I spent about $10 AUD back in October and used it to buy the mats I was missing to craft a full set of exotic Rampager’s Leather. I’ve enjoyed that set of armour for two months now, and given my lack of interest in Fractals I’m likely to continue enjoying it until they add Ascendeds as world drops or craftables, at the earliest.
For half the price of a gourmet pizza, I honestly have not the slightest regrets.
Good point. Even if it’s not the last gear you wear in game, that hardly matters to if you’ve enjoyed it, given how very slow and small gear upgrades are coming out. Cheap rent. Altho I enjoy pizza, too.
From the way OBrien described it, they don’t have prevention measures to stop hackers from trying millions of passwords. Their solution is to blacklist the top 20 million attempted passwords they’ve seen… Just hope yours is not 20,000,001.
Someone I know who just got to 80 for the first time went and got a full exotic armor set (the Lyssa temple one). With that and some dungeon weapons, the only thing to craft or buy was jewelry.
If you’ve done the daily achieves and a couple monthlies, you’ll have surplus karma.
Note that if money is tight, there’s not actually much difference between rare (yellow) and exotic. In fact, you’ll likely find each upgrade underwhelming, cuz it’ll still take about the same number of attacks to kill the mobs.
Not ONLY same sex partnerings. There was the whole Bercilak story. I haven’t gotten too far in the game, so that’s the only one that co to mind…
I kind of get the sense though that gender doesn’t really matter to sylvari, since they don’t make babies the way other races do. Male/female distinctions seem to be purely aesthetic, from a lore standpoint.
There’s another notable pairing you’ll find as you go thru your story quests, actually regardless of race, shortly after Claw Island. I’ll not spoiler it here.
There’s so many easy ways to get exotic gear without the TP. I doubt many people use gems to equip their characters, especially how the cost of gems for gold keeps going up…
But regardless, there’s only rings and a backpack to upgrade. Whether you got your gold from a gold-seller, the gem store, or earned in game hardly matters. Nor does it really matter if you use dungeon gear, invaders, karma, crafted, or TP, it all wears the same.
Do ya really advocate hanging around in masterwork gear until the level cap increases? I dunno if I’ll even be playing GW2 that long.
It doesn’t make sense to me that all the races speak the same language. It really doesn’t make sense to me that the only race with a different accent from the others is the one that hasn’t been around long enough for linguistic drift. But… of all things, this isn’t a big deal.
I think many Sylvarian females are beautiful. But it’s frustrating that there’s only one or two faces and hair that anyone chooses for either sex (is sex/gender the relevant distinction?). It’s interesting to me that there seems only to be same-sex partnering in the story quests. Then again ArenaNet is in Bellevue…
My guild has a designated story-mode session on the calendar, with the goal of having a time and place where people can group up to see that content, that they otherwise might miss out on.
Check in your guild — I bet you’ll find like-minded people. With scarcely run things, you need to plan them to make them happen.
GW2 isn’t so much a community-based game. You can play to 80 without ever being in a party. So as a community we tend to keep to ourselves, just talk in /guild or on our guild’s voice servers.
I’d suggest watching which guild tags you tend to see, try talking. People are people, and many enjoy making a friend, even tho the game doesn’t encourage it.
I really don’t understand all this stuff about waypoint costs. Its not that expensive if you just play the game. If I didn’t craft, I’d have more money than I’d know what to do with…(but I like crafting)
I really don’t know what you guys are doing thyats keeping you so poor you can’t travel??
I don’t feel at all poor, and certainly have enough gold to take a 1000 wp trips.
My issue is that almost everything I do in the pve world gets me some profit per hour of gameplay. Some things are less, some things are more, but everything makes some gold/mats.
Except taking my favorite characters to play with a friend who just joined the game. I’m not a bad friend, I do and will play with him. But working on finishing up his newbie zone, he ports for just a few copper. Every port is 1.4s or more for me. And god forbid we try something like the Metrica elemental…
I’m not just giving up on earning like I would in Orr or a dungeon. It’s that I’m lucky to come away without a net loss, for playing with a lowbie friend. Of course that’s the way it is in other games, too, nothing new here, but GW2 was supposed to be different.
Many of the advantages of Steam already exist in GW2 – primarily the ability to download the game from anywhere and play as long as you know your login info.
Beyond that, Steam is a social network for PC gamers – it lets you keep in touch with friends and family that you play with and makes it very easy to invite people or join in their games. I also use it to give my kids games to their accounts and I don’t have to worry about lost codes or discs.
However, for GW2, I like it not being on Steam, I like to casually poke around the TP during the day without it looking like I just play all the time to my Steam friends…
Sounds to me its just a game lobby where you get inundated with ad spam where they want to put cookies on your comp to track your buy methods. Is there a lot of spam on Steam?
Not just cookies. It’s essentially self-installed spyware. Which is ok cuz you get great deals if you buy from their store.
My understanding is the gold-gems conversion rates are based on how many people are buying gems with gold vs how many are buying gold with gems.
Since way more people buy gems with gold than the other way around, it’s necessary that the rate goes up.
The parameters of the equation are, naturally, set by ArenaNet. I’m sure there are people who speculate with gems (maybe bought a lot of gems when they were cheap and then converted to back gold after a spike in price), but the exchange fee is so high, it’s not tenable for a currency-trade model.
Some other aspects of the social system can influence this too.
If you’re on a friend’s list with one character, you’re on with all your characters.
If a person send a whisper to your main (or a party invite or a mail) while you’re on an alt, your alt will get it.
Everything social is account-based, rather than character.
Maybe someday. I see Steam as the way a company squeezes the last few $$ out of a title. GW2 isn’t there yet. Was GW1 ever on Steam?
Say you replace your armor every 10 levels. Say you wanna keep the chest shoulders and legs of a set. From 10 to 80, you’re needing 21 basic T-stones. It’s not that bad, given how many you get for zone completes and achieves. I use em as often as I care to, and still have an increasing stack.
Black Lion Traders express are the ones that really pile up for me. I just never needed the money that bad that I wanna pop one out.
By the way, Blade and Soul looks kinda cool. Has anyone played the Korean release?
I was playing with a friend who’s a new player. He can bounce around Queensdale basically for free, but I pay 1.4s minimum. Yet I’m not earning very much, cuz the mobs drop lvl 1-15 junk. The level-based component of waypoints in low-level zones could really use some adjustment.
I don’t want to sound like a cheapskate, but everywhere else I go to play, I make money as I go, whether it’s wvw, Orr, dungeons, whatever. But if I go play with a new player is the one time I’m at risk of coming away poorer after doing the zone with him.
The loading screens — somehow for me the time feels like it’s increased since launch. It is a bother, and I can see that they want that disincentive to take the cheap way, but I wish they hadn’t made the screens take so darn long. I end up alt-tabbing to pass the time…
I’m finding that I can do large-scale wvwvw combat without culling or performance issues in Planetside 2. It’s free to play, and works pretty well.
I think for me, precursors and gold doesn’t very much matter to me. I’ve been really frustrated w/ fotm and the bugs, and not feeling like I really have much to do except finish my 3rd 80.
We have another long thread on this, maybe a couple.
NCSoft has closed down and parted out some of their game offerings for NA/EU. Downsizing makes sense.
It’s not about Guildwars.
i disagree, having melee never viable in wvw is a major game breaking thing. Also i always bring a staff with my guardian as backup but sitting back pew pewing is boring and not fun. Melee should be viable IN ALL game types, look at DAOC, they had viable melee in 100vs100 battles, this is a fantasy game not call of duty.
And the guardian has a bunch of methods to move out of battle, do you play a guardian? A guardian does somewhat lack in mobility compared to a theif, but he has ttons of damage mitigation and aegis type things, which are what you use for escaping, i can mitigate atleast 12 attacks on me not counting WoR, which will help me run away, then i got rolls, and fast run speed on 3 diff skills – plus healz. Look at warrior, now theirs a class thats doomed when stuff goes bad, yes he might have more “mobility” but he lacks in damage mitigation, ide much rather have a guardian for wvw zergs in melee.
I can’t tell if you were talking to me or what.
Yes I play a 80 guardian, with a shout-based build, stand your ground, hold the line, save yourselves!
I was saying melee works fine, particularly with a coordinated group. Shock n awe, come in cloaked, render them dead before they can even render you visible.
But for the times between portal bombs, when you’re on the wall or behind the gate, I feel a lot more useful if I have a staff and/or scepter. We have weapon-swap (exc ele and engi) for a reason.
In the game, we’re the soldiers, not the heroes.
Trahearne gets to summon a whole army of baddies. The NPC in the dynamic event (sometimes) gets to be invincible.
It’s my mentor that can manage to hold off a whole army while I flee the island, not me.
It takes 5 people many minutes of doing our very best attacks to take out a single commander type.
A piece of scrap wood on the ground is more powerful than your exotic sword.
Look at wvw. We’re supposed to feel like the worker bees, not the queen.
Final Fantasy has an entirely different ethic. Elites that take us from zero to hero don’t fit the gritty world of Tyria.
What do you feel like you actually need to buy in GW2? Bags, and ??
The way it’s set up, you can easily level up without worrying about gear. Once 80, you can go masterwork-rare-exotic progression in a bunch of different ways. Get dungeon weapons, get karma armor, gather up for your jewels. Invaders’ if you’re one of those types. Oh and rings and back from fotm if you want.
It’s not like games where you have to spend a huge amount for your spells/skills, or a mount or anything. Top tier gear, except for necklace and earrings can all be obtained without a gold. And hey, we just got a fancy earring from the lost shores fiasco.
Im not sure youre on the same page as everyone else. Its not just about gear. To do what you want, to build the character the way you want, to repair, to travel, etc
It all takes money. Money that is not coming at a rate that is balanced. It cant be too fast and it cant be too slow.
Right now its too slow so gold sellers and sleepless farmers are causing prices to continuously go up because i feel the majority of us feel rich with 10g. Lol
Travel & repair, I doubt anyone is buying gold for that sort of thing. If they are, $10 of gems will last you a long long time.
We’re at the point where the economy is maturing. The only thing left to buy for most people are the fancy stuff. The weapons with nice effects, the cool looking gear, the splurge sorts of things.
It’s to be expected that in a game with a very shallow power curve and a lot of tradeable goods, the price for “fancy” will go up at the same rate that player wealth goes up. Cuz there’s nothing else we’re spending on.
Increase gold/loot drops 10% and you’ll see inflation go right up to match it. Just like real life capitalist markets, if you’re poor, you’ll stay poor, no matter what happens in the macro-economy.
I don’t think you should ever go on the battlefield without a staff and or scepter in your bag.
But with the culling bug and use of portals, just jump on the glowing circle and have your mesmer bring you to the battle. And hey — You’ll be invisible, too!
Dreaming of being the leet noble knight is misunderstanding what wvw is about. If you want glory, seek it in spvp. There you can actually kick kittens and take their names.
What do you feel like you actually need to buy in GW2? Bags, and ??
The way it’s set up, you can easily level up without worrying about gear. Once 80, you can go masterwork-rare-exotic progression in a bunch of different ways. Get dungeon weapons, get karma armor, gather up for your jewels. Invaders’ if you’re one of those types. Oh and rings and back from fotm if you want.
It’s not like games where you have to spend a huge amount for your spells/skills, or a mount or anything. Top tier gear, except for necklace and earrings can all be obtained without a gold. And hey, we just got a fancy earring from the lost shores fiasco.
At what point is it just too late?
I noticed gamebreaker.tv stopped their GW2 pvp show. Sites that host builds and post videos have dropped off. It seems like any serious esport types have given up and moved on.
I’m afraid at this point if they suddenly magically had a good system for team pvp, it’d still suffer from low-use, because that ship has sailed a while ago.
Maybe they’d do better to make a spvp system that appeals to the pve-players that remain in the game, something that’s casual-friendly and fun. I dunno, maybe like let us take our spvp skins into the rest of the game.
These things happen when you buy gold. Next time don’t contact them through the same computer you play on.
1, i didnt buy gold
2, i have 3 pc’s, one is for games only, one is for msn/surfing and one is purely for d/las stated before, played online over 10 years, never had a problem, my games pc’s only interaction with internet is only a game login hitting the server. it doesnt even have an IE installed. the game it self is d/l’d on a seperate pc, installed, scanned, then transfered by usb and copied on to the games pc.
From what they’ve said, their system is vulnerable to large scale brute force attacks, where hackers cycle thru millions of potential passwords.
How they by-pass the mobile-phone authenticator? — that aspect is disturbing.
In my experience, vets after this last patch aren’t any less likely to drop loot than normal mobs. They’re just not any more likely to drop, either.
Step 1: Hacker sold everything for the gold/silver/copper.
Step 2: Hacker transferred money to another account, either by mail or TP.
Both of those are databases owned by ArenaNet. If it were about the in-game economy, they could follow the money and zap it. But each case would take time and labor, just like to reconcile your accounts IRL. And if they restored it, you gotta know the hackers would just come back and take it again and again.
It all has to do with the game economy. Since gold is tied so tightly to gems and RMT, restoring the items and coin of hacked accounts would upset the balance. It’d be akin to printing money for you every time someone was mugged.
Another glorious side effect of our monetized game.
If that actually mattered to ArenaNet, they could look in the mail database to see where the money was sent and delete it from there. Justice and zero-sum exchange.
But it’s gonna be labor-intensive. Even if rolling back a hacked account only took 5-10 minutes, that’s a lot of labor $$. In the first couple weeks alone, over 30000 accounts were hacked. You’re talkin in hundreds of thousands $$ in support for a company that’s doing significant layoffs and reorganization.
It’s not about printing in-game money. Cuz they can unprint it, too. But in the real world it’s not that easy.
I’ve yet to DC myself in a fractal, but it does happen a lot for me with GW2.
It happens enough that I have 120 of the tokens, but have yet to make it past level 2. So frustrating, kinda just gave up on it. And then I go play PS2 and it goes all night, no problem, huge battles with no “culling”…
Oh, yes, Cliffside is not good. The final boss glitched on us when I did it, so we suicided and reset til it worked, except we had to 3-man it b/c of folks getting DCed with the glitch. So much joy.
It used to be difficult to transfer, but ever since the Lost Shores patch, most of the servers are not “Full” even during prime time. Hooray ArenaNet!!
So chances are good the O.P. will be able to get on the same server. If not, one of the key features of GW2 is that you can play with friends on any server, any time, via guesting. This feature is coming Soon™
Collossus is borked. But I think “cliffside” is the one with the harpies and golems, right?
Yoda, that’s not related. The article is about the ascended tier, lost-shores thing. Which of course has its own many dozens of threads.
Not a well-crafted piece. More words from anonymous forums posters than GW2 devs, and it’s all recycled from Reddit anyway.
They just closed (about to close?) the City of Heroes world.
Blade and Soul isn’t released to NA/EU yet.
I’d have thought when they closed down CoH franchise, that’d necessarily mean down-sizing a bit. I’m not sure how much activity Lineage2 has had in NA/EU since it dropped subscriptions.
The announcement makes sense to me.
So he Joins guilds made by random guy spam inviting in town, inviting literally anyone who responds…. then acts surprised when the guild is stupid, lacks cohesion, and most people quit after a week
Duh?
The dungeon finder thing is spot on though. Even if you argue against it saying it will kill the community… at this point the game has no community to kill, everyone is just spamming LA with fractals for hours on end (because they can’t find a group at the proper level.. because no dungeon finder…)
Actually, instead of find-a-proper-level-group, they could’ve made Fractals so that we can all progress even if we’re not the same fractal level, instead of this one where only the lowest member can advance.
We don’t actually need a dungeon finder, we need a better design for fractal advancement.
There was this idea that we should be able to play with our friends, anywhere, any server, any level, and feel like we’re still rewarded by the game.
Fractals fails on this. It explicitly divides us up by fractal level, wedging teammates apart.
And of course it’s still a bug-infested pile of kitties, where if one player gets DCed, you’re broken, if the leader leaves, you’re all booted to Lion’s Arch, where you can’t group with friends on other servers unless you can manage to get into overflow…
Uncharacteristically well-written piece, thanks for the link.
I think it’s less about the guild and more about the game. It’s not that a game needs to force you to talk to strangers. It’s that to build a community, a game should be engineered to encourage relationships. GW isn’t.
So much of the game’s design separates, rather than draws players together. The other players at a D.E. could just as well be NPCs. You really can do almost everything in the game without ever joining a group.
Don’t make relationship with a crafter, cuz all pieces are the same, everyone has the same recipe, and there’s nothing to distinguish (whereas in a couple games, players gain notoriety by being one of a few with a rare recipe, and when players look at their gear, it says “Crafted by mulch.”)
Dungeons were the one place where your reputation mattered, but with Fractals, that’s been rendered rather irrelevant, because we don’t get anything by running with friends of lower FotM level than ourselves. So you’d rather run with strangers of your level than friends who aren’t.
I have a very strong, very large guild. But even there, we’re spread between 4 sister guilds with no way to talk between them. Even there, we have contrived reasons to get together that feels a bit forced, cuz GW2 is really a solo game. GW1 was, too, so it’s no big surprise. We’ll get heroes in the next couple months and seal the lid on the social environment’s coffin.
(edited by mulch.2586)
I don’t think you can trade em. Don’t they say “soulbound”?
Honestly, I’d gladly accept them dropping their posts to 1/10 what it is now, if we’d get some bug fixes in return.
It’s a discouraging lack of progress with in-game fixes that troubles more than a lack of telling us that they still haven’t done any fixes.
Just had an outrageously frustrating evening in GW2, because of bugs. Tryin to get group into fractals. Someone DCs so we start all over. And again. Finally get thru one to boss fight, 2 DC, but we 3-man it. Boss at 5% and we’re all booted to Lions Arch.
This on top of playing a ranger so therefore unable to shoot an ice wall standing right next to it, unresponsive pet won’t attack elementals or walls, yet still obstructs my supposedly piercing shots…
Just basic functionality — if they ever get this game ready for launch it might be a good game. But it’s still not ready.
I’m still trying to figure out what the first sentence was supposed to say. In lure of…
I think the communication is actually typical for a MMO. They don’t have much to say, largely because there’s basically no bug fixes. If you’re moving at glacial pace, there’s no reason to keep updating us. You wanna hear weekly “still broken” “still broken” “still broken” … ?
Seems like just over the last couple weeks it’s become easier to make money than before.
Even the venerable Guildwars (aka GW1) isn’t free to play.
I think it’s cuz we’re earning so much in-game gold, and don’t have a lot to spend it on.
2 million + accounts.
Fewer than 1 million forums users
Therefore a minority. Cuz that’s what it means.
Master the zones, get your exotics for completion, never go back again.
I don’t find them difficult to stay alive in. I do find them difficult to enjoy.
Rest assured that you’ll be able to get an ascended berserkers weapon and transmute it onto your legendary-skinned regular exotic.
If you play them, there’s almost no overlap in terms of how the game goes. Instances and skills and 2 class vs 1 and choosing a layout vs not and a world vs a lobby and dynamic events vs fetch-me-quests and can’t jump vs jump dodge n roll all the time and gw1 you have your own heros no need for party…
There’s no big player things in gw, nothing like the Shatterer or retaking a temple or a keep.
Trading post vs player-to-player trade is radically different in feel and approach.
Aside from lore, I don’t see much resemblance.
planetside 2 at launch is doing wvwvw better than gw2 by a lot
GW2 should continue its track. I <3 spvp, but the community’s already gave up a while ago waitin for it to be ready. Wvw just sucks here. There’s more pve interest, and it’s increasingly leaning that way.