The Shrine

So the current beta weekend ends later tonight but I've gleamed all I wanted from it. I thought the combat from the original was improved to the point where it was hardly recognizable.. Still not quite as smooth as, say, TERA, but at least it doesn't suffer from rubber-banding/that weird 'sticking' effect from the original.

It does away with quests that send you out to kill things entirely, instead opting for you to help out people spread throughout the zone.. who want you to kill things and fetch things for them. Okay, but at least it lets you pick which of these things you want to do 10+ times for these people.

Class and weapon balancing seem to be a lot of what's left for this surprisingly polished game. For a game with a release date still TBA it's refreshing to see it so well put together in comparison with other games of the type. I found that even with my aging desktop there had to be several dozen players in the immediate vicinity for my computer to chug.

If you've been following the game at all you know that which kind of weapon (and/or offhand item) you have equipped sets the first five skills you have at your disposal. This works out pretty well except some weapon combinations are pretty useless compared to others. There's also the fact that certain weapons for certain classes provide skills that are boring as hell to play with. I'm sorry, but the longbow for the ranger shouldn't be that boring and the great sword shouldn't be the only fun and viable weapon for a mesmer to use while soloing. Even with all that, I would say the biggest problem with weapons is that you only get these same five skills with these weapons for-fucking-ever. Trait points you get at level 11+ let you specialize what these skills do, but if you're using your mace at level 3, you're going to be using it the exact same way 77 levels later. Lame. But I imagine easy as balls to balance.

The mesmer seemed like one of the only extremely unpolished things in the game but apparently was basically added in during this specific beta event so I guess that can be expected.

The story quests seemed to vary a great deal, varying with certain selections in character creation. While not quite up to snuff with the variety in SWTOR, the variations mean that you won't have to sit through the exact same thing if you roll the same race for a new character. There were also some daily missions that seem to be designed to give you decent rewards (by account, not character) for playing your character(s) for 1-2 hours a day. The unfortunate thing about these is that they don't seem to be trackable on the quest tracker and that they literally reset every 24 hours, as opposed to 7AM every day, which kind of defeats the purpose for adding an incentive to play daily to casual players.

The star of the show is the events and they typically don't disappoint. The variety here is impressive. The first person you need to help if you roll a human, say, has a farm. In order to curry favor you help out on the farm killing worms, feeding cows, watering plants...zzzzz... But if you're there in time for an event (which almost occur constantly when the zone is extremely populated) you'll get attacked by a giant worm the size of a dozen story building or have to defend the farm from a gigantic bandit attack. This stuff is well designed and plentiful, but there are a lot of holes experience-wise and farming events specifically to level is tricky. Luckily each race gets its own zones and you can pick and match your way through at least the beginning levels.

I see myself losing just as much time in this game as the original. Which was a ton.

Oh, and, crafting is about as cookie-cutter boring as it gets, but at least you don't park yourself at a forge for an hour crafting ingots since crafting duplicates of the same item goes from taking 2 seconds to a negligible amount of time awfully quick. There really needs to be more inventory space and bank NPCs for this to be feasible in enjoyment, though, otherwise it'll feel like you're spending too much time sorting inventory and waiting for the main city to load then killing the shit out of some centaurs. I think how they try to mix it up with crafting is that you have to experiment in order to gain access to different recipes. This could be interesting. I doubt it.

Finally announced a release date - August 28th... earlier than I thought.

Last beta event started today.. really wish it coulda been next week when I should have the new PC put together.

Gave this a go, I was impressed.

No monthly subscription either? Might be a day 1 buy.

They made a decent amount of improvements from the last go around, as well. Seems to generally run better than it did last time. They added 'collections' for crafting resources so your bank and inventory aren't constantly full, which was one of my major complaints from the last beta phase that I forgot to mention.

Nervous about the cash shop getting annoying. Five character slots definitely won't be enough if I get hooked on this game long enough and getting charged even $5 for a character slot is going to drive me crazy.

Game is definitely fun as hell, though.

I'm skeptical about the games that are built in F2P since it seems to be just acknowledging the fact the game will eventually die because it can't cut it, though it's better than the games that refuse to admit it's not going anywhere. At best you get something like Diablo 3's RMAH, i.e. a successful rip off for the company but a relatively painful experience for the user. Though it's pretty hard to screw up the standard MMORPG model and it's hard to beat free so there isn't much risk to take here.

I wouldn't lump this particular game in with the greedier F2P games, considering they basically invented it (in a way) and the original didn't even have a cash shop. They know what they're doing in this regard. They'll make their money the same way they did before - releasing big, full price, expansion packs. The cosmetic stuff (aviator glasses? really?) is your standard fare for people into that stuff and the boosts are there for the min-maxers but probably won't effect the average players gameplay experience. There is a gem (currency bought with real money) to Guild Wars currency AH and this is mostly just a good way to combat gold sellers. This could also be a cool way to eventually afford extra character slots.

I tried to give mesmer more of a try again during this event. It was my second favorite (core) class in the original Guild Wars so I really wanted to like it in this iteration. I just couldn't find any fun in it. I checked the forums and the true devotees to the class said the viability of the class in PvE was fine but that the class just wasn't any good in PvP. I must be missing something, but I think I give up for now since I've found nearly every other class enjoyable to just jump into. There definitely still need to be some tweaks to the class, though. It's silly how much more viable the other classes are in the beginning in comparison.

I'm a little more content with the limitation of weapon skills this time around.

There are still a ton of crashes to the desktop which seems insane at this stage of the game. Hopefully this is something that they're going to iron out in the last month of development. I would say that in five hours of playing I would experience 2-4 crashes.

There's almost no such thing as a 'fair F2P'. If it's fair it's usually because whoever is selling the stuf greatly underestimated the value of the free stuff.

The cosmetic stuff is supposed to make a lot of money. See the WoW Celestial Pony, or anything from EQ1's Legend of Norrath where they're handing out like $10K prizes for tournaments that are related to its F2P cash shop. I mean nobody knows how much money it takes but $10K is about near the top of what I see for any kind of gaming tournament so it's safe to assume the cash shop must have made a ridiculously amount of money to warrant that kind of prize money. Problem is that for every Celestial Pony or Legend of Norrath you have 100 examples of stuff that don't work, and since it's hard to predict why something like Celestial Pony will suddenly sell like hotcakes F2P ends up being a nickle & dime ripoff.

Actually it's pretty easy to see why stuff like Legend of Norrath or Celestial Pony worked. They're cosemetic stuff but it's tied to some kind of in game power (I think Celestial Pony came out at a time where not everyone have the super duper fast flight mounts). Most of the people were indeed buying power, not cosemetic. Quite a few guys enter the LoN tournaments for $10 because it comes with a Seru speed mount for your entree fee which is stuff most players do not have, which is why you've a ton of people in a tournament where most people don't even know the rules of the said tournament let alone actually have a deck capable of winning. Of course eventually everyone has the super duper fast mount so you can't sell that anymore, which is why this F2P stuff needs to be planned out. One of the power items from LoN cash shop in EQ1 basically become mandatory for high end raiding and it drove a frenzy of LoN pack sales but eventually people realized it's pretty dumb to shell out $200 for an item that you absolutely must have to be cutting edge in raiding (which eventually gets nerfed for exactly the same reason). Still, most game's cash shops couldn't even generate that kind of sales even once. You really need to be willing to sell quite a bit of power to get people's money, and I don't know why game companies are so stingy so they're the one who control the power too.

Ill more than likely get it. I loved GW for the fact that I could pick it up and play intermittently without having to pay. My schedule just doesnt allow for the constant time needed for a traditional MMO

I put countless hours into the original and its expansions when they came out but I just couldn't get back into them when I tried last year. I would say GW2 has managed to appeal to 15-30 minute gaming spurts even more than the original, though, so you're in luck in that regard. Basically everything you do takes 15 minutes.

I watched a long video from the last beta event where my bad experience with the Mesmer class was shown to be more because of my lack of experience and low level then anything meaningful. Still could definitely use a dramatic boost in low level play but I'm much more willing to give the class a go then I was before. Excited for the head start launch in five days.

Jumped into one of their few hour stress tests last and it runs much better (duh) on my upgraded computer even if it doesn't look all that dramatically different from the lowest settings to the highest. Now I'm just puzzling together race/class/history combinations.

Tentative plan is to roll my characters on the Maguuma server

I started on Stormbluff Isles. This game is way overrated compared to reviews, but I guess you do get what you pay for. Right now the game plays a lot like a slightly worse version of RIFT but it's hard to beat $0/month over $15/month. The cash shop isn't really that bad for a game with no sub, so I guess the idea is that they try to make enough off the $60/box sales, which is a reasonable approach.

On the harder events it's really not obvious when the big guy is going to do his instant kill move that you've to avoid/roll out of. They could take a page from RIFT where all the big guys do moves that do like 40-50% of your total HP in one hit which means you can take a few of those before you die even if you never avoided it, but of course you can't possibly do this continously. The cool thing about RIFT's zonewide is that you can basically have 50 guys beat on something without anyone ever actually healing and still usually survive because it's usually very obvious when the boss do their major moves. Not so much in Guild Wars 2. There seems to be an assumption that someone is actually going to heal and good luck finding that someone when you've 30 guys beating on a random boss. Probably suck slightly less if you're a ranged, but I picked a melee.

All the melee classes get a ranged weapon or two and I'd definitely recommend lugging it around for big battles where you'll get smashed immediately in melee. This is especially handy if you're doing an event that's 1-3 levels above you where you can't take more than a hit or two from even the minions.

I got my mesmer to 10 and he got stuck on the last beginners story mission so I'm putting him on hold for now since I intended to use a thief as my main.

Also $10 for another character slot is such bullshit. Everything else is reasonable. Considering how long it'll take to max out five characters I guess the bang for your buck is probably there, but $10? Come on, now. I wasn't expecting it to be at cost of server storage (which is probably like a tenth of a penny), but it's easily twice what I would have been comfortable with giving them.

Game was definitely over-hyped but they did a pretty damn good job.

Usually services in MMORPGs cost trivial. Even when back in EQ1 where they actually had to physically look up your entry in the database and do a move because they apparently never thought of attaching unique IDs to people's name, it still obviously cost considerably less than the $30 or whatever they charge for the labor involved. They obviously charge you $ just because they can.

It seems like this game uses the concept that any attack that appears to hit a large area actually hits a large area, which is okay except there's literally no way you can tell when it's coming. They need to really look at how RIFT gets the big zerg PvE battles to work. You can never go into a zerg battle assuming anybody's going to heal but it's not going to be very fun if you die the moment you get aggro, so in RIFT the big PvE bosses actually do very little melee damage and their big moves are something out of Dragonball where you can see them charge up, go get a drink, and they'd still be charging up and if you still get hit that's obviously your problem not the game's problem, and they're always % based so you can at least take 1 or 2 hits even if you're grossly underleveled, though conversely this also means you can never completely power through it (i.e. a level 50 at a level 10 zone still has to avoid the big attacks).

I really dislike the 'hey mom, our mobs know how to run away!' AI aspect. It's like literally everything with a ranged attack runs away just to show you that the mobs are smart. Honestly I bet you can have a botter come up with a better kiting mechanism if they have all the advantages mobs get (being able to turn on a dime, ability to run through all obstruction, no need to worry about aggroing more stuff, and the ability to use all abilities on the run).

I tried some World vs World and basically involved running into a bunch of guys and then die, but there's always fun in mindless charging to your doom. Besides, my server is winning, so it's all good.

So far as value per money it's not a bad deal in the long run I guess, just because there's no sub. I'm not convinced it's better than RIFT, WoW, or SWTOR for active playing though. Of course sub-based game are impossible to play on-and-off without losing a ton of money because you can't just pay a monthly sub for 1 month for a game you play for 10 hours this month, and it's certainly not a good value to play it like that compared to a whole mess of games you can otherwise play.

That said the underyling ideas of the game isn't bad, and it's a reasonable compromise between $15/month with nothing to show for it or F2P where everything of usefulness costs money. But if Torchlight 2 came out first I'd probably just play that instead.

At least based on the feedbacks so far I think it shows rather conclusively that people will tolerate a far worse game if it's a lot cheaper (it's not like people can't tell the sub cost adds up to a lot over time).

If GW2 was a sub based game it'd be barely average but not charging that $15/month gets you a lot of positive karma with players, who are obviously cheap.

Crafting in this game sucks hard. Unless I'm missing something about skill ups there is no possible way you're hitting 75 in any tradeskill before you get out of the first zone and at that point you can no longer gather the basic materials for the first tier. The stuff uses way too much materials and requires way too much time and probably won't make anything beyond what you can find anyway. It seems like the tradeskill was modeled after EQ2 which had probably the best crafting system in a modern MMORPG except they didn't even copy any of the stuff that worked (like having a tradeskill system that was good, having the ability to obtain materials by the truckloads, and the ability to buy more materials with cash shop if you're desperate enough). I mean in EQ2 you'd literally gather 2000 whatever ore before you start working on your next tier of skill but due to the blazing traveling speed + nothing aggros you if you're X levels higher than they are (this is never true in GW2) it's actually feasible to gather up thousands of materials while you'd be insane to do that in GW2.

World PvP seems like a Warhammer clone without any concern for balance, but mindless zerging has its own fun, especially when you're on the winning side. The respawn points in the World versus World stuff seems way too far away. If you lose a major battle you might not be able to get back there for 5 minutes if someone didn't rez you, and sure you want to make deaths meaningful but I don't know if making someone walk 5 minutes back to the battlefield is a good way to do it. At least it's pretty smooth and have no real frame rate issues as far as I can tell.

As an aside, I'm seeing a lot of 'worst launch in history' and I think by now, every MMORPG that's ever launched had a worst MMORPG launch in history. I mean okay AH being down the whole time was pretty bad, and sometimes I wonder what's the point of having your home server if you get booted to the overflow server every single time, but otherwise it's pretty smooth. I have a problem with the game itself, namely it's just not that good, but the launch itself is pretty decent.

I hit 75 with my trade skills just fine in the first zone. You get a fuck ton of experience for 'discovering' recipes and that rockets you up a coupe skill points a pop. You add in skill ups for building the basic stuff and you get there just fine. There are a lot of combinations for discoveries so this isn't a huge issue beyond being careful not to waste components/fill up your bank.

What tradeskills do you have? I don't see how the materials can possibly work out for tailoring and armorsmithing. Maybe some other skills is possible but you just won't have enough stuff to get anywhere near 75.

I managed getting Jeweler really far up but I had another character bolstering my gem collection. I try to 100% each map I'm on so I'm consistently doing a bit of exploring where there's no reason for me not to grab next to every node I see. I also managed to get leatherworking to 75 in the first zone. Now that I think about it more, getting two (unless they're completely unrelated in resources) above 75 is probably impossible in the first zone.

This wouldn't be an issue if the god damned AH was working. I got a 20 minute peak at it around 6AM on Sunday but then they replaced it with the cute sleeping monster. Resources weren't super cheap but they were affordable and that's with no one being able to use the thing.

You need about 300 copper ores to to from 0-75. I didn't even break a single stack copper picks (100) by the time I got out of first zone, and of course I mine everything I see the way. Part of the problem is that nodes do not respawn over time because they're available on a per person basis, so let's say you find an area with 4 copper nodes which is good, you mine all 4 of them but these aren't going to respawn at all until you either leave the equivlaent zone or go somewhere really far away to start mining stuff. Ironically this makes overflow server a pretty good way to gather stuff because you can go to the overflow server, gather what you need, and by the time you're done gathering you can go back to your regular server and mine there again. It looks like ores are only available near areas that looks like mines which means when you're on the open areas you can go for a very long time only seeing one or two ore at the most.

I'm not convinced AH would've helped much because people usually sell raw materials at overpriced values but it'd at least help some.

Are you salvaging? That helps a ton. I basically only sell junk.

Seems like it'd cost less to sell the stuff and buy the raw materials from AH, since it doesn't tell you what you managed to salvage anyway. It's hard to make a guess as to whether you should salvage something when the interface tells you nothing about what you can salvage back and the only way you can tell is remember how much of each stuff you have had before you salvaged.

Yeah that thought crossed my mind too but until the AH is up the crafting supplies take precedence over selling, especially since you can get a pretty great amount of experience crafting.

There's just so much information missing that it feels like it's some kind of cheap MMORPG title. I mean there are like 5 kinds of salvage kits, but you really have no idea whether it's even worth it to buy the more expensive salvage kits since you don't know about the yield on the basic material. Like say you salvage a sword, you probably get metal back, but how many? You have no idea unless you wrote it down ahead of time so after a while I figure I might as well sell the sword instead. Not to mention it's kind of a pain to click on salavage kit and then look for all the items you can salvage in the first place because the salvageable stuff doesn't light up (or rather everything is lighted up the whole time).

Having different kinds of gathering tools is pretty dumb too if you ask me.

Expensive salvage tools salvage better things from items but that's meaningless until later. Expensive tools should be saved for green items and better. I don't care about what exact amounts I get back. A lot of it has to do with chance. If I get two materials back I'm usually happy, but most of the time I don't even bother looking.

I just got through the first dungeon on story mode. Very difficult. Boss battles were mostly fun if kind of cliche. Items weren't really worth it although someone in my group got their first major rune. Got about one full level going in just before hitting 31 and getting to 32 on the completion exp.

Interesting observation, I just looked at gems -> gold and vice versa and since they listed the average price for the last 5 days, it's easy to figure out ArenaNet takes 1/3 commission off everything (average buy price = 34 silver, average sell price = 25 silver).

If you run any kind of gambling with a margin like that nobody would play your game after a while. In fact that's what some of the online casino 'scams' are, where they can simply control the outcome since it's all electronic to get you considerably less than your expected payout (not that it was great before).

I saw an article saying Diablo 3's problem was that they got it backwards, they try to monetize the secondary market without the great game that created the market. You've to create a game like Diablo 2 that has a great secondary market and then monetize it, not the other way around. I'd argue that Blizzard being way too greedy didn't help either.

The weird thing is that you got plenty of example of where if you just take a little bit off the top you can keep everyone in the game for a long time. Casinos are an obvious example but EBay is like that too. Instead game makers seem to come up with schemes that's more like 'better make as much money as fast as possible before people catch on', which might explain why most DLC/service type stuff from gaming companies hasn't really been received well.

Still dominating my free time. Been bouncing around between all my alts trying to find something that fits. Have kind of settled on my thief for now but I'm basically enjoying every class but mesmer, necro, and engineer.

Joined a guild and had to settle on the Henge of Denravi server which is kind of annoying since it's apparently the most active PvP server in the game so the one time a week or so I feel like WvWing there's a gigantic queue, even when next to no one is logged in. Not a huge loss since every time I play it's basically a never-ending tug-of-war.

The second dungeon is several magnitudes easier than the first. The xp reward is weirdly high for the amount of effort required to get through it. Still, I'm resisting the urge to grind since there's just so much to do that isn't playing through the same bosses ad nauseum.

The high end stuff seems pretty much unplayable. In the level 70+ zones you just see people train everything all over the place because nobody can clear their way anywhere and most events aren't even remotely possible without a large number of people.

The badness of the endgame is more than enough to undo whatever good the 1-70 experience is, not that 1-70 was all that good. It seems like Guild Wars 2's idea of challenge involves jumping from platform to platform, but if Super Mario Brothers 1 had the precision of GW2 then Nintendo probably wouldn't exist as a company today. The Orr continent is pretty much unplayable unless you're with the large crowd of people. It reminds me of The Underfoot expansion in EQ where the entire expansion is designed to kill you repeatedly with absolutely no thought as to how you're supposed to win. Eye of Zhitan hits for 11K, for example. Since the gear acquisiton is a huge grind you end up having to do the platform stuff since those gets you 2 Exotics and some of the jumping puzzles are just infruriatingly bad.

And of course people will say it's 'challenging' sort of like the same way guys who say The Husk in EQ1 is challenging probably never been there (I was one of the two groups that were in The Husk when it was current, and I was there every day so I know there isn't anyone else besides another group in there). I mean for the most part you just strafe in a circle and range DPS stuff, and as long as you don't get hit by a one hit kill move like anything from an Eye of Zhitan you're probably okay, though due to the mob density + aggro range + insanely fast respawn you've to strafe in a very tight circle or you're just going to run into even more stuff and one of those guys is likely to have a root/pull/fear. The Dynamic Events on Orr is pretty much pure fail because you cannot possibly travel to one of them on time or even necessarily alive because whenever one is going, that waypoint is always contested and the waypoints are spread out really far away. All you can do is teleport to the closest one and try to train your way there hoping you don't die and get there on time. Aside from the Eye of Zhitan the DEs are surprisingly easy because as long as you can clear about a a visible screen's worth of enemy (and that's easy for any party of 5 or more) you have plenty of room to kite, and it seems like DEs actually suppress natural respawns because I know I've kited champions for 10 minutes without running into respawns the normal respawn seems to be 10-30 seconds.

They aren't so much training stuff all over the place because it's too hard but because it's nearly useless to fight anything without hearts around. Or they're just grinding events or resource nodes.

Um the base pop in Orr can definitely kill you even without factoring in the insane aggro radius, the respawn rates that makes no sense, and other people training. They're not hard if you don't have to worry about 3 things respawning, trained, or just aggro from middle of nowhere but that happens a lot.

I haven't had that issue there other than the respawning but that's mostly an issue if I'm retracing my steps. Found this to be more of a problem in the 70-75 area than the 75-80. People are gigantic assholes about training stuff though.

Luckily there's little reason to be in these zones alone unless you're doing your story quest or you're a masochist.

Some spots don't just respawn fast. You're literally talking about whatever you just killed respawning the moment it dies which usually leads to a guaranteed death if it's a strongish base type. Also due to the waypoints pretty much never working it takes forever to travel anywhere. Usually you can get away with training but there's always someone who trains a mob that has pull/cripple/freeze/immobilize who happens to do that on you instead of the guy they're chasing and you'd usually just die with no chance of escaping either. Due to the freakish respawns a lot of the time you would never even be able to get anywhere because you'd just be fighting repops nonstop so you might as well train.

So blah blah, my account would have been stolen by Chinese hackers if my e-mail authenticator hadn't stopped them but that doesn't change the fact that some how they had gotten to my password. While I don't really play the game any more, I'd rather not someone even remotely have a chance at the characters I've put my time into, so I went into account management to change my password. (also - using multiple passwords for different services FTW)

The password strength recommendation is to use the xkcd comic as a guide lol

Shrinweck wrote:The password strength recommendation is to use the xkcd comic as a guide lol

I've been using that system for a while. My observations:

1. Certain phrases are easier to remember than others. It helps when the words are related in some way that it sorta makes sense.

2. I still have to use one uppercase and one special character for passwords at work. I usually just put those as the first two characters.

3. One time, I had to change my password because it was longer than 25 characters, and some system at work was using that limit on a web form. Passwords longer than that tend to be real annoying to type, anyway.