Great. So now you have a Reaper. And after you finish the starting area, you find that you have no gathering skills. What’s the best way to get going? Well you might start with a gathering guide. But it might be out of date. I started with this one. But I found some hints to get going.
First of all, the Fey Forest may not be the best place to start actually. You might want to start your 0-100 gathering on the Island of Dawn. The nodes seem to be closer together, of all types and you don’t have to mess around with fighting anything, as easy as that is.
As of the update on 13 May 2014, the whole costume and Fed Bills system has changed. The templates available previously in the Fed Bills store are no longer available. The remodeling system is no longer available. The looks are still there, but there is no way to pass them along to new armor. You are stuck with what you have. See previous post.
There are some really strange items in the Fed Bills store called things like “Design: 24-Karat Robe” which is described as “Craft a permanent 24-Karat ensemble”. This is a crafting recipe that combines Robe, Sleeves and Shoes to create a “Costume” that will fit in the costume slot.
Federation Bills have been a daily login-reward for a few weeks now. But when you check the vendors in cities, nothing seemed very interesting. But then I saw a player with a neat new outfit, and looked it up on the template site. Wow. A level 50 robe being worn by a lower level character! Wonder how that happened? Check out the robe I saw here and look down for set 19.
Well now I know. Use your Fed Bills to purchase templates. And they are reasonably priced too. 35 bills gets you all three pieces. There are two styles – Santia’s and Quandary Bazaar. The templates are marked level 60, but if you go to the re-modeler in The Hunter’s Plaza of Velika, anybody can remodel their equipment to these templates. It cost me about 1 G 50S to remodel my level 33 gear to the new look. And of course, I can remodel new equipment to the old things to keep the look for future items without buying new templates.
You get 510 bills each day you login on each server on your account. Back to 5 per day. These templates are gone with remodeling in 13 May 2014 update.
All of the battle chest with all but Pandaria for $5 and then Pandaria for another $10. It might as well be free.
It seems to me that this not so much a sale as a desperation move to avoid going to free to play. All the other games have gone F2P. So why not Wow? They appear to be clinging to the teat of those $15 / mo subscriptions, while all the other companies are doing just fine with F2P or Freemium.
Perfect World has always been F2P and has made so much money that they bought their own game studio – Cryptic Studios. There is clearly plenty of money in F2P, but Blizzard apparently cannot yet bring itself to cut the cord and go there. Once the cost of the entire game is $15, it would seem that it might as well be free. Uh Oh? What about all those physical boxes on store shelves? Seriously, are they going to bring the price back up to $25 / $40 where it used to be after the holidays?
I have never seen details of the economics of F2P mmo games on the PC. There have been some articles about F2P games on mobile, but those use a different model, since you do Pay to Get Ahead with those games. With MMOs you cannot pay to get ahead or play better. But many companies are making great MMO games, far better than and more modern than Wow, and they are using a F2P model. Consider Tera, Guild Wars 2, Rift, Neverwinter, etc. etc. All released as F2P or converted to F2P. And all with much more modern graphics, more efficient game play style and many other advantages. Continue reading “World of Warcraft – Desperation is Showing”
I have lots of screenshots from the games I play. I used to use screen capture programs to do this, but almost all the games use PrintScreen now to save the images. Most tag the images with unique names based on the date and time, but Guild Wars 2 is not doing that. They tag the files with sequential numbers which makes it difficult to archive the images.
The problem is that the names are not unique if you delete the files in the screen shot folder and take more screenshots. In that case they start over from gw001.jpg again. So I wrote a program to archive my screenshots from my game programs.
I back up my screenshots to folders in the form yyyy_MM, like 2013_11 so that I can easily find them and so that not too many files appear in a single folder. Also, since my system drive is an SSD, I don’t want screen shots to accumulate there to excess and use up that valuable space.
Update: 11 Mar 2014 – Get Version 1.5 to add zoom/pan and reorder pairs. Read more below.
Update: Get version 1.2 with a fixed installer and screen shot image review. Read more below.
Update: Get version 1.1 that supports sub-folders. Read more below.
The recent content for Guild Wars 2 is not well balanced to be fun for any but the strongest players. Here’s an example.
The first installment of the Tower of Nightmares spawned an evil tower in Kessex Hills and some recurring events around the tower and in other places. It was ok if you were with a very large group and were above level 40. Kessex Hills is a 15-25 area. But for one thing, you can’t play that area until you are about 35, and if you go near any of the new content at less than 40, you are instantly dead. I’m talking with Green [Masterwork] equipment, not just white or blue armor.
These events were so scary that it was very fitting that they occurred during Halloween.
Guild Wars 2 was developed with new ideas like eliminating the Holy Trinity, no backtracking to quest givers, everybody is a healer and so forth. But one thing they haven’t eliminated is “Grinding”. By Grinding I mean repetitive game play that is the most efficient way to move forward in the game.
I’ve played 6 characters from level 1 to level 40’s and recently started one – an Elementalist. When I reached level 17, I wanted to level to 20 to wear armor that I’d crafted so it seemed that Grinding Champions in Queensdale was the most efficient way to level quickly. I kept track of the progress and here are those results.
This is not a complete description of champion grinding in Queensdale. The GW2 forums or wiki will provide better descriptions. It’s an overview of what’s required to level in this way, with examples and my observations about how GW2 really does seem to include a lot of Grinding. Continue reading “Guild Wars 2 – Grinding on Champions”
Guild Wars 2 is hard to play. Compared with World of Warcraft, or Tera, both of which I love and do not complain about.
The reason appears to be that ArenaNet is designing the game for the end-game players. For example, the recent update notes stated that they have upped the health of the champions [bosses] and reduced the time required to kill them. These are the events that show up in all areas, including low level areas and that you can do once per day, per account to get mid level loot and exp.
I think the problem is that the “Down-leveling” math is not fair and they are compensating in other parts of the game rather than fixing “Down-leveling”.
I played GW1 for 2 years. All my 9 toons [of all classes] have done Ring of Fire. So I’m not saying that I’m the coolest player, but I have some chops.
So here’s my Rant.
With Arenanet, it’s not about careful design, it’s all about the hack.
They may think they are doing careful design. But by hiding that design and making it non-obvious, it’s really all about the hack that we eventually discover and document.
BTW: By hackI do not mean any exploit of the game. I mean an obscure play style, or path that allows you to solve a game problem. A solution that is totally legal and in keeping with the terms of service of the game, but is so obscure that you are not likely to find it without help.
So you want to be a Super Hero? Well there are a few choices out there. Here are three, and my choice for Best of Breed. All these are Free to Play, so you can easily try them all.
Marvel Heroes is of course based on the Marvel Universe. But I’d give it a pass. It’s a pretty game, but only 2.5 D [Dimensions] in this age of 3 Dimensions.
DC Universe Online is a very pretty 3D game and is a very good choice. But it has a complicated overloaded control scheme that I didn’t like.
Champions Online is a full 3D experience in a new Superhero world. Cell shaded, with Roll-Your-Own heroes and Costumes, it’s a great game if you want to be social, or if you don’t. Brought to you by Cryptic Studios which is owned now by Perfect World. Continue reading “Be a Superhero”
Windy Weather 