”; nothing else. It’s interesting too me that this would be the case because what it tells me is that the player wants to “skip” content. In turn the developer facilitates their player base to skip content.
The downside to these mechanics is that while you may be in combat, others may not be in combat, and they are running at full speed. This makes it feels impossible to ever run away if you have one person tagging, then the rest can catch up with ease.
This is probably the biggest gripe I have with this system; in a PVP environment. In a PVE environment I can see NPC’s change their behavior when in or out of combat. Combat systems are probably very deep in the layers of code in an MMO. This probably explains its existence in PVP.
Even in PVE; this “in and out of combat” system makes very little sense to me. NPC’s should be given tools to prevent players from running away if the design intent is to “force” combat.
An invisible force that effects movement speed and health regeneration is hilarious.
I don’t understand the idea behind this design. Seems like a borrowed idea turned into an industry standard.
You could take a ballista shot to the face 3000 yards away for half your health and 1 second later your health goes back up to full in an instant. A mosquito bites you in the face and you start running slower until the mosquito stops chasing you then you start running faster.
This is so weird. Makes no sense to me.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Average people tend to not care much about game design systems. If any of you would like to take a seat and pretend your a game designer for a moment; I’d like to hear your logic.
They are priced at a point where people actually pay for them. So they can’t be overpriced if they sell. Remember, item prices are player set. So if you’d like to try and manipulate the prices down, you’ll have to sell the same item for far less, and hope you have enough supply to offset demand.
It’s overpriced relative to other buffs which are much better.
I’m glad that they decided to drain useless materials from the TP. The increase in value in these materials makes other parts of the game worth playing for the drops.
You have quite a few important and interesting characters in GW2 that you can slowly develop to help change the world. Characters need to be important and memorable. They need to feel emotion. Make us fall in love with them and kill them. Make us hate them for burning a major city.
Please try to step away from the monthly Scooby-Doo villain design.
Building wealth in GW2 is completely useless. You could have a higher PAC MAN score than Joe six pack commodities trader if that makes you sleep better at night.
My consumables and repairs costs are a fraction of my earnings just from playing WvW. The gold and laurels just keep piling up. The numbers have become so large that they’re redundant.
I do feel bad for people who play alt characters though. That laurel grind makes me shiver.
it seems to me people just don’t want to play anymore and yet stick around because they have nothing better to do. If you don’t like the stories and being there watching the world be built. Go play another game.
I will.
Those games are just not out yet. In the meantime I’m going to point out to Arenanet why their stories are for children and how to make them more meaningful. I’m not holding my breath though; MMO developers are notorious for writing terrible dialog and creating very forgettable characters.
I always thought arenanet would crush a player’s income stream. The fact that COF hasn’t been nerfed is surprising to me. There must not be a lot of people farming COF.
Any normal person would go insane if they had to watch the same movie 10 times a day.
Go watch Game of Thrones and ask yourself why that show is watched by over 5 million people.
Because a lot of episodes are basically softcore porn?
Oh, that wasn’t your point.
What planet do you live on? Does anyone have any meaningful relationships on this planet? Does anyone hate each other, fight over land, power and resources? Does anyone ever fall in love?
I suppose not; this game is rated T afterall. More Scooby-Doo villians would suffice.
The characters in the Living Story are dealing with small matters. It’s like being in a boring meeting talking why the stock market dipped 2% yesterday.
Oh really? With the Molten Alliance you don’t think it would have been bad if the Dredge and Flame Legion Charrs became more powerful than they were able to? Countless numbers more of Norn and Charr would have been killed.
What do you mean what if?
How about instead of preventing destruction; we failed to stop it. We fight trying to save what’s left of it and rebuild.
The molten alliance story was like a convenient store robbery. No one cares. No one will care long after it happened.
The characters in the Living Story are dealing with small matters. It’s like being in a boring meeting talking why the stock market dipped 2% yesterday.
Characters that on one cares about will result in a story that no one cares about.
Characters take time to develop. Your audience has to learn to love them or hate them. Their experiences shapes the story and the world. When they die; we will mourn or we will celebrate.
Make your characters important; give us time to love them; then make them stab us in the back. Let these characters change the world so severely that we as players must work together to save what’s left of it.
I don’t know anything about Queen Jenna. She sounds like an important person but; apparently for a Queen she doesn’t do anything worth talking about.
Trying to attract new players to the genre is bad; which was my point.
Player retention is what you need in an MMO. Why? Because those players come from other MMO’s. All these large budget MMO’s that failed couldn’t keep their customers.
Yet WoW had really bad retention, yet was the biggest giant in the genre so far. Doesn’t that tell us that retention doesn’t really matter if enough people are sticking with the game to make the game really popular?
Also at some point a game will encounter his first MMO. Without trying to attract players that never played MMOs the genre will shrink and die. Why? Because old MMO players will die one day, now you’re not trying to attract players that never played an MMO, so new players don’t join and then some people will leave the genre eventually, because not a lot of people have the exact same tastes trough out all of their lives.
The MMO genre in it’s current state will die eventually. Subscription fees, tanks, healers, leveling, gear grinds ect. This kind of stuff appeals to a segment of the market that will keep shrinking over time.
The MMOs that will succeed in bringing new players are the ones that continuously innovate by creating new systems and challenging conventional wisdom.
However neither of that suggests that updates that change the world are bad.
Trying to attract new players to the genre is bad; which was my point.
Player retention is what you need in an MMO. Why? Because those players come from other MMO’s. All these large budget MMO’s that failed couldn’t keep their customers.
What those statistics don’t tell you is that the majority of the new players quit before level 10. Old players (especially in Asia) had free to play MMO’s competing for market share and player retention was extremely difficult. Blizzard is still bleeding heavily in Asia; which is where most of their player base is.
The MMO genre isn’t attractive to new players until some studio takes enormous risk by doing drastic changes. Good luck with that when you’re average MMO project is in the tens of millions and takes about 5 years to build.
Ask Blizzard how their campaign to attract new players went in Cataclysm. Complete failure.
There’s a sizable market of players in the MMO genre and they are getting older. Step away from the childish Disney crap; create challenging content that is repeatable; keep players invested with vanity items and housing and you’ll have you’re own personal gold mine.
They don’t talk much about the Elementalist because there’s nothing to talk about. Look at the Elementalist forums? Do you see any in-depth discussions about builds and hard choices the players are making?
The Elementalist forums are one of the most dead class forums in GW2. The class is good with 1 or 2 specs. There’s nothing to talk bout.
Third phase of Frizz with golems pull and pushes make this dungeon impossible for casual players and you all know it. It’s not fun, challenging, or rewarding. It is downright unfair. Not every has class a good source of stability or condition removal.
Some people take longer to solve problems then others. Giving up because you can’t solve it is the worst decision you can possibly ever make. This type of behavior transcends much farther than gaming or hobbies.
There will always be dispensers in Guild Wars 2 where you can just pop a button and get candy. I find it refreshing that the game is challenging me and daring me to tackle something difficult.
