3161

To me, that’s the best part of it. I mean, it’s pretty, it’s fun, it’s all good. But whenever I play a $15 a month MMO, it always feels like I have to play it as much as possible or I’m pissing away money. GW2 I can set aside for however long I want and it’ll still be there when I want it. Very groovy.

3162

I was getting a little bored and logged out after a couple of hours. I was fully expecting to be up half the night and force myself to go to bed. I don’t understand. Give it another go tomorrow.

3163

World v. World
We’re aware the world v. world matches have not been resetting properly. We’re preparing an update to fix this. Once the issue is fixed, we’ll start running 24-hour matches to balance servers.

Maybe those Stormbluff ringers get matched up against someone else!

3164

More:

Worlds
We added three new worlds in Europe yesterday, three new worlds in America today, and increased the population limits on all worlds.

Good news for ANet, and deservedly so. Sounds like a large number of folks are bit with the same bug as many of us.

Overflow
During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. If you want to play with a friend, but you’re not on the same overflow servers, you can form a party together, then right-click on your friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”.
We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.

That’s good news for so many of us.

Botting
We suspended accounts of 750 players running bots. We’re ramping up and will soon apply permanent bans for cases of substantial botting.

I know I reported a botter today.

3165

Are you concentrating on the personal story?

3166

I’m loving this game, and also loving the experience of forming a small guild with a group of real life friends and discussing guild upgrades, emblems, and activities for the night. Level 44 elementalist.

the one complaint I have is the trading post being down. Because of that I was stuck on Artificer 60 for a long time with a huge glut of resources for the 75-150 tier. The trading post briefly went up tonight; after alot of bugginess I got the requisite materials, made my 75, and then got to 150 a few minutes later thanks to my hoarding. It being down has been a big pain for people who like to craft.

3167

I wouldn’t say I’m concentrating on it. I run around a bit and do some things but then that little green spot on the mini map beckons me back because it’s a quest.

The found quests so far haven’t been all that interesting. Go collect a bunch of rabbits. Escort a trade caravan (though “caravan” is a bit grandiose when all of one one goods-laden animal is in it). Some centaurs are fighting on at this spot so go and kill a bunch of them until they stop respawning. Kill a big bad fish in a lake. There’s nothing really about them that makes me say, “I haven’t seen this before in an MMO” and in fact I get the sense that they will be triggered and repeat over and over again so they don’t feel any different than questing in WoW.

The best part about exploring is finding the vistas and just discovering the little things in the world, but it’s probably a one-time experience. And I don’t really like jumping puzzles so having to jump to get to a vista was a bit annoying.

I’m sounding more negative than I am. I like the game. It’s clearly very sharp in a lot of ways, and seems to have a lot of depth to it. I haven’t even tried the PvP and WvWvW yet, which would ultimately be what would keep me playing.

Best of all, it’s different from the standard DIKU so that in itself is interesting. I just wish the setting, story, and questing in GW2 were as good as those in Secret World.

3168

I am continuing to try to make profits through the trading post (and trading by mail when the post is down).

I’m only level 17, so I haven’t made much gold from questing and items, but I’ve made over a gold and a half through trading post profits during the brief half hour to an hour it’s been available to me.

If anyone wants to try what I’m doing, it’s so easy, however the market has gotten more difficult once everything stabilized. Just buy something for the cheapest custom price you can get away with, then sell it slightly lower than everyone else is selling for. Wallah instant profits. :)

When I first had access to the trading post, it was a trader’s dream - You could buy iron ore for 4 cents per unit and sell it for 8 cents per unit instantly. Orders were all over the place.

I’m having a blast. I’d only be having more fun if the game had more trading / market features :) I guess once I’ve made enough money I’ll try levelling up my crafting, I really like the crafting in the game so far.

3169

Do you even LIKE MMO’s? ;-)

I’ve read what you wrote about TSW as well, and you were very worried about it, and had lots of “don’t likes” about that as well? I don’t mean to be rude, but sometimes expectations can be hard to meet, if one has unrealistic expectations to a genre :-)

3170

So… How is the wvwvw queue on ebay? I’m currently in n. Shiverpeaks and it’s usually several hours long, to top it off when I finally get in my side has already devastated the other two servers.

It’s fun to be on the winning side, and but not when it’s this one sided.

3171

Well, I played Warhammer, AoC, Rift, Aion, and Old Republic and all failed to hold my interest after I got comfortable with the game mechanics. In other words once I had learned the new wrinkles the rest was the standard DIKU model and I might as well have been playing WoW, which did the DIKU thing better anyway.

The little bit I played of Secret World impressed me. My concerns were that the quests would be standard MMO stuff, and many seem to be, but I did experience some cool stuff I hadn’t seen before. Also, I had no idea Funcom would pull off the story elements so well. They just really knocked it out of the park with the writing and voice acting. So I was pleasantly surprised.

Guild Wars seems to have great mechanics and that’s probably most important in the long run. Funcom likely can’t produce enough new content to justify maintaining a subscription. Guild Wars seem quite intricate in its combat and if the WvWvW is popular enough it could be a game I’d play for a long time, especially since I wouldn’t have to pay a fee to play. I could play once a week, couple of times a week, etc. I am wondering if I will need to buy expansions to remain competitive in WvWvW. We’ll just have to wait and see.

3172

Maybe I’m spoiled by Secret World, but the story here doesn’t grab me at all. “This is MY story,” says my protagonist, but it’s a very banal story. Choosing whom to save and whom to let die becomes a coin toss; I could not care less what happens.

The hearts are mostly just “kill things to fill up a progress meter.” Does anyone do anything with them beyond just checking the list of things that will progress the meter?

On the other hand, the combat is very polished, and very fun, no denying that. Graphics, animation, abilities come together perfectly. Probably the best, most fun combat I’ve seen in a long while.

But I can’t feel any soul. I kill things because that’ll give me more materials for crafting, because it will move my progress bars to the right.

So I’m thinking, maybe this game is really meant to be played together with others, coordinating abilities to be more effective. Unfortunately in that case, they’ve made the game so very solo-friendly you don’t even have to team up to cooperate on quests. Yes, I loved that feature, no more kill-stealing! But now I’m thinking, if you don’t have to make an effort to cooperate with people, you don’t really notice those other people. They become more like the white ghosts you see while playing Dark Souls in online mode.

Sure, I could specifically look for people to play with, maybe look for a guild, but part of what I enjoy in other MMOs is just randomly bumping into people. Sure, some are complete nutters, but - especially in TSW - many of the people I run in to are fun to play with for a while.

So, weirdly enough, having made it very easy to cooperate with people, makes GW2 even more like a single player game for me than other MMOs where my usual solo play is broken up by having to team up for harder content. That, coupled with the fact that I absolutely hate PVP probably means GW2 isn’t really for me. I’ll have to hope that some of the good stuff will make it over to TSW some day. :)

3173

I had no problem getting into the borderlands last night around 11pm pst, though there was a sever reset.

3174

On ebay if on WvW was full another was available with no queue every time I wanted to.

3175

The story isn’t top notch, that’s for sure, but I’ve still enjoyed it. Sometimes the voice acting can be pretty lame and the way they do cutscences pretty much ruins any conversation. Maybe try making a different race? I’m sure they are all different.

One thing that has just really been irking me is that you can’t craft straight from the collection tab… I really think they just need to fix that D:

After playing through the Charr dungeon with Triggercut and co, I’ve decided that Dungeons simply do not work well in this game. Or at least, those double bosses near the end are absolutely bonkers. It just seems like, in a game where your tank mostly comprises of dodging, the fact that you can get one shotted by an attack is a misplaced mechanic. Maybe it’ll be better with a specific stratagy/build though.

3176

They’re there to point you towards areas with dynamic events (the real meat of the game) and provide you with a quick objective that results in rewards + a new karma vendor.

They’re also a little bit more varied than just “kill things”; usually there are multiple ways of filling that bar.

Having said that, if you’re not enjoying the combat and/or the exploration, then you probably won’t ever enjoy the game.

Mark, I’ve never played another MMO where I had several events chain into each other and take me halfway across the zone, with something different happening on failure. The problem is failure is rare at the moment with a critical mass of players, so we’re only seeing one branch.

For example, in the zone I’m in at the moment, there’s a lake which spawned an event to collect Dwarven Artifacts for an innkeeper nearby. After collecting these, he ran off to his inn. I followed him.

He then had a conversation with a Charr about the artifacts, with some background lore inserted in, and discovers one of them is a summoning stone.

A pirate captain turns up, demands the return of the artifacts, then launches several waves of pirate attacks against the inn. We fight them off, and the innkeeper decides the artifacts need to be taken to a nearby outpost, so he grabs some Asura dudes (who have some funny lines as they’re skint after blowing up their lab) and an escort mission spawns.

The escort mission takes us to the next “heart area” and involves several different types of beasts attacking us en masse. It doesn’t take too long and we get to the new outpost.

Another conversation. One of the Asura points out it’s a summoning stone and that the recipient needs to be very careful when destroying it, so he gets roped in to help out, and they all run off outside the outpost to do it. Apparently the great plan involves releasing the summon, who turns out to be a really hard bastard Champion demon of some kind, drawing in players from all over the place to put down.

I could’ve just done the first event and moved on - there were plenty of other things to attract my attention. But this level of detail is fantastic, and I’ve seen nothing like it in other MMOs.

3177

I’m liking the mechanics a lot, and, when lag isn’t an issue (which it has been occasionally under load) it’s very responsive. Loot itemization at the low levels seems good, and it’s very pretty. It is pretty generic, and the quests are pretty standard fare, but it all works pretty well together.

I did like the stories in TSW, but those didn’t compensate enough for the mechanical and technical issues, nor for the general feeling of repetitiveness I got, as PvP there was not very good and I really didn’t like the crafting or loot systems much.

That being said, if TSW were F2P I’d still play it occasionally for the stories and settings.

3178

Some of these personal quests suffer from, in my opinion, horrible balancing. Just rage quit a game for the first time in years…

3179

You had someone trying to tank?

Totally agree about crafting.

3180

I think he means “your tank” as in “your ability to handle damage” rather than a specific character.