Category: Guild Wars 2

I’ve been following The Guild Wars 2 Trading Post fan-blog, written by Markco, for awhile. The posts are not rocket science, but they are great ideas for entering the world of trade in Guild Wars 2. Anybody interested in toeing the markets, or those already swimming in the deep end, should take a look at this blog for some great thoughts and suggestions. While not all of his ideas “work” all the time (e.g., up-forging materials only works for gossamer, which costs more than 15 times the cost of the previous cloth tier, silk), he does try and emphasize using his ideas only as training wheels. Here’s some of the things I did over the weekend regarding the Trading Post.

Flipping Velocity

The easiest thing to do is find a market discrepancy and flip. I did this all weekend instead of letting gold sit in my pocket. I did this with dye, although sigils, rares, and exotics are all good markets. I watched for a comfortable buy at price, and made a dozen or so buy orders. Then when I would receive the items, I’d turn them around at the sell price I knew would sell in a reasonable amount of time. 85% of the sell price had to be above the buy price. I would say roughly keeping 10-15 buy/sell orders going at a time I made about a gold. Continue reading [GW2] Weekend Money

At launch (and these tallies generally go up), Guild Wars 2 has:

• coin for merchants
• gems for the cash shop
• karma for events
• influence for guilds
• glory for SPvP
• badges of honor for WvW
• 8 different dungeon token types

There is also supply in WvW, skill points become a sort of currency with a few vendors, and mystic coins could be considered a 9th token type. You also have an achievement point count. Some of these are inventory objects, others are just variables attached to your character/account.

Since I complained at length about the need for a LotRO barter wallet, which was implemented years later through the cash shop, I thought I would take stock as GW2 started. WoW and CoX were also noted for their problems with proliferating currency types. Let’s see how ArenaNet handles this.

: Zubon

Reaching the month mark is a pretty good time (as good as any, really) to start throwing down real solid opinions. Opinions that at least had have some time to stew and cook properly in the crock pot of your head. Keen has given his, and I find myself in agreement with most of his points.

Thanks to Netflix I’ve been watching a lot of old episodes of Top Gear lately (as an aside, if you haven’t already do yourself a favor and watch their yearly specials where they go all over the world for shenanigans. It’s great TV). Jeremy Clarkson is a huge Ferrari fan and when you watch his road tests you can, right under the humor and his snark, hear the disappointment in his voice whenever the Ferrari he’s driving doesn’t feel up to par. You can see the letdown in his face. It’s personal for him; if the Ferrari doesn’t feel right, he just can’t connect to the car, and it has nothing to do with the car’s top speed, gadgetry or, Cthulhu forbid, fuel economy. It has everything to do with his feelings and expectations of what driving a Ferrari should be.

Which, naturally, somehow, brings us to Guild Wars 2. Somehow.

Continue reading [GW2] This is not the Ferrari you thought it was

Trahearne is not the most beloved character in GW2, but Sieran is a strong competitor. For those of you who have not tried the Durmand Priory personal story arc, try the Durmand Priory personal story arc. Magister Sieran is your guide, and she is the happiest adventurer around. “Cherry!” (or sylvari cursing: “Thorns!”) We’re going into certain death: “It’ll be an adventure!”

Everyone gets the lesser version in the Pact story arc, Carys, who is enthusiastic about running in and whacking zombies with a big hammer. I tried this on a sylvari guardian, and it is indeed satisfying to whack zombies with a big hammer, so I can see why she is in such a good mood. Still, Sieran is the full version, the physical incarnation of joy and enthusiasm.

: Zubon

There are interesting views about stories stemming from open world PvE in Guild Wars 2. Tobold disavows using “themepark” to prefer the slightly broader rendition of the term “guided gameplay”. Guild Wars 2 is guided gameplay, but I’ve always felt it edge much closer to a “sandbox” form because it always wasn’t clear what I would get in each play session. I liken Guild Wars 2 with events and very cooperative multiplayer PvE to more of a zoo. Never know what the animals are going to do.

Jeromai has a Spink-stamped Quote of the Day regarding the stories that stem from Guild Wars 2. Spinks notes that Jeromai’s anecdotes might be more interesting than a lot of sandbox stories. That’s the thing. The best sandbox stories, sometimes spanning month’s of work and play, are among the best MMO stories, but they gloss over those hours and hours of scanning, waiting, or running “guided” content to pass the time. Continue reading [GW2] Stories That Should Be Told

This is not unfair. We tried to put a guild WvW group together last night, but after an hour or two, only two of us had made it into Eternal Battlegrounds. Hey, weekend prime time, right? There is a problem when the game becomes unplayable only when people want to play it.

The PvE was still working just fine, though. Guilds war, just not with each other.

: Zubon

Ravious is worried about storage space due to intermediate ingredients, that he will have a vault full of soup stock and spice jars. I am more worried about final products. With experimentation from the vault available and a level 80, 400 skill cook who has been accumulating ingredients everywhere he can, visiting that discovery pane is an attractive nuisance that calls me to try tossing things together until I have millions of calories of desserts and finished soups. As a cook/artificer, I have enough food and potions to keep my character buffed continuously for days.

: Zubon

Cooking By the Book

Possibly the best quality of life improvement in Guild Wars 2 is being able to discover recipes with materials from the bank. Last night I made sure to run a play session of crafting, as cooking can take a long time, and it was great.

For artificing the main “hidden” recipes involve potion brewing. Each potion instills hatred and hardness in the character for a certain race, such as destroyers or Nightmare Court. With that crafting profession, and I would guess most of the others, crafting from the bank is a akin to Doodle God with bumper rails as I randomly clicked on material icons to see which ones would darken and which ones would remain lit. In my opinion this is the perfect difficulty for most crafting professions. It’s fun to combine, it’s not very difficult or time consuming, and not having certain materials is just difficult enough to keep some stuff hidden. Continue reading [GW2] Crafting From the Hilt