The Circle

[glo]

So, let's sift through the recent changes to the game in a very simple manner:

What types of activities can we do once we hit 80?

1. sPvP
2. WvWvW
3. Dungeons
4. Dynamic Events
5. Gear Farming

What is required to do each of the listed activities?

1. sPvP - Nothing. No form of currency required whatsoever.
2. WvWvW - Gold. Lots and lots of gold since siege costs a good chunk and each death = repairs.
3. Dungeons - Gold. Lots and lots of gold due to the sheer difficulty.
4. Dynamic Events - Gold for waypoint travel.
5. Gear Farming - Gold for dungeon repairs and actually running said dungeons.

So what is the common denominator? We need gold.

How do we get gold?

1. Dungeons. BUT WAIT, they're crippled after the first run due to the new patch. You'll be lucky to come out of that first run in the positive, let alone the fact that you'll never be in the positive thereafter.
2. Dynamic Events. BUT WAIT, they were also crippled previously in a recent patch. Only one of the same event for you!
3. Farming mobs. BUT WAIT, they're now capped as well as of yesterday. Only so much loot for you!
4. Gathering and selling gathered materials.

Now you think to yourself, "So what? Who cares? We'll always be able to gather and sell!"

BUT WAIT, you need that to level your professions and to use create gear for the Mystic forge!

What's the point of this entire thread?

I want to WvWvW but I need gold to do buy siege and repair. I can't get gold because I can't farm dungeons after they got capped. I can't farm dungeons easily in the first place because I can't afford the repairs. I can't farm dynamic events to get the gold I need for dungeons to get the gold I need for WvWvW because I can't afford the absurd cost of traveling across areas since you can't farm events. I can't farm gold/items from mobs to pay for the dynamic event travel that pays for the dungeon farming that pays for WvWvW costs because mob loot is capped. I can't farm gathering materials to pay for ANYTHING because I need the materials for professions!

So I guess I'm off to the gem store! Or not.

[Mosotti]

Well, the thing with "no subscription fee" games is that you either do stuff you really hate so you can then do the stuff you like, or you just pay up. They actually need your money just like those with a subscription model, only the complete imbeciles think otherwise

Of course, even if the game has a subscription, you might be forced to do horrible things just to get to the "real things", or the things you'd like to actually do. Like in WoW mindlessly farming PvP in random BGs, so you can step into the arena without being butchered in the first 4 seconds.

But the scope of the design is different, in one case is to make you buy things, in the other is to pretend there is some progress or content.

[PACOX]

WvW - Completing objectives and gear drops pay for the equipment repair cost. Siege can be bought with badges. There are tons of ways to scrap up money for repair cost in WvW.

Dungeons - Can be expensive if your group is wiping, in that case you probably need to reevaluate your tactics. If your group is ressing people how they are supposed to and not letting them die, repair cost are minimal and you leave making money.

Dynamic Events - Like dungeons but you die a lot less often. At 80 you can at least 1s for completing ANY event. So you can go to Queensdale and knock out a bunch of easy events. Its easy to grind DEs in Orr for silver and loot to salvage/vendor. The anti-farming code targets people who try to camp a high occuring DE in one spot or turtle events to farm them (there is at least one in Orr you can pretty much turtle indefinitely)

Anti-Farming criticism in a nutshell: OMG Arenanet is forcing me to play more than one sliver of this huge game.

[glo]

While I have no issue paying monthly for an MMO I enjoy, that wasn't what was advertised. They stated the complete opposite saying stuff like "We don't feel you should have to pay to play our game every month yada yada". "Play the game however you like".

Well, if one wants to do WvWvW heavily compared to other activities, they're going to have to play the game not the way they like, but in a way that is a total grindly farmfest to trickle small amounts of gold in your inventory. Or of course hit up the gem store, but... again they advertised the opposite.

[Vasilisa]

I'm sorry but what else did you expect? This game won't fuel itself by selling the game only. If you need stable servers, bugs fixing, support, etc you should expect that they want to earn money for that. Gem store / microstransactions were announced long time ago. There shouldn't be any surprise.

Besides I have no problem with gathering money, what I'm earning covers all my needs (repairs, proffesion leveling, etc). Maybe that's I'm not using much waypoint jumping within one zone. I'm playing engineer so I can have constant speed boon. Perhaps that's the issue.

I'm level 75 now and I have nice chunk of gold coins in my pocket. Yet I didn't even touch game store nor I spent a lot of time selling items on TP. Perhaps we are looking for different experience. I don't mind exploring world, running through areas.

From my point of view you are looking for "fast and easy" gold while the only such option is gem store. Or maybe I was just lucky in the terms of earning money.

[glo]

WvW - Completing objectives and gear drops pay for the equipment repair cost. Siege can be bought with badges. There are tons of ways to scrap up money for repair cost in WvW.

Dungeons - Can be expensive if your group is wiping, in that case you probably need to reevaluate your tactics. If your group is ressing people how they are supposed to and not letting them die, repair cost are minimal and you leave making money.

Dynamic Events - Like dungeons but you die a lot less often. At 80 you can at least 1s for completing ANY event. So you can go to Queensdale and knock out a bunch of easy events. Its easy to grind DEs in Orr for silver and loot to salvage/vendor. The anti-farming code targets people who try to camp a high occuring DE in one spot or turtle events to farm them (there is at least one in Orr you can pretty much turtle indefinitely)

Anti-Farming criticism in a nutshell: OMG Arenanet is forcing me to play more than one sliver of this huge game.

And if you want to use badges for other things? What then? You're spending gold.

Coming out ahead in dungeons? Have you seen the recent changes? You may come out ahead in your first run, but if you want to get your mats for your shiny gear, you need to run them multiple times. The cap prevents just about all income after the first run. So again, you're stuck PAYING to run dungeons after a single run.

Dynamic events? You have to PAY to get to them since they're all heavily capped. You make about the same amount of money completing each one once as it costs to travel back and forth. Running through zones without waypoints? No thanks.

---------- Post added 2012-09-19 at 09:02 AM ----------

I'm sorry but what else did you expect? This game won't fuel itself by selling the game only. If you need stable servers, bugs fixing, support, etc you should expect that they want to earn money for that. Gem store / microstransactions were announced long time ago. There shouldn't be any surprise.

Besides I have no problem with gathering money, what I'm earning covers all my needs (repairs, proffesion leveling, etc). Maybe that's I'm not using much waypoint jumping within one zone. I'm playing engineer so I can have constant speed boon. Perhaps that's the issue.

I'm level 75 now and I have nice chunk of gold coins in my pocket. Yet I didn't even touch game store nor I spent a lot of time selling items on TP. Perhaps we are looking for different experience. I don't mind exploring world, running through areas.

From my point of view you are looking for "fast and easy" gold while the only such option is gem store. Or maybe I was just lucky in the terms of earning money.

Your concept of money will quickly change once you hit 80. It's easy to build up money while leveling because there's no real cost to leveling beyond books. However when you're not killing mass amounts of mobs and completing dynamic events / hearts as you go, life becomes expensive as hell. Just take a look at something like the tier 3 cultural armor. 20g a piece.

[Deleted]

Dungeons I can understand... but point number five, gear farming, is the same as point number three, dungeons. What's up with that?

Also, unless they've changed something drastically since yesterday, waypoint costs are a pittance.

Also, why can't you participate in WvWvW without being the one buying the siege equipment?

[ghostblade]

3. Farming mobs. BUT WAIT, they're now capped as well as of yesterday. Only so much loot for you!

they only nerfed speed farming.

[Deleted]

Wow, if I was a mean person I'd put a one liner here that reads simply "You're doing it wrong." Because quite frankly, I don't see how you can claim that you can do absolutely nothing in this game because of a gold deficit. Instead I shall insert my customary wall of text after which you'll probably wish I'd stuck to the one liner.

The game does seem to be based on a premise of quite a large number of potential gold sinks and costs, along with quite a severe amount of changes to ensure that any "easy" ways of making gold are balanced fairly quickly... which can lead to frustration for those using those easy methods who suddenly find life gets harder. But suggesting that you need to go to the gem store only works if you're making the assumption that you're not playing the game properly or are lazy.

Your over dramatisation of the farming caps is silly. This game currently has a very high gold balance of gold sink -> gold reward meaning most people do not have a lot of surplus gold around despite a lot of gold being output by the game. That does not mean that you are forced to buy gold, it does not mean you can't still make gold, it means you have to be careful what you spend it on and prioritise things.

I want to WvWvW but I need gold to do buy siege and repair.

No, you don't. You can WvW and make gold in WvW without buying sieges and repair costs are not that high. Try and run with a group or a few friends if possible, remember to farm the stuff you find in WvW as well, remember to loot your supply bags.

I can't get gold because I can't farm dungeons after they got capped.

If you were using the CM story gold run or the CoF semi-exploits for 10 min runs, then unfortunately the game just got harder for you. You can't do those two things. None of the other dungeons are really that majorly affected and only being able to get the same rewards twice in an hour is NOT the same thing as "I can't farm dungeons at all." I'm sorry but the first time I calculated the amount of gold/hour you could get from CM story I immediately knew it was going to get hit hard and quickly, I believe everyone did. It was simply not balanced and you can't really cry about that legitimately. I may have a little moan about it and that's fine but claiming now making gold in dungeons is impossible is ludicrous.

I can't farm dungeons easily in the first place because I can't afford the repairs.

Start looting, start selling, start dying less. My sympathies go out to you if you have had the most awful pugs in the world (hey, I've been there), which I can only assume if you really cannot make money in any dungeon, must be the case. I'd highly recommend finding a guild, there are a lot recruiting and server transfers are still free and hopefully your dungeon experiences will improve.

I can't farm dynamic events

Makes no sense. It costs a few silver to teleport to a zone and then you can do all the dynamic events your heart desires. Dying during DE's should be pretty rare, there's no GY zerg or repair cost excuse here. You can moan about the farming cap - and I personally hate this cap because I don't like being told how long I should play for - but you can still farm for 30 minutes in a zone and can still make money from that, then take a break, do a dungeon, do some gathering, whatever, and then go back to farming DEs. Do I like this system? No, I really don't and it's frustrating to be punished for the actions of abusers/exploiters/bots. Can I make money with this system anyway? Yes. Not as much as without it, but I can still make it.

I can't farm gathering materials to pay for ANYTHING because I need the materials for professions!

You a) don't NEED to level your disciplines right now and b) not ALL the mats in the ENTIRE world are useful to your exact disciplines right now. If you're really struggling this much for gold then prioritise selling the mats for a few days to make a bit of money. Disciplines are not mandatory.

Anyway, I am not a good gamer. I am old and slow with poor reflexes, ask anyone who runs with me how often I die, fall off cliffs or do something stupid. With 400 deaths I should probably be way in the negative from repair costs. I'm also lazy, I teleport everywhere, including paying 4s every time to go to Lion's Arch because waiting 20 seconds to go through the mists annoys me. I'm not efficient with my money, I have a full exotic dungeon set and I have a full rare Magic Find set which with the stupid Pirate and Traveler runes practically cost as much as my exotic set anyway. I've helped every friend and quite a few virtual strangers who ever asked for anything with mats, gold or gear. I've never run a single exploit in this game or anything I thought was imbalanced. Even knowing that CM story was by far the most profitable way of making gold, I didn't run it, I spent hours wiping on a new explorable mode instead

I still have over 20g without even trying hard to make it. I really do not like the caps and limitations on farming and looting but they are not as crippling as some people think they are.

[glo]

-snip-

In no way am I trying to sidestep your well thought out response. However, I wasn't trying to suggest that I can't do -anything- at all. It's more a frustration that to do anything that I enjoy in the game, I need to do a big currency grind to do so. It isn't impossible for me to make money doing all of the things I listed, it's just extremely slow. So very, very slow.

IMO, there's more depth in the gold sinks than there needs to be. Fast travel should be free, armor durability needs to be -heavily- decreased and they need to get rid of these caps.

(I'm no longer playing it or trying to start a game war) WoW had a good formula going. You could do whatever you wanted in the game that you enjoyed with few strings attached.

Wanted to PvP? Sure, it's free. No repairs no matter what form of it you're doing.
Wanted to quest? Sure, it's free.
Wanted to pug dungeons/LFR? We'll be sure to throw you more than enough money to cover your repairs.
Wanted to raid? Sure, all that extra money left over from doing the above will more than cover your costs.

With GW2 you can do whatever you want, but there's a million annoying grinds attached to enable you to do so.

[Vasilisa]

Shamanic your post made my day. As far as I know this game already there are few ways or getting money and you only proved that my way of thinking is not wrong.

[glo]

Shamanic your post made my day. As far as I know this game already there are few ways or getting money and you only proved that my way of thinking is not wrong.

The point is that you shouldn't have to go through the tedious and slow process of acquiring gold simply to play and enjoy the activities you want in the game. Refer to the above where I laid out how WoW handled it. That's a rewarding system, this is a punishing one.

[Deleted]

I'm sorry that you feel that you have to work for anything you do in life.

Let's look at the things you do for entertainment in your life.

I want to watch a movie: that costs money. What do I have to do? Work for it.

I want to buy a new (toy). Car, Computer, Television, etc. Those all cost money. What do i have to do? Work for it.

Now then the typical argument that comes from this is: "I'm playing a game for entertainment, everything should be handed to me for free because playing a game should in no way or form cause me stress. After all, I am playing the game as a release from stress, right?"

What you're actually trying to say is this: I desperately wanted guild wars 2 to be a game where everything was available to me on day one, but it's not, so i'm going to cry about how I have to work through the restrictions of the game (Just like almost every single other game has restrictions of some form or other).

[Deleted]

The point is that you shouldn't have to go through the tedious and slow process of acquiring gold simply to play and enjoy the activities you want in the game. Refer to the above where I laid out how WoW handled it. That's a rewarding system, this is a punishing one.

It may simply be an unfortunate point that you don't enjoy the game as much as others do then, and thus find it a tedious and slow process I personally really really enjoy pretty much all of the things I listed, so I guess it's really hard for me to understand why it's such a horrible process for you.

You not enjoying the ways currently available of making money (which basically means not enjoying playing the game I guess) = perfectly valid point of view.

Claiming that you can't make money = wrong.

[glo]

I'm sorry that you feel that you have to work for anything you do in life.

Let's look at the things you do for entertainment in your life.

I want to watch a movie: that costs money. What do I have to do? Work for it.

I want to buy a new (toy). Car, Computer, Television, etc. Those all cost money. What do i have to do? Work for it.

Now then the typical argument that comes from this is: "I'm playing a game for entertainment, everything should be handed to me for free because playing a game should in no way or form cause me stress. After all, I am playing the game as a release from stress, right?"

What you're actually trying to say is this: I desperately wanted guild wars 2 to be a game where everything was available to me on day one, but it's not, so i'm going to cry about how I have to work through the restrictions of the game (Just like almost every single other game has restrictions of some form or other).

Argument is valid for in-game rewards. It isn't valid when considering you have to put in work... to enable you to put in a second tier of work (grind) for the actual rewards.

In no way am I looking for handouts. I lead a hard mode guild for 2 years prior to cancelling a couple months ago, I'm fully open to a fair trade off between effort and work put forth and reward. I only have issue when I have to work for the ability to work more to acquire my stuff.

---------- Post added 2012-09-19 at 09:32 AM ----------

It may simply be an unfortunate point that you don't enjoy the game as much as others do then, and thus find it a tedious and slow process I personally really really enjoy pretty much all of the things I listed, so I guess it's really hard for me to understand why it's such a horrible process for you.

You not enjoying the ways currently available of making money (which basically means not enjoying playing the game I guess) = perfectly valid point of view.

Claiming that you can't make money = wrong.

I can make money, but they're making it increasingly difficult by making it a separate (long and difficult) activity altogether. The vast majority of online games that I've ever played enable you to sustain yourself through the activities you enjoy in the game. Can you do that in this one? No.

I'd love the game if I could just log in and play the parts I enjoy without the bullshit grind coming first to do so.

[Deleted]

Wanted to PvP? Sure, it's free. No repairs no matter what form of it you're doing.
Wanted to quest? Sure, it's free.
Wanted to pug dungeons/LFR? We'll be sure to throw you more than enough money to cover your repairs.
Wanted to raid? Sure, all that extra money left over from doing the above will more than cover your costs.

But that's a bit of a flawed system as well. Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of things I enjoy about WoW. But this isn't one of them.

For PvP, if you want to do it seriously, first you have to either get to max level (or play a twink), which is a lot of effort in and of itself. Then, unless you start at a fresh expansion, you're going to have to put up with being killed over and over and over again until you can get good enough gear to compete with others.
Questing, while mostly fun, is a finite thing. The quests will eventually run out, and then the only quests you have left are those which you do every single day just for the gold.
I'll admit to being out of touch with the pugging and LFR scene in WoW these days, but I don't think it's a very popular activity, and only done in absolute necessity. Again, could be wrong on that.
Raiding... well, one of its most limiting properties is that you can only do it once a week, so after spending 2-4 hours on it (depending on how good your team is or how long you can put up with how bad your team is), there's another week to go before you can do it again. Also, if you're interested in the raids, but not any of the above (I even think PvP doesn't give you any gold, but could be wrong), you'll also run into the issue of not being able to fund your raids.

WoW has... a formula, yes, I'll agree to that. But it's not good for everyone.

[Deleted]

just another "exploit got fixed now i crie in the forum about" thread - nothing to see here

[Lucas Ashrock]

Well, an other thread about the lack of money post nerf?

Ok seems the OP needs a direct answer.

A: Deal with it, and grind like a sheep until you have the money you needed, slowly, very.

B: Take your credit card, and buy some hundred dollars gems

Happy?

p.s. don't misunderstand me, i'm angry like you, i'm just used to the BS of Arenanet

Until enough bored to quit.

[Deleted]

you get siege weapons when you complete jumping puzzles in wvw

[Deleted]

I'm trying to imagine how inept or simply bad at this game you have to be if you can't get positive return on gold after a Dungeon run. I can't remember when last I died in Dungeon. Get a guild, get a team, farm all the dungeons/paths easily. We currently clear all CoF, Arah and Inquest paths daily. No diminishing returns on gold and the profit is more than enough to fuel 10 people in my guild who are close to legendary weapons - myself included.

If you are trying to earn money with PuG in Dungeons, you are stupid - sorry, nothing else.