Alleji

Gem Store and your credit card according to Arena Net.

I'm just laughing at the fact that this was written as though it has some intentions of being come Zeitgeist conspiracy theorist report, or ripped from Wikileaks. You're not uncovering anything that hasn't already been stated hundreds of times.

Nabuko Darayon, on 22 February 2013 - 05:25 PM, said:

The power of bugged traits >.> And.. the inability to mindlessly spin your greatsword for great justice like the top played classes.

Video guides: the WORST POSSIBLE WAY to convey information.
They're slow, linear, and usually (I haven't watched yours, so this isn't about you specifically) poorly done/shot/recorded/written/edited so much so it's painful to watch. (And too often they're just people posting some irrelevant crap, hoping to fluff their viewcount.)

If you have a list of DE 'chains' to follow....just write the list down.  Then share it with us.  It would be much appreciated!

Real, on 31 December 2012 - 07:14 AM, said:

The simple fact that you can have wildly different amounts of work necessary for a legendary due to rng is a big problem. Its a bad system, and its made worse by the fact that rich players can so easily manipulate the market and make tremendous profits doing so,

Zero Fox, on 28 December 2012 - 11:09 AM, said:

No. The trick is for ArenaNet to realise that people want a better way to organise grouping and provide that means to them in-game.

GW2 is at its best when it's not an MMO.

I am War Machine's GW2 lead officer Jang Gun.

I am deeply disillusioned about the current NA T1 match up.

People currently do all sorts of things to win: play the game in a wrong way, plant spies in the the other servers' guild and/or commanders, pm spamming all kinds of abusive words and making cynical remarks.

I, even until just now, received a lot of those pm spamming from unspecified persons from SoS. Looking at these people who apologize and pretend to be gentle on the forums while using abusive words and lying from behind, I ask myself if there has been any enemy that have been uncivilized and low leveled as them in the past gaming experience.

On the other hand, I am very disappointed by Arena Net who have been neglecting WvW and focusing PvE more and developers who cannot react to such a small bug fast enough.

I can say for sure that during the past 5 months from August to December, War Machine and I have never played the game in a unintended or wrong way. Enemies who fly around with the orb, jump over the wall to break the altar, and laying dead for several hours to be resurrected to take the same keep over and over. While I look at these enemies who think them as tactics to be proud of, I ask myself if I am not thinking correctly.

Earlier today I was thinking, "if you play dirty, I will react the same way." Then we jumped over the cliff of the garrison and took two of them pretty fast. Then I also thought WM should now focus on finding every possible bug and exploit that exist in the game like everyone else is doing then make fun of the enemies.

For the past hours I haven't been in WvW and thought about a lot of things.
Then I came to a conclusion. We don't want to play dirty. We don't want to play with/like low leveled players and pretend to be the king on top proud of ourselves.

War Machine and I will leave this disgusting T1 match up and will be heading to Kaineng, where we occasionally trained. A place where we give away all the benefits and advantages and only focus on fighting skills. We will not be like some others who bandwagons to another strong server and pretend to be the kings. It will be a tough and long journey, but in order to help a bit in saving the dying WvW and lower tiers, we are leaving T1.

If you want to join the trip to hell come join.

P.S. We will miss SBI.

You played 550 hours and wonder why the "new" feeling is gone ? Rofl.

I would like to see new ways to acquire unique weapons that aren't simply "Grind out this checklist and throw it in the forge". There is a huge and expansive world yet all the nice skins require a dull, repetitive grind in the same most profitable area.

Profession-based armor.  Would like each class to look a bit more distinguishable.

Robsy128, on 06 December 2012 - 04:15 PM, said:

How does a choice define who you are? Let's say you make a choice to collect stamps. Then you make a choice to stop collecting stamps. Are you a stamp collector now, or not? And is "stamp collector" even a fraction of an infinitesimally small part of a definition of who you truly are?

Yes, some people (you, for example) are loving GW2. But that's fun for you: a strange thing, different for everyone, yet the same basic feeling. Try to give it meaning, and it goes away. But one thing is constant: all fun games (regardless of who they are fun for) validate the player's ego. That is done in different ways... For people like you, it's about patting you on the head and telling you that you are a good boy because you did all that grind. For people like me, it's about patting me on the head and telling me that I'm a good girl for beating a difficult challenge. It's not even about who is the most deceived here, because in both cases, the grind and the challenge, respectively, were there to be beaten. And that is... fun? Yes, that is fun.

As an amusing thought experiment, think of that the next time you do any kind of PvP. The devs set the game up so that one of the teams can beat the other one. Which means that one of the teams is there to be beaten? Or both?

alucard13mmfmj, on 03 December 2012 - 12:48 AM, said:

Let's see...franchise item is used to sell units as a follow up, yet it lacks much of what the original had and it burned the fans in the end just to sell units.

Similarity?

Where is the Guild Wars in my Guild Wars game?  Where is that "no grind for gear tread mill" in my Gear Wars game?  Where is the "we removed as much tedium as we could" and then added it back in 3 months later?  The entire fiasco smacks of being WIlsoned.

I await the day I read that Colin posted "f that loser" on some developer facebook page.  At that moment the circle will have closed.

I've played mostly heavy or light armor classes until now, and i really liked the skin variety for them.

Especially for heavy armor, everything from being a tin can to plate bikini's out there

Now i'm thinking about making a thief, i've browsed a bit for what armor i can get for him, and... it's trenchcoats, trenchcoats everywhere. Ugh!

Can we please get more DIFFERENT medium armors? They all look freaking same!

Excellent post and I've been feeling the same way.

F2P to me is overrated and a lame way to conduct games.  Obviously companies can or think they can make more money doing it than with subs, or it wouldn't be such a trend right now.  While some people think "hehe, I get to play for free" - no, you really don't.  In most F2P you get an extended demo and you get nickel and dimed and if you REALLY wanna play, you end up paying, with the goal of the hosting company being that you end up paying MORE than a sub per month.

These games cost millions of dollars to play.  Nobody is giving them away for free.  Think whatever you want and maybe you're special and don't mind playing stripped down crappy versions of games to avoid paying ever.  But obviously enough people want more out of their gaming than the bare minimum and somebody ends up paying.

For people who love games and don't mind paying for their entertainment (ie, not trying to get everything for free, pirate games, steal music and videos off the net, etc, exaggeration - maybe - but I swear the attitudes of the people are similar) this new design paradigm is garbage, because what you get is games where every element of design is tainted by trying to steer you to the cash shop, microtransactions, cash walls, etc.  Game designers have to be constantly keeping in mind how they're going to get money out of you - instead of just being concerned with creating cool stuff for their games.  Entire game systems, like we see and the OP describes, are completely designed around controlling and limiting players to encourage cash shop use.

Maybe some people don't mind the tainted designs, limits, proddings, etc, but having played these games since EQLive and having paid subs for years, there is just a whole different vibe and feel to GW2 and moreso with other F2Ps that is just unwholesome to me.  I would rather play and truly have a wide open world that isn't so harshly governed by cash shop hall monitors and overlords.

I don't see how we, as players, can expect to get the best gaming experiences when devs have to be so mindful and focused on trying to squeeze cash out of everything they're doing.  Compared to a sub based game where they know they're getting money and the focus is on cranking out cool stuff to keep people subbing - stuff that can actually revolve around maximum fun.

ANet said their whole design philosphy is centered around fun but I'm not so sure and I agree with the OP, I see ANet tightly controlling and manipulating the game's economy, I see ANet shut down things players figure out to do to get ahead, ANet is designing based on pushing people to the cash shop (BL keys for the october event caused a surge, november event had new chests that caused a surge, now we have makeover kits (a good thing) but again causing a surge), along with other new game additions that keep people poor and/or grinding.  And they take fun stuff like dyes away after months of them being fun.

I'm one of those people who usually makes a ton of coin in these games thru various means - market manipulation, crafting, whatever - there's always lots of easy ways to get easy money. But not in GW2.  There's way less potential due to how the market is setup and controlled.  So little stuff has value.  A lot of big value stuff is entirely luck (get a precursor drop or thru MF).  Crafting has been ok - tiny profits til this last patch wiped it out by driving the price of ectos and T6 rares thru the roof.  Most people get sure gold in GW2 by grinding and that's what circulates - the latest good way to grind to get gold (til ANet shuts it down then something else becomes the new latest good way).

Good or bad?  Do you really need to be able to make easy money in MMORPGs?  For me it sucks since player econ is like a minigame to me and that part of GW2 just does not exist.  I fired up SWTOR (as a subscriber, their F2P is not tolerable for a prior subscriber) and even being ridiculously rusty and not knowing current market conditions I had over 60 items listed and was piling up credits immediately.  It was fun to be able to actually LIST something that had value and demand in the player economy and sell it for an actual profit that wasn't buggered by insane fees on top of everything.  In GW2 when conditions are good I might list a couple of exotics in a day, and I go days at a time without anything listing at all since most drops aren't worth selling via TP.

I think it sucks for most people because there just is less fun involved in player economy when there is so little to sell, when most crap you loot is straight to vendor, and when the market is so comletely tight and even due to being game-wide that you can pretty much never score an amazing deal or make an amazing sale.  You're sure to get undercut immediately and pretty much must undercut to hope to sell, and it takes lottery like luck to score an amazing deal before some TP shark grabs it up (you'd probably have better luck getting a precursor as a random drop).

I doubt many players like the way the WP costs scale, or repair costs, or often feeling like you need to grind like mad if you want any gold or just to pay regular expenses.  Ido gathering runs to get T6 mats, which is pretty boring, but say, when Plinx was the thing to do for gold before ANet ruined it, I would always see a pile of people doing those events, and I can't imagine they were really having all that much fun either.  Mindless gathering runs or mindless event grinding.  Yay.  Big fun.

GW2 is better than most for F2P due to the box sales and less painful prodding towards the store (you aren't really restricted to point of needing to spend and only slightly inconvenienced to encourage spending initially), but there is no doubt that the game is designed around pushing people towards the store.

I think it's much worse in other F2P's and this is why I'm really getting sick of F2P.  I have never minded paying a sub for a game worthy of a sub.  The problem is that not many games are worth 15/mo.  So instead of F2P, either lower your monthly sub to match what you're offering or do something to deliver 15/mo worth of paying.  Regardless, I'd rather pay a sub for untainted and pure fun gameplay without the taint and presense of a cash shop.

I also think F2P is bad for player quality in these games.  People who are paying nothing have zero care about playing nice or behaving at all.  The MMORPG genre's player quality is already dreadful due to the emphasis on solo gameply and inclusion of slapped on PvP (in largely PvE games), but going F2P lowers player quality even more.  Again, this isn't as bad in GW2 as what I've seen in other games, since with GW2 you have to buy the box and paying tends to make people take things a little more seriously (and to not want to get kicked out of the game after paying for it).

I hope F2P is a fad that goes away.  I don't mind paying for good gaming entertainment and it wouldn't bother me at all if people who aren't willing to pay for their entertainment just didn't get to enjoy that type of entertainment.