Guild Wars 2

Tej mouse.1852:

I recently got back into this game after not playing it for a while and realized there was a new expansion pack. I went to go check for the price of it and saw it was $50 but it also includes the core game. is there a way to buy HOT separately so I don’t have to re-buy the game?

your missing the point, its Hot for the standard AAA price and they throw in core for free for those that don’t have it.

OP sounds like you are the kind of person that will appreciate what GW has to offer. My tips for you are classic stuff, enjoy the journey, enjoy the full map and resist the temptation to rush to max level. As an aside if you have never played GW1 I recommend it, one of the all time classic pc games. It has hundreds of hours of content and backing story for GW2 and also provides rewards that ultimately contribute towards to GW2 rewards – google hall of monuments. happy hunting

isn’t this simply housing under another label ?

Wildstar has brilliant housing model where you build, gather and develop your housing plots, I would go with that if I had my choice.

that’s why you have to look past the subjective and focus on the core aspects that define what is ‘hardcore’ , especially when its part of marketing campaigns or bickering on forums.

“A Hardcore player is someone who commits to regular scheduled contiguous sessions for a sustained period of time and prioritises these session over almost everything else in his life. Everything else is casual.”

in otherwords how a real life player prioritises a game in relation to everthing else in his life.

what messes this definition up is people using ‘hardcore’ and ‘softcore’ to try and describe a person (usually as a form of insult), when actually its a definition of how a player prioritising a game in relation to everything else in there life.

My best stab would be

“A Hardcore player is someone who commits to regular scheduled contiguous sessions for a sustained period of time and prioritises these session over almost everything else in his life. Everything else is casual.”

So for example , a player playing 30 hours a week at his leisure is casual in that he comes and goes as he pleases, but plays a lot. He does not feel bound to a commitment., but may commit to stuff if it suits. A Hardcore player on the other hand would commit to play those 30 hours in long scheduled sessions, and would very rarely break from the schedule, and may possibly show withdrawal symptoms in extreme cases if his personality is prone to addiction.

Living story = fragmented story over a long time period. Telling any story in small chunks over a long time period is not a great format.

Aldath.1275:

This is incredibly grindy.

I’ve been getting ready for high-end PVE content, and now I’m starting to see this MMO for being a “non-grindy pay-to-play” feels grindier than say…. TERA (f2p) or The Secret World (P2P).

In between the eternity you spend grinding for gold and materials to craft ascended gear in order to survive high level fractals, and the almost two years some people spend trying to craft a legendary (829 gold for total material cost, even with the Legendary Collection quests, is REALLY grindy and excesive) just makes me cringe.

250+ Laurels for some stuff, having to run arround the map doing events for Karma, zergs…

Isn’t this against everything A-Net said this game would be? I bought the game with the promise the end game wasn’t “grinding”…

Ask yourself this, why do you feel like you ‘need’ to grind for something. If you don’t want to aim for the ascended gear don’t worry about it play at a fractal you are comfortable with, exotic gear is perfectly fine. If you are doing anything that you feel is a grind, then don’t do it, that applies to any game that has a power cap, there’s no race. Same applies to legendries, its a skin.

they need to sort the issues with the new maps, rotating just hides the problem temporarily. The new maps are gorgeous and have a lot of opportunity for good play, but it needs some design work to bring armies together in battle without running through a lot of long corridors. if they were a mess I would say dump them, but they just need work. Compare them to open world pvpzones in any other mmorpg in the business and you can see the potential.

mhamilton.3095:

I have been playing GW2 for a long time now , I know how to play .And I still think the purchase of this expansion was a waste of money .

This is what you said 3 years ago.

Best mmo on the market .LOL…complaints about difficulties in normal maps…

this is what you said 2 years ago.

‘The Reason people stop playing GW2 Iis because the game is a load of crap, compared
with other games on the market.’

This is what you said a year ago.

‘This Change has Totally F……. My game up , With these new Dailys . I dont do pvp wvw so now I have no reason to log on anymore until this has been changed .’

Why exactly are you buying an expansion for a game you clearly don’t like? This is the problem, people spending money on products without researching and then blaming the product because it doesn’t suit their needs.

morrolan.9608:

vesica tempestas.1563:

its strange that it bugs out every single time for you but most have completed it, what class and build are you using?

There have been a large number of complaints about the bugs in the fight and anet has not addressed one single complaint. I only ended up doing it by getting in a group and even then we had players killed via bugs and only just managed to finish it with 2 alive.

I wasn’t talking about the complaints in the forum, I was wondering why your setup meant you got bugged out every time you played. I solo’d it on the second attempt on my zerk ele so its not a consistent bug, but was for you apparently.

if you get say a conservative 150 mystic stones over the lifetime of your char, that’s 12500 rare or above disenchants or about 5 disenchant every day for nearly 7 years, so the smart money says use up your mystic stones and look to buy the silver fed at about year 6 Would be different ofc if there was other good stuff to buy with the mystic stones,

its strange that it bugs out every single time for you but most have completed it, what class and build are you using?

Sky.7610:

If Anet is sticking to their “expansion focus” new business model then it is fair to assume that they will come out with a new expansion on an annual basis.

In 2015 our focus predominantly shifted away from live updates and toward our first expansion. In 2016, we aim to provide a more balanced focus, which will see efforts divided equally between providing regular updates and working toward the next expansion.

In the future, we plan to offer all of the prior expansions, the core game, and the latest expansion for one single purchase price.

Hot was released Oct of last year, meaning if they stick to a annual release schedule, then a new expansion will arrive at Q4 of 2016 or maybe Q1 of 2017.

Either way, will gw2 get into the mess of “buy GW2 expansion #2 and get expansion #1 FREE” mess again (that will upset old players) or will Base + Expansion #1 be free because gw2 expansion #2 is worth the $50? Are you looking forward to the next expansion? What kind of business model do you think it should be adopted in the next expansion?

To help the kids out there, the average price of an expansion is 40-60 in an AAA mmo, and most modern mmo give access to older content free when buying an expansion – which ofc makes perfect sense. No different to you buying a music album now, then seeing it offered free in a compilation a few years later, or same for a game in Steam.

seyhzade.3401:

u mean craftin precusor is fair?
Thats what i said it has to be a journey but this craftin method is more likely spend spend spend. And also there is no balance between tiers.

Why u said “20g a day = your doing it very wrong.” ? U cant make 20g in a day. I gave as an example for craftin 1 by 1 item 60 days long. and if u make 20 golds a day u can make 1200golds and u can buy precusor.
Also i said u can make easily with some farm methods 6-7 in a hour.

i didnt said it musnt be pricey. But at least it must be with less materials and more griding.

And i think u didnt get my point.

you are not getting the point, its not intended for the player who wants to pick an optimal route to get a legendary, it is for those players who don’t care how long it takes and want to gather the materials as they go.

this is a more modern outlook in gaming where only a ‘winning’ reward makes a thing worthwhile. Even in losing a meta you get the gameplay, loot and xp you got on the way, but people don’t see this, they just lament that final prize.

MMORPG’s are a group game, and within GW2 the Metas are designed for large groups. Meta events take time, they are meta, if its a good meta you should have a mix of failures and successful attempts, and its this that makes it more interesting than non meta events.

Personally I’m also extremely busy and mostly have no time for big metas like the new ones which I wish was different, but occasionally I do, and that’s what makes them fun for me. You have to look at things within the context of the full game, not just in isolation, and in this case GW@2 is mostly solo able content or easy group events, with a small number of metas available that can be failed.

The alternative is short meta’s, except we have these In GW2, or meta’s that guarantee a win, which we also have, and are ultimately dull face rolls.

the average AAA mmo expansion is perhaps 3-5 zones, and 99% of that is not repeatable content. These games offer a couple new instances as repeatable content, GW2 offers repeatable zones.

the Devs? I wouldn’t imagine so.

Metas have unique rewards as with most things, if you want something from a meta play the meta, if you cant play the meta, they you wont get the reward, its not life threatening.

What this does give is choice, I can choose to play metas, or choose not to. Choice is good, a game that avoids choice but somehow expects it to appeal to a big audience is not good. RNG is also good, theres far too much self entititled I should be guaranteed stuff asap, its dull, getting a drop you wanted for a lot more fun,. and if it don’t drops well that just adds value to your next run, not having a skin for another week is not the end of the world either.

for me its

1. GW2 : Beautiful, stable, power cap, no sub, actively developed, large, good mechanics that avoid many of the social issues in other mmo (mob tagging, power, geardrama). WVW needs fixed.

2. ESO (similar, but engine performance needs a lot of work, and once you have done the questlines you wont go back, some power issues)

The rest are much of a muchness with various problems.

+1, if you look at any group of 4 zones in isolation then they would look wanting, but hot zones are not in isolation, there are 32 zones offering a variety of gameplay.

Khyan.7039:

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

• Staff DPS tempest (fire/water/tempest) (zerk)

Don’t really see the point to use water instead of air. Air is >>>>> water and you loose too much dps without it as a zerk tempest.

depends on how you like to play, if you like playing support its fun to have water and playing with auras etc.

yes yes your apparent dislike of HOT is fascinating, but I was talking about dungeons. The new players base have not lived in a vacuum I suspect and are quite cfapable of player 3 year old dungeons. since I was suggesting dungeons could be harder which you took umbrage to this implies you think dungeons are either perfect or too hard. mmhmm.

dungeons are simplistic, they need to be more challenging, not the opposite, people get better over time not worse.

Astralporing.1957:

maddoctor.2738:

pepsis.5384:

maddoctor.2738:

pepsis.5384:

“Levelling there is something that just happens while you’re still discovering the world”

Of course when you discover than same poi or vista for the 5th (or 10th) time it’s such a natural feeling that you get while re-discovering the world. Natural leveling comes the first, and maybe the second time, a third if you stress it enough, from then on there isn’t much to discover anymore, you’ve already seen everything.

Maybe Im just not as burned out as you people. Im currently leveling up my 4th alt, he is at lvl55 with no books used. I’m just moving around following the story, grabbing hearts and hero points along the way, collecting mats etc. Feels very natural and if the vista is boring you just skip it and still get credit for it. Veterans who played it all 50 times over or people who simply have way too much spare time may disagree with me.

And why can’t you do the same in HoT? You can move around and follow the story, follow the events, gather mats, mastery insights and hero points in the process. What’s so unnatural in HoT zones that is in core tyria?

There are only 4 zones, with events on a constant, unchanging schedule. This gets old very fast.

1, you don’t have to do the meta, you can just play the game as you do in tyria- dip into events as you want.
2. or you could have zones like in other game expansions, where you play through the new zones once, do the quest line once, then repeat dailies while ignoring the old zones that are dead because of scaling.

Just to be Clear, ESO has good graphics, but the performance of the teso engine is truly terrible, its well known to be terrible, in fact if you go to the developer posts they regularly talk about the performance issues. They are frank about the problems they are having and how they don’t actually know how to fix the issues (it is suspected the modified engine is at fault, hence no fix in 2 years) If you go to the players forums it has been a huge issue, with rubber banding, crashing, single groups spamming aoe to bring down the server, it goes on. Client performance is not an issue in GW and Teso, so DX12 does little, its not addressing the issues at hand.

Not some, most if not all, and certainly less than all the other AAA mmorpg by some way by the nature of the power cap.

Op it’s the average price for a mmorpg expansion, it also covers the cost of you playing for free instead on the typical 120+ a year which you would have to pay to join friends on a mmorpg server

Harper.4173:

spoj.9672:

I don’t get why people are trying to justify a safespot.

Because if the content is so old and boring but you want to do it getting it done while interacting with it as little as possible is the only reasonable solution.

whats that got to do with using an exploit. I quit groups that exploit, the latest seems to be standing on a rock for mossman. Its a more fun fight when the boss is in the open and a lot more interesting.

All content becomes old with age, standing on a rock and spamming keys like a monkey with rolling pins attached to your hands does not fix that.

Agree there is no relationship between casual play and skill, A highly skilled player can decide to play casually. A casual player may fancy playing easy or hard content.

A casual player may play 1 hour a week or they may play 30 hours a week, again number of hours played does not make a player casual, although it can indicate it.

What a casual player is from a mmorpg perspective is a players that does not commit to long scheduled events on a regular basis where the events are deemed important in relation to conflicting real life events.

Those that disagree are basically saying I like x more than y with forum warrior mentalities (especially in a toxic forum like mmorpg) that’s not how you build a game designed for multiple players with a mixture of long and short term objectives, you design it based on design philosophy and the community well being as a whole (in a mmorpg)

The correct answer is that open world should have a mix of hard and easy as should instances. Ain’t rocket science when you think fairly.

The other think that people get wound up about is zone stalling, its too hard, it’s too easy etc but in reality it’s impossible to perfectly balance a zone to natch everyone’s skill levels moment to moment I may be skilled and tired, skilled and on the money, using a mix of skills to meet some personal objective, a new player with top gear, a an expert player in an alt in new gear. It goes on and scales in a non linear fashion. No program is ever going to cope with that, it’s impossible as the virtual world can nit be all things to all men, even if it did have the processing power.

The purpose of precursor was to provide a route for those that are more interested to play and collect gradually rather than farming gold. It’s the same type of people who ask this over and over – those who always see things in terns of fastest wins.

6 and half a dozen, however giving player choice is always better, and the xp currency abstraction is far more flexible.

since its really hard to define casual, you are better defining hardcore – and that for me simply means the player commits to long regular scheduled hours for scheduled events and will prioritise those events over everything including RL commitments at times. Hardcore exclusive content has firm content power gates that require that scheduled time and that is not raids in GW2, that’s being enforced by players who are still stifled with the need to micromanage.

Casual is simply everything else, you can play 2 hours a week casually and you can play 30 hours a week casually.

did you read the posts in this thread? it was a marketing spend and has already reaped profits, i.e they gained more than it cost.

The xp currency means you have control to buy multiple things ^^

maddoctor.2738:

vesica tempestas.1563:

Vayne.8563:

sED.9342:

I started reading this thread and i had to stop at the end of the first page. guy is making a great point of how the game is casual. and yes, it is. but i laughed and just about fell out of my chair when hes calling a TWO YEAR grind to craft a legendary casual. there is NOTHING casual about two years. so your telling me after about 20 years of playing this game i will have a full inventory of legendary gear. somebody please tell me how crafting legendary gear is casual. it is the dumbest most unmotivating grind i have ever encountered in any game.

Answer. Legendaries were never meant to be casual. The trade off is they’re not required either. Early on, when people asked Eric Flannum if there would be stuff to grind for, he said, yes, but there wouldn’t be required grind.

This is where your legendaries fall, and to a lesser degree ascended weapons.

Wrong,, ‘casual’ content is about accessibility and the path to gaining a legendary or ascended is equally available to all. You may not like long term objectives, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t, and certainly not a generalisation like ‘casusl’ you could equally say we ranks is not casual because it would take years to get to max rank, or gathering gold is not casusl because it would take years to gather enough to feel rich in game. Just because you don’t like something that does not mean it’s bad content.

So you consider the Winter’s Presence shoulder to be casual?

yup, I’m farming it, and will continue to do so next year, I only play a few hours a week. I’m also working on ascended gear, WVW rank, Fractal rank, and gathering materials that I will use for a legendary when one that appeals is added. You see Casual players play casually – we see no need to rush in GW@ as we are not punished by the power curve and most normal people don’t obsess over what they cant have immediately. – its a game.

‘casual’ friendly means casuals are not excluded because of scheduling, not that it takes longer to do things – that’s obvious.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

DeWolfe.2174:

vesica tempestas.1563:

they realised players wanted expansions more than Living story

And now we should all realize, that wasn’t the case. Also, that the Living Story was much more manageable for the player and the community. I’d also say it’s generally better for the game design wise. Too much at once creates far too many bugs and balance issues. The dev’s need to follow the adage, “Brick by Brick”.

Players wanted something on the scale of Factions or Nightfall (which weren’t technically expansions but semantics), not a living story season welded to a feature pack.

Especially for the obscene price Anet charged.

Subjective hindsight does not change reality. The majority preferred an expansion to more living story, and ANet saw that demand and reacted, despite their previous strategies which they accepted was not working.

As for price, the expansion price is in line with other expansions, and the expansion does not destroy older content. This is all noise though, what we are seeing here is endless ‘I don’t like HOT so therefore no one must like it’ which is evidently incorrect.

Phoenix.6917:

DocRimpel.5280:

As we love currencies so much in this game, how about earning an ‘XP token’ each time you fill the bar which can be used to purchase items from an XP Reward Vendor in Lions Arch.

+1
What Doc said.

+1 this nails it, you default to the experience mastery if you are maxed out on a bar currently, and the experience mastery dings an experience currency point on each level up – perfect , permanent xp gain again, and the currency abstracted away so the devs are free to evolve the currency to be relevant and not overpowered.

And there we have it.

Ipso facto, and the figures are readily available.

As someone else said, how would you spend a marketing budget for a mmorpg?

Vayne.8563:

sED.9342:

I started reading this thread and i had to stop at the end of the first page. guy is making a great point of how the game is casual. and yes, it is. but i laughed and just about fell out of my chair when hes calling a TWO YEAR grind to craft a legendary casual. there is NOTHING casual about two years. so your telling me after about 20 years of playing this game i will have a full inventory of legendary gear. somebody please tell me how crafting legendary gear is casual. it is the dumbest most unmotivating grind i have ever encountered in any game.

Answer. Legendaries were never meant to be casual. The trade off is they’re not required either. Early on, when people asked Eric Flannum if there would be stuff to grind for, he said, yes, but there wouldn’t be required grind.

This is where your legendaries fall, and to a lesser degree ascended weapons.

Wrong,, ‘casual’ content is about accessibility and the path to gaining a legendary or ascended is equally available to all. You may not like long term objectives, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t, and certainly not a generalisation like ‘casusl’ you could equally say we ranks is not casual because it would take years to get to max rank, or gathering gold is not casusl because it would take years to gather enough to feel rich in game. Just because you don’t like something that does not mean it’s bad content.

Lol don’t be silly, they made a bad decision with the eve new map design that is all. As for those raptors, I kill them, it’s fast xp.

Your not listening, if esports was not working they would not do it. estimated 6 million revenue per month.

I’m guessing that’s where guilds come in ultimately.

They do it to drum up business for gw2 = more people playing = a greater return then 200k = more investment.

Pandabro.8743:

It’s because there’s no good way to filter players. Raid leaders who have a goal of clearing the whole wing have responsibility to 8 other people to find someone who they know will be reliable. One way to do this is to make sure they have a certain number of insights which means they have a solid amount of experience.

Sure it’s far from fool proof but what other options are there? We don’t have performance measuring tools in the game so it’s impossible to gauge another person’s performance once they are in a group. The best away is trying to prevent underperformers from ever joining.

Actually the point of gaming in a group is to have fun and not get obsessed with winning or its a fail night. Imagine you tried to join an imaginary raiding group that was genuinely light years ahead of your skill and demanded that you had to have 500 insights to join – its the same thing, its 1 person being judgemental and forgetting that once apon a time they were new players too.

the 8 fallacies of network computing. In short, good design expects and recovers from network issues.

The network is reliable.
2.Latency is zero.
3.Bandwidth is infinite.
4.The network is secure.
5.Topology doesn’t change.
6.There is one administrator.
7.Transport cost is zero.
8.The network is homogeneous.

A raid is simply a dungeon that is aimed at 10+ players that tend to have more scope for complicated encounters,

Ye that’s the idea, no overpowered awards but just enough that xp has value for all content so at any time you can simply switch to the experience mastery you want to go for next, once a bar reaches max you click the train mastery item to get the reward then it resets.