Guild Wars 2

[Eraser]

Really? Sure, I've only seen a relatively small portion of the game myself, but for me the experience has been relatively bug free.

[U4EA]

A lot of the later zones [especially Cursed Shore] are very buggy.

[Mat Linnett]

Yeah, it's been driving my mate insane and is preventing him from getting his 100%. To be honest, I think they'd be better off making these skill points in to commune ones. Saying that, today's patch notes do imply fixes:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates

I'm just finding money to be incredibly hard to get at the moment, with the numerous money sinks continually draining my funds. I think they've gone a little OTT with teleportation costs and armour repairs in particular.

[Transient]

Waypoints would be fine if we had mounts as well. Then we have the choice of an instant travel or a slighty-faster-than-normal travel. Right now I can either pay to instantly travel through 3 zones, or walk it by foot. That's a 20-minute walk.

[Pauly]

Oh shut up.

[U4EA]

I'm sure most people are already aware, but you can use Heart of the Mists as a free Lion's Arch port. Bring up your hero pane, and go to the sPVP tab to port to Heart of the Mists. This is free and you can do it from anywhere. Once there, simply run straight and you'll hit a portal to Lion's Arch. From there, you can take an Asura portal to any of the major cities [whatever is closest to your intended destination] and then take your final waypoint from there. This can drastically reduce cost as you can potentially cut down the distance significantly [depending on where you are and where you want to go]. If all you want to do is get back to Lion's Arch, it's totally free. It does add a few more loading screens though, so it's a tradeoff between cost and the convenience of a single loading screen.

I'm just finding money to be incredibly hard to get at the moment, with the numerous money sinks continually draining my funds. I think they've gone a little OTT with teleportation costs and armour repairs in particular.

I don't think it's OTT but it is very tight and I think in the long run will be good for reducing rampant inflation seen in most games. They are taking the game economy very seriously and this was seen with the heavy handed bans early on for people converting karma to gold at very favourable exchange rates. Since then, they have also removed the ability to vendor or salvage karma gear. In the long run, these are good things.

For me, I used to salvage everything when I didn't really understand the relative price and value of crafting materials. When I levelled my trade skills in earnest, and found myself buying mats off the AH, I found that the common crafting materials [ore, wood, etc.] were insanely cheap on the AH. So much so, that you are better off vendoring everything [aside from 70+ rares which can salvage into ectos] and then buying what you need.

Over time, I have developed the following rough guidelines:
o Before salvaging anything, bring up the Sell tab on the AH to see what your particular items are selling for, occasionally you might be able to offload some of it on to others. I only do this for items which people have ordered, I never list stuff and hope for it to sell later. Maybe that's a mistake, who knows? Gots no patience to wait though.
o Salvage EVERYTHING until I hit my 500 required for the monthly achievement, I use the cheapest 25 stack kit for this.
o After hitting the 500 requirement, vendor all whites, blues, and greens.
o Always salvage all "salvage" items.
o Salvage 70+ rares with the best salvage kit for ectos.

My cashflow improved significantly after I started doing this. The other major factor was building a magic find set. I went for the rare crafted set [not exotic] as the extra stats were not really worth the price premium. I use 5/6 pirate runes and 1/6 traveller, also for the magic find. I use magic find weapons with the Superior Sigil of Luck. This is also a simple way of upping the number of drops you get .. and Omnomberry Bars for magic and gold find.

[Transient]

Nice tips.

[Mat Linnett]

Still very curious about why we're not allowed to craft Power/Vitality/Toughness gear.
You can get everything but the helmet from the Orr karma vendors at 42,000 a piece, or you can try to farm over 1,300 Badges of Honour in WvWvW.

Oh and don't get me wrong U4EA, I use every one of those tips you suggest and have been doing that stuff since I started playing, but repair bills from attempting dungeons or doing WvWvW very quickly eat in to your money, and unless you explicitly put aside some time to farm (ie, not actually play the game for fun), you'll become broke incredibly quickly.

[Ryoki]

I’m finding myself suddenly utterly bored with GW2 and have all but stopped playing.

I have several gripes with the game:

- The lack of roles. This whole getting rid of the Holy Trinity is an admirable attempt to rethink the genre, but it has a severe drawback; i just don’t have any sense of purpose for my character at the moment. What should i do, what am i good at? I have no clue, everyone seems to be capable of doing similar things as me, making me (and everyone else) redundant in a group, because noone has to rely on anyone else. This is directly related to my next irritation:

- Not enough teamplay. When in a zone under 80 you can solo pretty much everything save the larger events, which leads to zero teamplay. I’m in my sixties now and have teamed up exactly once. It feels like i’m playing a singleplayer game with clever bots at times. For the larger events you’ll sometimes see a bunch of players flinging spells at a target and when it’s over everyone fucks off to do their own thing. No sense of purpose & no sense of accomplishment.

- The money. See Matts post above. I really, really can’t be arsed to grind simply to get around the map and repair my armor.

- The underwater combat. Nice idea, not so nice execution. It’s a whirlwind of chaos and a lot buggier than it should be. Find myself avoiding it as much as possible.

- The quests. Instead of the classic ‘kill twenty bats’ and ‘bring this to there’ quests we now have… exactly the same. The only difference is that you’re filling up a bar that tells you when you are done and you don’t have to speak to a questgiver to do it.

I think the most fun i had in the game was crafting (which tbh is pretty sad). And maybe that one really big boss i came across, that was rather fun too. Done with it for now though, it’s just not interesting to me anymore. I hope they fix some of the things that turn me off, might come back to it if they do.

[Eraser]

I find that I'm in agreement with Ryoki. I'm approaching this game more like a single player game with clever bots (as Ryoki put it) than a real MMO.

And the difference between GW2 and GW1's quest system is that in GW2 you have to spend two clicks less because you don't have to physically talk to the NPC issueing the quest. In that sense GW2 is a little worse because I'm doing something and I don't even know why I'm doing it or for who.

I also think that the lack of the 'holy trinity' was a requirement for this form of gameplay. If you have the holy trinity setup, you'll need to people to cling together to survive. In Guild Wars 1, this was simple because people were basically forced to team up to enter instances, especially the missions. You formed a group and set out to play with that group, sticking together. In fact, if one player left an instance area, the whole group would teleport along with him.

In GW2, parties are much looser in the way they're set up. You can be in a party with people all over the game-world, not actually playing together. Also, because the world isn't instanced, there's no real reason to stick with the people you're playing with. So if people don't stick together, everyone needs to be a self-sustaining entity, and thus be capable of doing a little of everything.

The gripe I have is that with GW1, I fondly remember people calling out for others to complete parties. I have done quite a few runs through areas with complete strangers, sticking together in the same party for hours on end. In GW2, I haven't actually played together with anyone other than my own brother and even that experience is a bit... well... let's go here and kill some dudes and then go there. There's no real cooperation beyond reviving each other. And that's pointless as well because any other of the 15 people around can revive us.

[MKJ]

whoa.

reading that made me reminisce about the GW1 times. sweet nostalgia, what a great game that was, exactly because of the character roles and the instanced missions.

sigh

[Ryoki]

Oh, i forgot to moan about the Personal Story Mode, so here goes: uninteresting story, bad voiceacting and incredibly difficult missions. And because GW2 hates teamplay it's not allowed to bring even one other person for the bigger events in it. So you'll end up dying and reviving and maybe killing a mob, getting killed again, rinse & repeat until you win. And then you pay a lot of money to repair your armor which has been destroyed completely, resulting in a net loss.

Terrible.

[Eraser]

My main character in GW1 was a monk, and I really enjoy that sort of supporting role (I usually played as medic in games like Wolf:ET as well). With the right people, playing as monk was a really grateful thing to do.

In GW2 there's no such thing. In fact, I haven't got any healing abilities that I can cast on others to heal them. So if I see my bro is running low on health, there's nothing I can do other than attacking the same mobs hoping to kill those faster than they kill my bro.

In that sense, I miss actively helping people. The only thing I have that affects others is some nature spirits I can cast, giving people a +10% damage bonus or +something percent speed increase. Stuff people barely even notice.

[Mat Linnett]

The one thing that annoys me the most when grouping is when people start complaining about the lack of the Holy Trinity

To be fair though, at lower levels and upon first experiences with dungeons, it is hard to find out what you're supposed to do and how you fit in to the team.
This isn't helped when the majority of players out there advise using builds that are more glass canon than durable adventurer. This premise is backed up by checking material prices on the trading post, where the runes and materials used to craft gear for such builds are valued more highly than any other.

Over time, I've settled on a build that balances damage and durability, with a healthy amount of group buffs as well as higher than average damage output, finished off with very high degree of personal survivability.

And grouping becomes essential when doing the higher end event chains, particularly in the Orrian areas (when said events aren't broken).
We rinsed several event chains in Malchor's Leap last night playing as a 5 man guild team, with even the weakest member of the team contributing. And it felt pretty damn good and fun, with aggro noticeably switching between my friend Gobhoblin and me as we've been able to coordinate our playstyles quite well. We finished off with the Temple of Zephys event, where I was able to melee the final boss and grab its attention, then dip out every now and again to let my regen kick in while Gob would draw some of the fire away from me.
The players who did go down regularly were those who had specced glass canon builds, with one of our WvW stars in particular spending quite a lot of time on the floor saying "WTF?!?".

But yeah, I can see that it's not for some people, and that's okay.

Personally, I absolutely love it

[Ryoki]

Teamwork should have been essential the whole game, not just at max level. If that’s a concious decision they made, i’m really not getting it. And if the game only gets interesting at lvl 80... well, fuck that to be honest, i can't be bothered.

As for the builds thing, i'd be willing to tinker with my build to see if i fare any better in a dungeon, if only there was more of an incentive to do dungeons in the first place. As it is, noone seems to be willing to do them. Or maybe that’s not the case, maybe people are itching to do them all over - the lack of a looking for dungeon type chat channel means i’ll never know. I've only did the one with you guys and that's it, not even once have i witnessed someone asking to do a dungeon in general chat. Might have something to do with the massive repair bill you will face and the prospect of no useful rewards, i don't know.

Anyway, meh. Guess i'll wait for the next game to get excited about and then be dissapointed by (looking at you Xcom)

[Eraser]

So what do you folks think of the way the story is incorporated?

In my memory, in GW1, exploring new areas in the game was driven mostly by the story and, on a smaller scale, by quests.

Starting off with quests, that stuff worked because you often had to walk from point A to point B and you'd explore new ground most of the time. This was possible because of the walking from and to locations related to the quest, and because it used a more restrictive fog of war kind of mechanic where you'd only explore the map in a small area around you.

In GW2, you discover an entire section of the map at once, so exploration isn't really that exciting anymore. There's also no real incentive to explore, because most, if not all quests, require you to stay around the area where the little heart icon is and do something X number of times. And that is a gripe as well. I'd rather walk from A to B and back to A than having to sit at A killing 15 of the same creatures.

As for the larger, overarching story, in GW1, that really drove you on to the next section. From Ascalon to the west through the mountains, to the Maguuma Jungle, back to the southeast to the Crystal Desert all the way to the end. The story brought you all over the world. In GW2, the story had me starting in Divinity's Reach, go through Queensdale, then take a pinch of Kessex Hills, a tiny section of Gandarran Fields and then over to Lion's Arch. It just completely ignores most parts of Kessex Hills/Gandarran Field, didn't even bring me to Caledon Forest, didn't get me to Brisban Wildlands or to Metrica Province. And Caledon Forest/Metrica province look 1000 times more interesting than boring old bog-standard Queensdale.

Is it just a case of me having to choose a different race? Well no not really, because in the end I did need to go into those other areas for the sheer fact that I required the XP to be able to continue the story. So what feeling of purpose does that give me? None at all. It feels like crummy dry old grinding for XP.

Maybe I'm playing this game for the wrong reasons, but it feels like a disappointing departure from how GW1 worked. That game gave me the feeling of adventure and exploring the unknown. GW2 gives me a feeling of statistics and chores.

[Silicone_Milk]

It's interesting to see these posts saying people are getting bored.

I hit the same boredom point about 2-3 weeks ago and didn't realize I was actually bored with the game until I had noticed I hadn't bothered to log on in over 7 days.

The lack of definitive roles creating an overall lack of teamwork is one of the main issues for me, I think. I really like specializing in a task and being damn good at it. The few times I've played with other people I've just focused on throwing down walls of fire to augment everyone else's attacks and just generally spamming flamethrower into big groups of mobs.

Sadly, the most fun I had in the game was cooking (I'm sure I mentioned this earlier). I liked hunting down ingredient vendors and crafting various food types and dyes. But that, too, started to get a little old.

Now I've been preoccupying myself with Borderlands 2 and the new monk class in WoW (yeah I know, WoW is pretty shit these days but I'm willing to give it another shot with the new expansion. Monk is pretty badass so far)

[Pauly]

What's boring me is the lack of variety of monsters. Bandits and Centaurs. Repeat.

[Transient]

I haven't really seen centaurs outside of the starting areas. Bandits, on the other hand, are getting tiresome. At least change up the costumes...

[U4EA]

I'd be curious to learn why the same folks denigrating the great Satan, Blizzard, for the Diablo 3 RMAH are now, oddly, silent about GW2's RMAH.

[Mat Linnett]

I'm not really in favour of it, although it's interesting being able to buy account extras with in-game currency.
I did buy gems initially to get character slots and some storage expansion, but I've not used it to buy gold, and I think that this is where it really falls down, as while they may be scammers and account stealers, gold sellers are selling their wares for substantially less than ArenaNet. I think at its worst, ArenaNet have compromised the security of players with the Gemstore.

It's hard making comparisons to the RMAH in particular, as while you can convert real money to gems, then gems into gold, the reverse process stops at converting gold to gems. You can't convert gems into real world cash.
Additionally, I grudgingly admit that ArenaNet do need some form of monetisation given that Guild Wars 2 is a proper MMO, just without a subscription fee.

There's American posters on the official forums freely admitting spending upwards of $150 in the Gemstore. Now THAT'S crazy this soon after release.

I'm also very suspicious of just how stingy they're being with drops and how quick they are to nerf loopholes involving players making gold quickly. I think a lot of the goldsinks have been designed to drive players towards the Gemstore. And again, because gold sellers are offering gold for less than ArenaNet, it's once again potentially compromising player account security.

[U4EA]

I think at its worst, ArenaNet have compromised the security of players with the Gemstore.

I don't see how you can reach this conclusion. Gold sellers would have existed even if ArenaNet didn't have the gemstore. The people who would happily buy gold from gold sellers [in the absence of a legitimate source] are still going to buy gold. The only difference is, now they have a safer option [the gemstore] if they are willing to pay a higher price.

People who weren't willing to buy gold from gold sellers before, aren't all of a sudden going to consider getting gold from the official gemstore .. but then instead opt for the gold seller merely because of the better rate. They weren't willing to take the risk before, why would the legitimate option push them to take the risk now?

In short, considering the safety vs. price trade-off, gold sellers are getting less business now with the gemstore active than they would if there was no gemstore at all. The gemstore actually increases player security because people now have a safe method to buy gold. Although this might attract formerly hesitant gold buyers to the official gemstore [i.e. it increases the overall number of gold buyers], it does nothing to qualm their reticence with gold sellers and have them take that extra step [i.e. it does not increase the number of gold buyers buying gold from gold sellers].

Gold sellers are always going to undercut the price floors set by the game developer because that's the only way they can compete. If you have the option to buy gold at the same rate from a gold seller, or directly from the developer, you're going to pick the legitimate source every time.

There's American posters on the official forums freely admitting spending upwards of $150 in the Gemstore. Now THAT'S crazy this soon after release.

I've seen quite a few discussion threads on the Reddit D3 and GW2 forums about this topic, and a lot of gold buyers [whether legitimate or from gold sellers] have put forward their views. Contrary to the common stereotype, it's not rich kids buying gold with their parents' credit cards. It's mature adult professionals who don't have a lot of spare time to devote to tedious things like farming. They enjoy playing the fun parts of the game, levelling with friends, doing dungeons, pvp etc. but want to skip the boring time investment [i.e. gold] required to make oneself effective in those arenas. Dropping a couple hundred on a hobby when you have disposable income doesn't seem too outlandish to me, though personally I'd never buy gold [legitimately or otherwise]. I haven't bothered getting bank space, bag space or character slots yet, but if I do, it'll be from buying gems using gold I've accumulated through playing the game.

I think legitimate developer implemented RMAHs are only going to get more common over time, and it's probably the right way to go.

Thanks for the response.

[Eraser]

lol, Yahtzee's review of Guild Wars 2:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... ild-Wars-2

He's bang on about context. Yeah I get it, I'm probably not a true MMORPG player because I don't get stiffies from numbers that go up, but a little bit of context to glue the whole thing together would've made it a much more enjoyable experience.

[GONNAFISTYA]

lol I was just about to post that review.

[Transient]

I've been waiting for that review. Surprisingly tame, as far as his reviews go.