Guild Wars 2

DarkFrost.2847:

Belle, I do run Necro MM zergs on HoD. I’ve sent them against your server at least once.

I would LOVE to see this … too bad I can’t get online this week (I’m on NSP).

As for the OP… I always focus MMs when I see them in WvW .. because they’re pretty much guaranteed to be PvEers.

JaNordy.6149:

So just post matchup threads in General WvW. What are they gonna do? Ban their entire user base?

They’ll just delete the threads. One quick look at the thread title and OP will tell them whether it’s matchup-related. If so, they’ll delete. Super easy for their moderation team.

… great job! Nice and simple, no clutter, easy to read and easy on the eyes. IMO the best looking forum I’ve used on the web.

Lorelei.3918:

Simple question.

If they do, then why do they state that they don’t care about class balance. Isn’t class balance critical to a enjoyable pvp game mode?

Secondly, if they care about WvW, why doesn’t anet make WvW as rewarding as PvE for the time spent playing it?

Try to keep your answers short and simple, so a person could quickly parse the entire thread and get a feel for every ones feelings on this. TL:DR; no walls of txt, plx

• Anet doesn’t feel like it’s possible to balance WvW, so they don’t bother to try.
• But more importantly, Anet insists that (the failed) sPvP should be the primary PvP game mode of GW2 and thus puts 100% of their balancing efforts into sPvP.

zarathru.3184:

Neither of us are winning this war, we are currently being obliterated by hedge of denarvi, I am willing to make a truce until all servers are even, work together as one to even the tide of battle. If interested please message back.

This is how WvW should be played, with #2 and #3 double-teaming #1 (without people even having to make formal deals).

Unfortunately the way ranks are determined, the incentive is to maximize your own PPT by stealing as many PPT from server #3 as possible.

Atharsia.3249:

Good call.

Whoever calls this censorship must remember that the so-called freedom of speech is not a “I can say whatever I want, however I want and whenever I want” right, it has boundaries and that sub-forum was clearly trespassing most of them.

(As most forums, but this is an official gateway for Anet too, and having that sub-forum was hurting their image more than helping it. Just deal with it, and take the circlejerks elsewhere, its that simple)

We’re not debating whether it is within Anet’s rights to shut down the forum. There’s no freedom of speech and Anet may censor and shut down whatever forum they wish — these forums belong to them.

However, we’re asking whether shutting down these forums is a good idea on Anet’s part.

IMO it’ll hurt Anet’s own interest if they push people to go elsewhere for their forum needs since Anet has far less control over outside forums.

Huge mistake that actually hurts Anet. People will likely go elsewhere (e.g. revive the almost completely dead guildwars2guru) for their foruming needs … that means a space that Anet’s censors can’t control.

Now Anet may not care too much about the small (relative to PvE) population of WvW players, but this could lead PvE players going outside of these forums as well. Considering how much censorship we see in the official forums — censorship that will not be as possible outside of the official site — this may end up as a negative for Anet.

This is a good opportunity for an outside site to attract some traffic and make some advertising money.

Sunshine.5014:

Before the pvp reward patch, you earn on average 150 glory for each pvp match win (and much less if you lose). If you play extremely well, you can get 250 glory.

Your 2 million glory = 8000 matches win. Which is 2000 hours played if you just win all the match you played. 2000 hours for 1500 gold? I say pve players get more rewards than that.

Too much entitlement.

Not if you skyhammer glory farmed.

Obtena.7952:

This thread is like a timewarp to when RPG were on disks and C64. Don’t like something? Edit the hex code.

Hex code editing… ah… the good old days!

Several servers have temple zergs at reset. Join in, AFK for the pre-events and most of the final event, hit 1 a few times at the end to get your dragonite.

That’s what I do. I feel a bit bad about it when there are queues for the zone because I’m almost certainly taking the spot of someone who enjoys this type of content more than I — but it’s the only way to get dragonite in a reasonable amount of time if you’re a WvW player.

Osi.3504:

Lord Kuru.3685:

azizul.8469:

ascended gear was added to the game simply to rectify ANET’s own mistake in estimating how long the players could get the exotics, which turns out to be very fast….

so yeah, it’s their mistake; we had to grind…

It’s amazing that people still believe that lie by Anet. Please refer to the (now infamous) quote by Colin Johnson about expecting people to reach BiS gear by the time they reach level 80.

The game was rushed out the door… they already intended to have ascended gear in the game clearly because if you look at the release date, and look at when fractals came out, there was no way in hell they created the gear in the short period of time.

Please quit fooling yourselves and looking for the negative that doesn’t exist. Guild Wars 2 wasn’t even finished upon release, and sPvP is a good view of that.

They likely had fractals under development but shoehorned Ascended in when they decided to do a 180 on the gear grind. Again, refer to the infamous quote.

Anet simply got greedy when the game sold more than expected and panicked when those who were not their target audience started complaining about the lack of grind. So now we have a game that was developed to be one thing, but supported after release to be something else — making the whole thing a big mess that satisfies no one.

azizul.8469:

ascended gear was added to the game simply to rectify ANET’s own mistake in estimating how long the players could get the exotics, which turns out to be very fast….

so yeah, it’s their mistake; we had to grind…

It’s amazing that people still believe that lie by Anet. Please refer to the (now infamous) quote by Colin Johnson about expecting people to reach BiS gear by the time they reach level 80.

BobTurkey.8915:

Nice fight the 2nd one. Mesmer doing the video is ugly as sin, but nice work.

No way… Bamf’s outfit is AWESOME! More vids pls, Bamf.

Behellagh.1468:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I had no idea that coding an MMO was as easy as simply switching out a few scripts.

For something like wiping your story progress to zero, it absolutely should be that easy…

Unless you have very poor programming practices … which is unfortunately, possible — witness Anet’s inability to match skill descriptions with their actual functionality; for example the slayer potions bug where you take x% more damage from the listed foe instead of x% less.

Trust me, you don’t want programmers to write the descriptions. That’s what the tech writers are for.

What I meant was that there should be code that automatically gives the appropriate data to the description. So the tech writer would write the description while the actual numbers (e.g. “weakness: 3 seconds,” or “apply burning every 4 attacks”) would be plugged in automatically as a variable (the “3” and “4”).

I’m not sure if it’s as much of an issue right now, but a while back, we’d have lots of these numbers not updated when the skill was changed — implying they were inputted by hand!

Fuzzion.2504:

You kitten ed fire? What witchcraft is this!

no witchcraft: STD.

The game is a bit too TP-centric. The best way to get almost every item is to buy it off the TP. This pushes people to play the content that returns the most gold per hour. So everyone is doing the same couple things that are known to return good amounts of gold. The game becomes more like real life than an adventure — you do tedious work in order to buy the stuff you want.

It’s kind of cliche, but it really is the journey, not the destination and with this playstyle, the journey is not fun. (There was a recent thread about infusing gear from GW1, where you had to kill a beast and bring its remains to a witch who would use the carcass to infuse your armor. People still remember this. In a couple years, will you remember doing hours of champ farming in order to buy your infusions?)

Voodoo.2107:

Oops, didn’t notice the other posts. Yeah I’m in the NA region! Thanks for the welcome anyways!!
BlackGate is the one I was planning on seeing the stats of current WvWvW on an external website. lel

LOL, just started the game and already bandwagoning to the top.

wolfpaq.7354:

the 2 vote system is idiotic. Almost as idiotic as the group leader logging out and immediately removing everyone from the dungeon & resetting it. Two of the many design flaws that have persisted for an entire year without being addressed.

The funny thing is that because both these flaws exist, you can use the leader-log-out flaw to prevent yourself from being kicked by the “2-vote-kick” flaw.

frifox.5283:

Nobody has to be an instance owner. If you’re worrying about cutscenes, show everyone their own char in it. If you need a unique ID for the instance, ID is the the timestamp of the instance it was created salt hashed with the ID of the instance opener. Refer to the instance by it’s unique ID, not by the ID who created it. If two instances are party-merged, the one that initiated the merge is the one getting destroyed BUT do show a warning that if you merge your current instance will be done. What’s so hard about this?

Someone must have been ignoring the basics when creating the db for managing the parties…

It seems to me the reasoning behind the kick is to prevent people from ferrying those who haven’t finished the prerequisites into dungeons/instances.

A partial solution would be to hand off ownership to a party member who has finished the prerequsites… and for those groups who don’t have any such members — give a small grace period to LFG for someone who has.

However, this bug/feature has now become an important way to defend against people kicking you at the end of a run in order to sell/invite guildies. So perhaps it’s better not to fix it?

They will never ever release a leaderboard that’s based on how fast people run fractals/dungeons. With the enormous number of exploits that they never intend to patch, such a leaderboard would actually look really bad for Anet.

Achievement points should be the only form of vertical progression in this game.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Lord Kuru.3685:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

(And let’s face it folks, ascended armor and weapons are not necessities, even in WvW)

Ascended gear, especially weapons do make a difference in WvW. Just the damage numbers from weapons make a HUGE difference if you have zerker gear; power, crit chance, and crit damage come together to make seemingly small numbers quite significant.

In PvE these numbers add up even more as full zerker gear is much more prevalent.

Here’s an interesting thought:

A group that does more damage due to Ascended gear finishes dungeons faster, so does more dungeon runs, and thus makes more gold than they did when they wore exotics. So more gold is entering the economy than before, raising prices in the TP. But that gold is not uniformly distributed. Those with Ascended get more of it, so those with exotics are left with rising prices, but the same income as before. Of course this is rough and theoretical, but I think it’s something to think about.

I did not say that they did not make a ‘difference.’ I said they are not necessities. There is a difference.

If you’re falling behind gold-wise or are far underpowered in WvW, it gets closer to being a necessity.

I think it’d be interesting if Anet did some research comparing character gear to how much gold they earn per hour (PvE only). Because the champ trains run the same no matter the gear, let’s restrict this, for simplicity, to dungeon runs.

Something as simple as charts with types of gear on one axis (zerker, clerics, etc.) and gold-per-hour on the other may be really interesting!

I think you’d get some nice data that may point towards the viability of different types of gear.

Furthermore, I suspect that:

Those who use Ascended gear make more gold per hour than those with exotics.

If this is so, how much more Ascended users make is an important question because it may give some indications as to how much you’re set back (gold-wise) if you don’t go for Ascended gear (I’m trying to word this carefully because correlation does not imply causation).

Perhaps your economist has this data already?

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

(And let’s face it folks, ascended armor and weapons are not necessities, even in WvW)

Ascended gear, especially weapons do make a difference in WvW. Just the damage numbers from weapons make a HUGE difference if you have zerker gear; power, crit chance, and crit damage come together to make seemingly small numbers quite significant.

In PvE these numbers add up even more as full zerker gear is much more prevalent.

Here’s an interesting thought:

A group that does more damage due to Ascended gear finishes dungeons faster, so does more dungeon runs, and thus makes more gold than they did when they wore exotics. So more gold is entering the economy than before, raising prices in the TP. But that gold is not uniformly distributed. Those with Ascended get more of it, so those with exotics are left with rising prices, but the same income as before. Of course this is rough and theoretical, but I think it’s something to think about.

Sometimes it’s hard to click your target precisely. I think it might improve gameplay if you could hold down your mouse button and drag a box to target whatever’s in that box.

Honestly, perhaps the only way to make Anet listen is by not crafting Ascended light gear. Anet makes all their decisions off of metrics so you have to give them numbers to show you’re refusing to craft Ascended.

Astralporing.1957:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Zaxares.5419:

I thought that colour rotation is completely random now? Back in the old days it used to be that Green = 1st, Red = 2nd and Blue = 3rd (or was 2 and 3 swapped?), but I’m quite certain that a patch some months ago removed that.

ooo are you sure it is removed?

if it is removed, then we should have more variation in the colors.

It should be random now, not based on relative strength. What did upset the color change balance however was the season 1 – for some reason it seems most (if not all, though i’m not 100% sure about that) servers remained the same color throughout the whole season. Add to that some unlucky rng before and after, and you end up with over 2 months of not getting that one color you need.

In the two weeks since the league ended, 9 out of 16 matches have the top server green; the middle, blue; and the bottom, red. If the colors were randomized (where each matchup has their three server colors randomly assigned), we’d expect only 1/6 matches to be “correct.” This could be RNG being RNG, but I doubt it.

Vayne.8563:

If you add more build diversity you need to add the subsystems to back it up. Give people the ability to have multiple builds and they’ll feel their characters are progressing.

This. And people are going to feel even more trapped in their builds once they have Ascended gear. So adding new skills is actually going to make people feel worse because it almost ensures they will eventually have to change builds, and thus go through the unholy Ascended grind again.

Phy.2913:

Lord Kuru.3685:

My take:

The game came out and was far more successful than anticipated, with tons of sales. Anet saw the dollar signs and decided to change the game away from what they originally designed (low grind, easy to get top level gear, horizontal progression) into a more traditional MMO — in order to keep these customers.

So we ended up with a game that was designed one way, but supported after release in a completely different way.

In the end, those who came for the original game were turned off, and those who want
a traditional MMO will surely leave when a new traditional MMO, one designed to be such from the bottom up, comes out.

That doesn’t make any logical sense. A large amount of sales right out the gate would tell them to stay the course, not the other way around.

Yeah.. I tried to shorten my post, but perhaps too much. What I meant was that Anet intended for a far smaller customer base of casual/non-grinders, but instead got an enormous number of customers who were not of that base. Anet tried to keep all these customers despite the fact that their game was not designed for them.

IMO, this was a terrible mistake on Anet’s part (with the focus on sPvP instead of WvW a close second).

My take:

The game came out and was far more successful than anticipated, with tons of sales. Anet saw the dollar signs and decided to change the game away from what they originally designed (low grind, easy to get top level gear, horizontal progression) into a more traditional MMO — in order to keep these customers.

So we ended up with a game that was designed one way, but supported after release in a completely different way.

In the end, those who came for the original game were turned off, and those who want
a traditional MMO will surely leave when a new traditional MMO, one designed to be such from the bottom up, comes out.

Aberrant.6749:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Buzzcrave.6197:

Exactly! Beside that, you’ve already killed a player, spike him in downed state, making him kissing the floor in defeated state and now you need to kill the same player just because your enemy blob is 2-4 times bigger than your numbers that it let them to mass ress those defeated players in the middle of a fight. Does that really make sense?

This. I don’t think you should even be able to rez fully dead people at all (in WvW).

IMO it’s fine if not in combat. The battle has already been won/lost at that point and if it isn’t you could just put them in combat by tossing a field on the corpse/aoe/cleave/etc.

I was thinking more of enabling small groups to harass a large zerg that’s far from its spawn and whittling down its size little by little. The small group can hit and run, killing those at the zerg’s tail, bringing down its size — while if OOC resurrecting of fully dead were allowed, the zerg always stays the same size.

Zergs would really have to worry about keeping their size and straying too far from WPs would be a genuine risk. I think it would really help servers with coverage disadvantages.

The solution to the OP’s problem is to champ farm and then buy the silk from the TP. That’s pretty much how Anet’s design encourages you to play.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Cliff.8679:

Izzy, you gave an example a little earlier about how it’s a problem that there’s a big gap between players who play a lot versus players who don’t play as much, and you mentioned an example of the hardcore players being level 4000 while the casual players are 100.

I don’t think this example really works, because this game doesn’t have any kind of vertical progression like that. In fact, before ascended gear, the hardcore and the casual players were on a level playing field, time-gating or not. Exotics were all anyone had to worry about, and they weren’t too difficult or time consuming to attain. Now with the ascended crafting, it actually makes things worse. Players who don’t play as much have less laurels, they miss days to do their ectoplasm refinements, have less materials to use, less money to buy materials they might need, etc. So I’m failing to see how the time-gating helps keep a minimal gap between hardcore players and casual players on a power level, especially when one didn’t really exist before.

At this point, the only purpose this time-gating is serving is what you just said: it keeps a stranglehold on the ascended material market so that some players can make money selling instead of crafting. Is that really worth it? I agree that crafting is largely useless when it comes to actually being profitable for players, but there has to be a better answer than crippling our ability to advance at a reasonable speed. Especially when we want to have multiple builds, outfit multiple characters, and outfit those multiple characters with multiple builds of their own.

I was using the example to explain how time gates help equalize players goals and focus them together. Another example would be guild timers without them a super hard core guild would have finished all guild levels in 1 night where other guilds of equal size might take months. Then if you design new content around the guild that can do that much content in 1 night then the other guilds just get left behind in the dust. Vertical or horizontal progression doesn’t matter a player who is going to take 3 years to do something everyone else and in a few weeks makes it hard to balance. Now gates don’t make them equal at all, the players with more time will still complete things faster take my guild example the super good guild still finishes something in 5 weeks that took the other 3 months, but it does help close that gap. You really don’t want them to be that close you just don’t want them to be crazy far apart.

This also is super important for wealth disparity as far as economy goes but I’m keeping the examples as much around progression as economy is a totally different discussion.

What time gating really does is make people log in on a regular interval so that it becomes habitual.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I had no idea that coding an MMO was as easy as simply switching out a few scripts.

For something like wiping your story progress to zero, it absolutely should be that easy…

Unless you have very poor programming practices … which is unfortunately, possible — witness Anet’s inability to match skill descriptions with their actual functionality; for example the slayer potions bug where you take x% more damage from the listed foe instead of x% less.

Keiel.7489:

Ascended Armor is not significantly better than exotic gear. It is made for top min/maxers to sink their gold in, and for the casuals to slowly grind it out.

A lot of it is psychological. Once you have your ascended set, there’s a psychological barrier to going back to exotics. This is really bad if Anet wants to encourage you to try new builds.

Buzzcrave.6197:

Exactly! Beside that, you’ve already killed a player, spike him in downed state, making him kissing the floor in defeated state and now you need to kill the same player just because your enemy blob is 2-4 times bigger than your numbers that it let them to mass ress those defeated players in the middle of a fight. Does that really make sense?

This. I don’t think you should even be able to rez fully dead people at all (in WvW).

Sir Egil The Bull.7869:

Who cares if she dies or not? It’s not like she’s Brian from Family Guy.

This. I’m personally done with the Living Story until she’s confirmed to be completely gone.

But Scarlet is not the biggest problem… the real problem is that Anet apparently thinks Scarlet is a great character — they can’t even tell good characters/stories from bad. So we’re likely to see characters and stories that are just as bad after Scarlet’s demise.

Many of the base mechanics of the game encourage stacking. Two examples:

• the size of combo fields
• the preponderance of cleaving weapons.

Come to think of it, perhaps Anet should create more mobs that use combo fields — you have 2 mobs, one who creates a field, the other who blasts .. you have to keep them apart or else their combo makes them super powerful. That can perhaps encourage you to split your group in order to separate the mobs.

good idea… but I’d bet nothing like this will be implemented for quite a while — otherwise, we’d see a lot of rage from people who grinded out their Ascended via crafting.

Personally, I don’t trust that Anet won’t add another tier of gear (or raise the level cap, which is even worse), so I’m going to skip Ascended armor and probably go for Legendary armor to escape any future grind.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Lord Kuru.3685:

So any comments about the Magic: the Gathering model (Type II/Standard)? IMO it’s a great way to keep the game fresh.

I prefer Legacy

GW1 had a PvP mode that had a (weekly?) rotation. We could only use a subset of skills every week in that arena. It functioned a bit like sealed in MTG.

It was not popular. I guess players wanted to have all the skills at their disposal. I know I did.

(Then again, I dislike sealed, while I do like drafting)

What GW1 did, that is a bit like the standard rotation in MTG, is more massive skill balances. Every now and then they would completely overhaul numerous skills that were for some reason rarely used.

Now in GW2, they need to be a bit more careful with that, because of weapon investments. Destroying some builds by accident may have quite a severe impact on players. Let’s say they change some underused condition skills to power skills. Suddenly a player that had condition gear just for that underused build is very sad.

If gear becomes easier to acquire that may be less of a problem though, and heavier skill rebalances could work out.

I wouldn’t want to miss out on any of the limited set of skills that we currently have though.

I prefer Type II/Standard because it’s much easier to balance and evades power creep issues.

As for gear… you’re right, with a Type II/Standard system in GW2, builds would regularly change and gear would be a huge issue. Exotics are easy enough to get that I feel drastic build changes 3 times a year would be ok. Unfortunately, we now have the Ascended grind and that would pose a enormous problem. Big mistake on Anet’s part in my opinion

(even in the current system, we are no longer encouraged to experiment with builds — negating the effect of new skills — as well as discouraging people from changing skins)

TimTWW.5867:

After reading everyone’s opinion and reasons I cant say that I support selling but there isn’t much of a chance of it being fixed due to how popular you seem to make it. So I got what I wanted out of this thread. Thanks for your oppinion

Anet has explicitly said they are ok with people selling paths. There’s no “fixing” to be done here.

• Not sure why everyone seems to think Anet intends for you to kill all mobs. If Anet didn’t want you to skip, they would prevent you from passing to the next part without having killed everyone. But they don’t, so you have to assume they are giving you a choice. Those who like to skip can skip, those who don’t, don’t — isn’t it better to have a choice?

• If everyone in your group knows what they’re doing, skipping should be smooth with no downs. In fact, it’s pretty fun learning how to skip most efficiently on your own without watching guides.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Pleurodesed.7625:

“Well then, there’s no way we all pile up at the console part with all the golems exploding into rings of fire”. Nope! all piled up at the console killing the golems too fast for them to explode.

And how do you think you’re supposed to do this part? Let the golems explode so that you never finish the action?

Pleurodesed.7625:

Then everyone timed the console so it glitched and skipped the remaining waves at the same time.

It didn’t glitch. It was designed this way. And I’m pretty confident Anet intended for this part to be done this way. They could EASILY have not let you pass unless all golems are dead — but they didn’t.

We did this part with one person channeling in stealth, 3 people distracting the main golem army and me (the 5th person) interrupting (!) the few golems that came close enough to start their bomb skill animation.

It was great fun!

Interesting. (I’m still pretty sure you’re intended to destroy the mini-golems .. that’s why they’re build with super low health.)

In you liked doing the fight that way… you might also enjoy kiting the gravelings in AC — Colossus Rumbulus path — instead of destroying burrows as they appear (the part where Tzark is making you into ghosts).

Pleurodesed.7625:

“Well then, there’s no way we all pile up at the console part with all the golems exploding into rings of fire”. Nope! all piled up at the console killing the golems too fast for them to explode.

And how do you think you’re supposed to do this part? Let the golems explode so that you never finish the action?

Pleurodesed.7625:

Then everyone timed the console so it glitched and skipped the remaining waves at the same time.

It didn’t glitch. It was designed this way. And I’m pretty confident Anet intended for this part to be done this way. They could EASILY have not let you pass unless all golems are dead — but they didn’t.

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

People post every day embarrassing videos of themselves so I don’t see why this would be a problem, or even a discussion. Gratz to all the people.
You can spend those 30-50$ get wasted and someone else record that video for you :P it happens on a daily basis anyway

“People” and “those who are interested in GW2” are a vast population difference. There are tons of “people” so of course you see tons of videos where people embarrass themselves.

In any case… even defenders of this video are taking the view that making such a video is embarrassing — that’s not a good thing.

So any comments about the Magic: the Gathering model (Type II/Standard)? IMO it’s a great way to keep the game fresh.

Something should be done about DE rewards. There are actually a bunch of DE chains that no one ever does but have nice little stories — it’s too bad people are missing out.

As of now, try leveling through DEs… your reward levels are extremely low compared to leveling via champ train. As a simple example, I’ve tried both, and keeping your gear up to level through DEs is much much harder than doing the same with the champ train.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Samhayn.2385:

Spawne.3128:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Is it fair to say that regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method?

Chris

I would say that is true pretty much about all items. However I see this strategy being problematic unless you increase the overall amount of items in the game. Supply vs demand basically. Scale it so that ascended weapons/armor only drop from the hardest of pve related events in the game, and exotics drop from lower difficulty events, and just leave the drop rate of precursors the same so that you dont diminish the rarity of legendary’s. PvE in this game has so much potential however has been largely undeveloped.

I like this idea of higher drop rates for harder content but it still neglects wvw so I would like to add. Higher drop rates in wvw from Player kills modified by the players rank. Higher rank = better chance to get something good from them. In theory higher rank players should have more experience and thus be more difficult to fight.

Interesting idea.

Chris

“Higher rank = better chance to get something good” leads directly to people from opposing servers organizing and taking turns killing each other to rank up and earn good loot.

Wear zerker and support with skills (this is for PvE, of course).

SmirkDog.3160:

Lord Kuru.3685:

I don’t think it’s as hard as you think. Everything you mentioned: Skills, appearance, story should be determined by entries in a database — it should not be hard to change — it could be as easy as a few search and replace scripts.

The most difficult issue would be what to do with the story, but I say: wipe your story progress to 0. That’s the price you have to pay to change races.

As for cost: certainly it should cost at least as much as a total makeover kit since it has more functionality. I see no problems with that.

The problem with wiping the story means someone could, say, level up to 40 while doing all the story missions, change their race, then do all those missions again and gain easy experience.

The only way that could work would be to remove any exp and rewards from missions that were previously done. Or reset their level too.

Who cares if they get that experience again? Creating a new character and going through the story gets you the same experience. But if, for whatever reason, Anet really cares, then can make the race change cost skill points and XP in addition to gems.