[Daywolf]

Originally Posted by Manticmuse [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This cash chop you speak of, Daywolf, you are saying it helps power buyers buy many more RNG chances to get the best stuff...but not that it gives anyone access to gear that is otherwise unobtainable?

Can people use real money to buy health or mana potions or speed/armor boosts...that kind of pvp killing crap? Daywolf I get that you're saying people can sell other things bought with real money and use that money to get those boosts, if they exist. Is it so prevalent that almost every match was decided by it? Would restocking equivalent boosts with in game gold be too difficult to keep up with people spending real money?

Can people use real money to buy extra trait/spec points?

Well they have those token things, clickables that give you temp buffs like health regen, armor buff, XP modifiers for general xp and crafting, luck boosts (for better mob loot) etc etc etc. Most or all is in the shop, but also comes out of the black lion chests. Those chests drop like crazy, worth like 2c in auction. But the keys you might get one out of the game every couple months. They sell them in the shop though, and people buy them up like crazy. There are a lot of very desirable things in those chests, can make a fortune if you strike it lucky (RNG), and if you have a gambling addiction problem, you're Anets new best friend. The tokens are not the big thing, tons of very valuable and rare items to gamble for.

Top tier gear is "legendary" and "Ascended". They added that into the game after swearing they would never add another tier such as Ascended. And when they added, it drove the market crazy for buying things out of the shop and selling them in auction to other players for gold. There is no such thing as "only fluff", it's just a matter of exchange. You buy what's new or hot from the shop and sell in auction to other players, take the gold you make and then buy components to instantly assemble top tier equipment that in total from start could take you as long as a year to fully gear up with ...for one character. Not just gear that makes your char look good, but actually gives you an edge over other players in everything apart from tournament pvp.

So an example, I start an account, roll my thief, then spend say $1000 in the item shop. Now I take that stuff and sell it to other players through the auction. Now I take the gold I got from auction and buy everything to level my thief up like 300% faster than someone that didn't micro-transaction. Finally at cap, I buy time gated crafted components from other players through auction and assemble all my ascended gear and buy my legendary weapon from auction.

They make a lot of money this way from teh all fluff item shop. So much so, for the longest time they mostly abandoned the b2p model and it became an f2p apart from initial box fee. Originally they were going to just mainly sell expansions to fund the game, but that changed to buying like tickets to get into the latest temp holiday content etc. You had to pay to get into new special zones where new special items dropped or could be bought off of special vendors, for a limited time during special temp content. Game went into melt down over all this, just so much anger from the community.

They eventually released an expansion, but not until the new model had already failed and the zones were all just ghost towns then they tried to switch back to the original pre-release promises that they broke. They merged every server into one, and there still wasn't even hardly half-filled zones. Anyway I was on closed beta for the expansion, uninstalled before it released. Too little too late. If they had stuck to expansions and not slid into the quasi-F2P crud and turning the game into a serious grind (worst grind game I ever played), game could have done well.

It's on my list of worst fail mmo's. GW2 is #2 on my list, with SWG:NGE as #1 biggest fail ever (but my fav mmo ever, pre-NGE expansion. Not speaking of just bad games, lots of those, but games that were good but went full retard from a game revamp and just crashed.

Play it if you want... I'm not saying don't, but just above is something to know about before doing it. I'd suggest something else. The EQ emu is about the only mmo I'm playing now, and GW2 is the last of the newer mmo's I've installed. I filed f2p mmo's in the round file long ago, they're all a scourge. Anarchy Online? EVE Online? way better choice than GW2. Heck, I think EQ live can beat GW2.

Yeah I got fed up with it, just like I left the battlefield series, went to ARMA instead, where the publisher hates the idea of micro-transactions. You know that military shooter very popular, Battlefield 3 etc. Spend more time playing like Space Engineers, X Rebirth (X series in general), the EQ emu, still playing Skyrim, some Quake Live. I don't like micro transactions, I could link you game industry articles that explain how they are scams, designed for just the few people they call "whales" that compulsively spend tons of money in micro-transactions. IMO wrecks game design, so now that rather than having the best and most innovative fun in mind, they rather do the other thing that will help compel a few people to spend like hookers with a stolen credit card.