I like levels in GW2 just fine. The leveling process isn’t a grind at all, goes quickly even on my 3rd alt.
The professions gain in power as you level up, and gain in the complexity and variety of possible builds. Similarly the gear gets more important and the environment gets more challenging.
In fact, it’s the sudden stop in advancement that makes people think the game is lacking any endgame content.
I had money for the book, but I didn’t get it, cuz I had the 40 book on my main. My alts, neither of them bought the 2nd book. For leveling, especially, I don’t think you need a 30-pt trait, do you?
You make the most money by selling stuff that people find hard to get. In this game, the money when I was coming up was in crafting mats, the blue types and cloth. So gather, salvage, sell, you’ll have plenty.
WvW I actually find fairly lucrative, cuz the events pay well and you don’t spend hardly any money w/ WP being free.
They made it separate for good design reasons.
You can buy gold via gems-store and easily get all exotics.
They committed to have the real pvp part of the game never have a pay-to-win aspect.
If you WvW, you get xp, karma, loot drops, and gold, just like PvE. In fact it can be the fastest leveling xp, and by design you can go WvW starting as soon as you’re out of the tutorial if you want.
If you got xp (or anything else pve related) from sPvP, it’d be the only place in the game you can get it completely risk/cost free.
Within reason. The last 2 MMOs I played had more days with holiday events than without. To me it quickly felt tiresome.
I still don’t see what could possibly be wrong with the way they launched it.
When a company posts a story to their “news” section of their website, it IS a PR piece. That’s what it’s for.
Hey we got a red name to post.
Hey look, STILL not even a threat to ban gold-buyers.
/sigh
I was under the impression that 3D is something companies do to keep nVidia happy, not because there’s a market demand, yet.
The FOV is something you wish they’d have worked out in alpha/beta. Such a shame to have an active combat system that’s hamstrung by clunky display.
Policies about names in-game are ruled by the terms of service and user agreement.
Really doesn’t matter what US law says, or any other country’s law. ANet has decided on a particular set of rules. It’s a bit too late, since 2 million of us have already named our characters to go about making fundamental changes in the names policy.
Fact is, if no one reports your name, you’ll be fine whatever you’ve chosen. Personally I only report names if the person attracts my attention negatively with it.
It especially happens underwater. Seems like it happens more the closer you are to the mob, so I wonder if it runs into a “divide by zero” type error where the AI can’t determine which direction you are from it.
It’s not hard to get it to happen, if you just run thru the mob repeatedly and jump n tumble a lot.
Best way to avoid it is to stand stationary in front of the mob. Not always a great idea.
The pve bosses that are on 3 hr timers already have plenty of people farming them for the measly 378 karma.
ergo the players have already demonstrated that it’s rewarding enough, as it is currently.
I’d never heard of these WvW others getting farmed or being a great source of wealth and power, so maybe the payoff isn’t all that exploitatively game breaking.
I agree that gold buying cheating scumbags are the problem.
It really doesn’t have to be a moral argument, and not everyone shares those particular beliefs.
I had a grad student from China who was avid gamer, and his belief in hacks/bots/cheats was very similar to how I view a nice mouse or fast computer. It’s not “cheating” to some — it’s just how you play the game.
Put that into GW2 where you are allowed officially to buy gold via gem store. There’s nothing “cheating” about buying your way to exotics with real money. It’s part of the game.
The part that’s against the game ethic is the RMT, the bots. The part that hurts the game is the inability of ANet to stop the bots and the rest of us suffering the effects of the RMT industry (whether it’s via spamming annoyance, living with the bots, suffering the anti-farm code and related bugs…)
I think there are some events that are programmed to never fail, and definitely most(all?) of the skill point challenges are basically impossible to fail.
I was doing the event for the Balthazar (? I think) karma vendor guy, and we players were not doing well at all, looked like it would fail. But then poof, he went from about 80% to dead instantly and we all got our gold stars (and access to the vendor).
So yeah, there’s things you can try, but I think some have a pre-determined ending, sorta like your story quests sometimes did.
Blizzard famously said they’d never ban a gold buyer. And WoW players are rather unabashed about buying it.
GW2 and ANet has been conspicuously mum on ever saying they’ll ever ban gold buyers. Check all the other sites, no one is talking about being banned for buying. Lots of talk about getting hacked. A little talk about bans for botting.
The gold spammers in game aren’t really a driving force. I’m betting everyone who plays GW2 can google.
That you can buy from gold sellers with impunity is a big part of the problem.
It was a deliberate design decision to make L.A. the center of the world. It’s unfortunate that its functionality makes the “home” cities irrelevant.
But for me, coming from Rift, it’s nice that there IS a semblance of a world out there, even if we don’t often visit. (Rift is set in some extra-planar world where there’s no cultures or civilizations or anything)
Would be nice if skilled PvP counts toward it. I never checked if it does. Anyone know?
Really if you don’t care for PvP, still give WvW a try, cuz it’s very easy to be successful with no skill or practice whatsoever, not at all like pvp in other games.. Just find a zerg and run with it. WvW has a lot of PvE elements in it, and you can come with a PvE character and have success.
I guess my point is you don’t have to be interested in it to get the achievement. It’s not like, say, PvPers having any hope of a dungeon set. Just show up, it shouldn’t take long, especially if you go at the start of the WvW cycle.
(edited by mulch.2586)
other games you could expect to get the missing rewards refunded by suppoert
but…
in b4 lock
/15chars
Serpentine Sheldon, Serpentine!!
On the thief, maybe you should shoot him for 1200 feet before he gets to ya, you know, just to soften him up a bit.
It’s not just the story quest, but there’s race-specific gear a character may have, which also may have been transmuted…
OP mentions PvP. It doesn’t take money or gear or anything. Just pop to the mists. I can understand wanting gear/money for other stuff, but the game’s instantly playable for pvp without.
How’s a thief even get close to you without you getting your shot in? They only have 1 1200 range skill and it won’t blow up anyone.
Understand that most people have more than 50 levels, and the gear that goes along with that at this point.
If it’s really happening very often, reassess your playstyle. Also have a look at your combat log and what they’re doing. There’s nothing without a counter.
I like the first set better.
And nothing runs as fast as a zombie in Tyria. Nothing. …
I would caution you that many professions don’t really come into their own until you have a full set of skills and utilities, around level 30, but Engineer and Mesmer need at least lvl 20 before they quit feeling constrained.
If you want a preview of what they’re like at 80, note that whether you pvp or not, you can “enter the mists” and go to the sPvP area. Once you’re there, you have top gear, ALL of the possible skills (minus racial-specific skills), and can change your traits and gear unlimited times for free. There’s target golems you can practice the skills on, and of course you can do some sPvP games which are fun and totally risk free (no repairs or respawn costs).
If he’s nekkid, I suggest you say ‘no’
Ya know it’s pretty easy to solve. Pay for the work in real world cash. Take that cash to the gem store. Ta-da! win-win-win
I have been banned -accused of using a bot/third-party program
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: mulch.2586
The other thing that could be goin on is – we have all seen the dozens of players lined up at regularly repeating “dynamic” events, with a skill set to autofire (ctrl right-click). Flame turret, spike trap, whatever.
It doesn’t take a 3rd party program to do it. But if you do it and leave your character while you’re afk, you are in violation of the user agreement vis a vis automated play.
Just cuz you got the ban while in Sparkly Fen doesn’t mean that’s where they think the violation happened. It could be you were reported back on the bridge in Harathi Highlands.
You don’t actually have to pvp for it, just go to the maps. There’s plenty of pve content there to keep you busy.
Just go when you’re on the server that’s owning the relevant parts of the map. You’ll need to make a few trips, prob’ly. Note that you can just park yourself and wait til the points are controlled.
Note that you are also forced to WvW if you want a legendary. Yep. Or you could buy one, maybe.
Mulch, we all wish that was the case, but it’s so prevalent that a player randomly LD’ing as they’re about to die is so abysmally unlikely compared to the alternative.
Yeah, I understand. And seriously, I’m never lucky enough to crash out of getting killed, I crash just before a chest, toward the end of a queue instead of the start, fml…
Barrage, trait up traps, pet with aoe, run axe + torch, even strafe around with your shortbow #2 hits a wide pack of mobs if you’re work the angle.
Re: the looks
What I thought was cool at 30 (cuz at least it was a break from what we’d had) got old along the way. There technically are new models. They just look the same unless you put ’em side by side.
(edited by mulch.2586)
Don’t automatically assume he left the field on purpose.
I don’t wvw if there’s a queue, cuz my luck is bad.
If it’d be me, it’d be that I crash as I’m pressing F to finish him.
if you want your “alt” to be treated as an individual, you need to have it on a different account.
hmmm….
You can “report” for whatever you want. It’s a right-click and there ya go.
Being bad is not against the user agreement.
Being intolerant isn’t, either.
Single currency for all dungeons/ current system discourages fun and varied gameplay with friends
Posted by: mulch.2586
When compared to the downside – having the player base naturally gravitate to the same handful of dungeon paths that are exceptionally easy or even just having an “it” path that every player learns to do, to the exclusion of being able to competently play any other path – I’d prefer that tokens stay dungeon-specific.
This downside is only a downside if the dungeons are poorly designed or poorly tuned.
I think better not to cover up poor design/tuning with a discouraging reward system, and just get them done right. I don’t know if they have the talent to do it right, but don’t fall into the trap of covering up faulty game design with more bad design (which seems to be a theme in GW2).
Single currency for all dungeons/ current system discourages fun and varied gameplay with friends
Posted by: mulch.2586
I’ve never done CoE explorable. Right now if you ask me to go, I’m looking at it as needing to go not just this one time, but more than a dozen additional runs before I can get something. That puts a “barrier to entry,” if you remember your micro-economics 101.
It’d be nice if there were a way to salvage some value out of small sets of runs that don’t earn enough for a payoff (without doing a whole bunch more runs).
Can’t quote cuz forums only rarely gives those buttons for me.
Reply to Berries question:
Yes I saw Jon Peter’s post above. But actions speak louder than words, especially louder than words being spoken on the forum tryin to quell the discord and put on a good customer rep face.
At level 44 I got less than a silver to run a repeat story-mode. Less xp than a simple DE or renown heart, yet with the massive increase in trash, the run takes most of an hour. Obviously at 44 I hadn’t farmed it exploitatively or anything like that.
So what’s that mean to a player? If you run this more than once or twice, you will likely lose more coin than you gain, and certainly would get better return (xp/karma/coin/loot) if you did anything else there is in the game than re-running a story-mode dungeon.
So yeah, he can say as the game matures they’ll need to find the right motivator. But the folks who made the actual changes to the game did so emphatically. It’s not cut in half — I earned over 10 times as much the time I ran it before the nerf.
So all this talk about getting good karma or tokens, just doesn’t match up with ANet’s actions.
If I were designing things, I’d want people to go to their dungeon NOT with 5 newbies, if possible. Because they’re different from other PVE in GW2 and if you play them like other content, they are brutal. But look at their actions — ANet wants you to be making a big sacrifice if you’re helping a guildmate with story mode.
You never want to do a story mode more than once. Despite the post above, ANet made it clear they don’t want repeat story-runners.
My first CM story-mode run after the patch on my lvl 44 I got 72 copper pieces and 1340 xp. Not even good loot at 14, let alone lvl 44.
Don’t do it at all unless you want explore. Don’t do it again unless it’s a guildmate or personal friend. My usually cooperative guild is turning deaf ears to story-mode requests.
The suggestion of adding tokens for story mode — sure that’d be fun, and we’d all maybe get back to answering LFG calls. But they didn’t just reduce the rewards, they completely totally obliterated them. That’s a powerful message. Don’t see them back-tracking.
As best I can tell it’s 2^-n that you get for story runs, where n is the number of times you’ve done it before.
The cool thing is ANet doesn’t have to rely on forum posts to determine if dungeons are too hard or too easy.
They have ready access to actual performance data from 2 million accounts!
How long do runs take? How many never finish? On what fights do players get downed/dead/wiped? What’s proportion of repeat runs by players or average # of tokens…
This goes for professions. A smart developer doesn’t learn that mesmers (or whatever) are OP and FotM by reading a forum. They learn it by seeing that every winning team has one. Or the opposite by seeing that a particular profession is half as likely as another to earn a dungeon set, or whatever.
The best data are our behaviors as players, not our posts.
Seriously I really doubt we need separate labels for every sort of RMT or violation of the user agreement. Flag them and let the GMs figure it out.
They’re not gonna go read the offending email, see “oh this is a powerlevel ad, not gold selling, nevermind.”
This is the most unsatisfying aspect of Tyria and GW2. We all have be heroes in the world. And the pvp areas aren’t even part of the world.
I really liked games where the pvp objective and fights took place in the normal actual gameworld. In Lineage2, my clan owned a castle and it was in the main game world. It meant if you were in my kingdom you paid tax to my clan. Or in WAR, the pvp lakes were on the same map as pve.
The request IS simple. I dunno bout the solution (or ANet’s ability to code anything), but the request is clear and concise.
There is a suggestions forum.
Stats from gear and your trait build very much do affect how your character performs. The system for GW2, if they had decided to make it a gear progression game, ivery much could have depended on gear.
The way they took gear out of being a huge factor was by having just a few levels of gear to progress at 80. For around vendor price, there’s blues and greens. For about salvage price there’s yellows. And then into the “more than a gold” there’s exotic, which is where it ends.
ANet saying if you put your turrents on autofire and go afk you’re breakin the rules.
Uhh… tilt at windmills much?
I think it looks amazing, and marks an amazing accomplishment!
If you’re counting “having the ingredients for” as the same as having, it appears the Sunrise was earlier, on 9/22. I guess it took the patch before anyone could actually finish assembly.
Regardless, phenomenal, congratulations!
I saw the vendor today on Sanctum of Rall. The preceding event seemed bugged, but in a good way, like the boss went from 80% health to dead instantly. Poof here’s your chest!
It’s not an exploit to do turrents on autofire, but ANet has posted that if you go AFK, it’s a breach, and subject to disciplinary action.