3301

I had dangerously high hopes for GW2, and it’s still blown me away. Like others have said, I’m loving the diversity the weapon system has.

What boggled me the last couple of days was the richness of the content. I was hanging out in a house by Hunter’s Lake in the Norn lands, AFK while I fed our baby and saw the NPCs that live there have a whole 2-minute conversation about their situation and local events that tied into the dynamic event there.

You’ll never see it unless you spend time right there, but it’s this lovely little insight into a family living on the frontier and their story. And it turns a dynamic event that initially looks like a cute, throwaway idea into an expression of those characters and their situation, making it much more engaging.

It’s the same in the cities - little snippets of interaction and colour littering the place.

Arenanet are insane. And glorious.

3302

Hah that reminds me, i was in a little hill in the nord lands and an elder comes on top and and says a little poem to his dead wife.

3303

That’s awesome!

3304

Say you enter Queensdale. A message pops up saying Queensdale is full and you’ve been moved to the overflow. This means you’re in a different Queensdale instance that contains other people who may or may not be from your server.

At this point you are queuing to get onto your server’s instance. When you’re done queuing, it’ll ask you if you want to travel to the main Queensdale instance.

Make sense?

3305

Same here. I’ve also read there are some people who are choosing to stay in overflow because it’s less susceptible to lag than the regular (non-overflow) zone, and I’m starting to wonder if that’s true. Most of the time that we’ve had lag it’s been in the regular zone.

As kind of an addendum to my earlier complaints about the Join In system (way back on day 1 or 2 of the headstart), my wife and I had issues getting in the same overflow for the first few days of headstart, but after that Join In has worked as intended for all but one day (either last Saturday or Sunday). I’m glad that they seem to have fixed this for the most part because it’s made a huge difference in our enjoyment of the game.

3306

So just go to the freaking server, it takes 5 seconds to load. Or don’t and just cancel the message. This whole overflow thing is a brilliant mechanic that helps to avoid the PvE queues and people are still bitching about it. Unbelievable.

Yes, it sucked when people in parties couldn’t get together on one overflow server but this was fixed days ago, we didn’t have these issues since at least last Thursday, almost a week now.

3307

The bag thingies don’t really “contain jute”, they can contain anything, including jute, ore, rare materials, etc. Any mob can drop a light armor piece, which are really the main source of jute, along with the salvage trophy thingies. So fighting humanoids definitely helps to get variety of mats, a little bit of everything including jute but it doesn’t really solve the jute shortage problem. Leveling up my human in the zone full of bandits, centaurs and skritts, I eventually had like 400+ ore and wood and only about 100 jute.

Heh, that’s why it costs twice as much as copper on TP even though crafting in general requires more copper than jute.

Speaking of TP. Lol, it’s a tough market for sellers, most stuff is selling at 1c above the vendor price. I am not sure if people realize that there is a 15% posting fee (5% when you post an item, 10% when you receive the money). It’s funny to see a crafted chest piece (vendor price 1s 4c) being sold for 1s 5c. Congratulations, every time you sell it on TP, you lose about 15c and a lot of time. :)

[edit] BTW, here is a nice website to look at TP graphs. I wish ANet implemented something like that in game (and I think I heard they were going to).

http://www.gw2spidy.com/

3308

I think those cheeky monkeys at Arenanet have been quite clever with the slot thing.

I mean basically an extra slot costs the same as a month’s sub. So it probably works out that between now and the next update a year or so from now, I will have paid for a few extra month’s sub equivalent, because I’ll certainly be trying out the classes that I haven’t picked in my first 5 characters at some point, and my pattern with MMOs is invariably a few months on, a few months off anyway.

Dammit, they’ve snookered me - they knew this game would be insanely addictive and that I would eventually want to buy more slots!!! shakes fist at Arenanet

3309

It does. It would be crystal clear if it said something like “Would you like to enter the ebay Queensdale instance or stay in the overflow instance?”

3310

Please confirm or deny (to clear up my confusion) - I can’t buy Guild Wars 2 online (digital download) at this point? Steam doesn’t even show it as a game in its system, and it is unavailable at Green Man Gaming.

Amazon has physical copies, but not digital it appears.

What’s going on?

3311

They’ve cut off selling digital copies of the game since this past weekend to avoid overloading the servers. It would appear they may have been having a second wave of purchases coming off the good vibe of the release that was more than they had anticipated and had hardware to handle, and they’re taking the route to keep the game playable for the current player base instead of overselling and letting the servers get overloaded.

I mean, the overflow system works great, but even still there’s a finite number of overflows before the system would start to strain. From the BWE and stress tests this makes the game laggy and rubber bandy and completely ruins the fluid action in combat, so I’m happy they made that decision and put the players first for once.

It’s not on Steam at all anyways.

3312

Between all my alts I figure I’ll have enough in-game scratch to buy enough gems for another slot in the near future.

I love that it’s an option.

3313

That’s a pity. I’m interested in getting it on Green Man Gaming (with the discount - I’m not paying $60 for it). Guess I’ll just have to find something else to do. :)

3314

It sounds like you’re trying to avoid this, but there’s always retail stores as well. Should be plenty of boxes out there.

3315

I disagree. Maybe with low-level crafted items that cost almost nothing there is a tough market, but there are plenty of opportunities to make money on the trading post.

As an example, I can make 12 slot coarse leather packs for 16.7 silver cost, and sell it on the trading post for 19.37 silver. That’s with immediate turnovers, if I was a bit more patient I could reduce the cost and increase the sale price.

It takes 150 level in leatherworking to make those bags, however.

For me playing the market is pretty fun. I’m up to 15 gold, but I’ve invested a bit in my character, crafting, and bought a few nice boxes to hold stuff.
I haven’t played ‘the real game’ that much - I’m only level 23. Been too busy wheelin’ and dealin’. :)

The neat thing about crafting is a lot of the time you can sell the stuff you made to level up the crafting skill right back to the TP for about the same amount of money you bought it for.

On another note, I hope everyone who is trying to get loot drops knows about the benefit of magic find. Look up magic find items on the google and buy an armor, weapon, and trinket set with magic find gems. Buy some magic find food as well, and you can get your magic find percentage up pretty high.

Once you have a really high magic find, you’ll get loot drops on almost every kill, and you’ll get a higher percentage of rarer items.

3316

Well, I’m more avoiding $60 than retail stores per se. :)

3317

Yeah, I don’t get this complaint. The only difference from the main server and the overflow server is that you are playing with a different group of people. You log on, join a party with your friend (or are already joined from the last time), right-click their portrait and choose “Join in X”, and BOOM, you are in the same server they are. I think you’re even put right next to them, but I could be wrong about that.

And again, what’s wrong with “Do you wish to go to the main server?”?? You both click it, the game reloads for two seconds, and you’re in the main server, in the exact same spot you were previously. I don’t see what the problem is.

I understand the desire to save money, but really, it’s well worth $60.

3318

I understand. It’s just that I’m frugal (cough cheap cough).

In perhaps better defense of my character, it is that Borderlands 2, X-Com, and Torchlight 2 (of which I need to buy two copies) are all coming out in the next month or so, so I’m trying to keep the total cost as well south of $200 as possible.

3319

Am I correct in assuming that there are different personal quest lines for each combination of class and race? So, 40 different personal quest lines, each with instances at nearly every step?

That’s some serious work.

3320

They are more different than that – when you create a character, there are 3 or 4 decisions you make that affect branches of your story.