I think the day you write a positive reply to anything I write will be the day I’ve seen everything.

For an mmo you need to pay a price for it say $50 no subscription but have constant expansion packs of shit that you actually need to move on. No hats, useless items etc but actually $15 expansions maybe a choice or whatever say for dungeons, map expansions every month but doesn’t stop you from playing on the server.

So yeh pretty much what guild wars 2 is doing. GW2 the future imo for mmos fuck f2p.

IMO F2P models are great if the pay part is only limited to cosmetics or similar. If you need to pay to get access to the ‘full’ game, then no thanks; the game obviously wasn’t good enough to warrant paying subs in the first place.

And btw, this new comments section approach is just plain awful.

Marius:
I’m just not convinced that the system offers anything more than window dressing to grinding. And I like having narrative, cinematic quest intros. Something that both SWTOR and TSW do,but GW2 fails at. As a result, it all tended to blur together for myself.

To be more accurate… THEY ARE ALL GRINDS.

in every MMO you do an action that produce some form of progress of a sort that improve you to the next stage, EVERY SINGLE THING really.. is therefore a grind.

the key is making the grind enjoyable and entertaining enough that ppl don’t mind doing it.

there’s no such thing as no grind since if you take that away then you basically have a completely different game.

And this includes all of them, even TSW, the difference is in how they all dress up the grind and what they choose as the motive.

in TSW the investigation quest IS A GRIND, it’s a grind with puzzle game as it’s cover. In a GW2, crafting IS A GRIND, it’s a grind with the item collection and experiment as it’s cover, ditto with almost everything you do in all MMORPGs.

The only question left is which one do ppl like and willing to do.

That’s not the part that really interest me with GW2 though,

the ones i am far more interested with the dynamic quest is the prospect of having non static current state from any one of the handful possible state that follows the sequence of event.

It’s still too limited frankly right now, but it’s a step in the right direction by attempting to mitigate to an extent the fatigue associated with facing an identical set of state of the world again, and again, and again.

If i can log into the game just an hour each day and find a world in a ever slightly different state potentially each time (up until i’ve exhausted all the permutations of course) then that’s already a massive improvement.

But there are holes in GW2… where you’ve explored the entire map, and still face a 3-4 level gap.

Playing dynamic events in these situations gets frustrating, because they’re so random. You run to a place where you saw a dynamic event spawn before… nothing. But then you get a notification that an event just occured at where you left from. Gah!

I know they’re meant to be dynamic, but there have been times that the spawn rate of them has just led me in circles.

To give a particular example, the human level 19 near the Krate village attack was particularly bad for this. There were three high teens dynamic events nearby in a triangle, but you’d never be sure which one was going to pop. Very frustrating area, I found.

I’m just not convinced that the system offers anything more than window dressing to grinding. And I like having narrative, cinematic quest intros. Something that both SWTOR and TSW do, but GW2 fails at. As a result, it all tended to blur together for myself.

I think you may have the dynamic event system mixed up with the heart “quests” in regards to experience per level. If you only follow heart quests per zone, you don’t have nearly enough experience to level, but if you do some dynamic events (and follow the NPC around, which they don’t explain enough for people to actually do) you end up being leveled well enough.

What they’re currently working on before release seems to be that experience curve where people don’t know where to get the experience and are set in the old way of going point to point, rather than exploring the world to get experience. It seems to be something a lot of people are having trouble shaking when it comes to leveling. (I might just say yourself included if I would be so bold :P)

It actually just re-introdueces the kind of questless grind that existed before WoW.

Good example is that there isn’t quite enough xp on the dynamic events to get you to the next level without repeating content, or going to another map. From my time in the beta, there are XP holes at points, which leaves you either travelling tens of miles to another map to do easy content while delevelled, or running around in a circle doing the same few chains of dynamic events over and over.

I just wish the GW2 hype would recognise that there’s nothing new under the questing sun. :)

GW2 doesn’t do that exactly. If Dynamic events ever revert to the same NPC (depends on what is happening) they continue to be the hub, but once their meta chain ends, a lot of the time they become a vendor of some unique item or buff instead of sending you off to another NPC.

TSW isnt unique in it’s quest grind, I can say that.

Gets kindof annoying seeing it pasted as the second coming of Jesus when MMOs have been innovating for years. Just everyone values different types of innovation differently.

I could even say TSW did away with quest hubs before GW2, because if you follow the path given to you in each zone, you’ll do a full rotation of the zone before getting a second quest from the first quest giver.

Obviously this all evolved from old school RPGs and that probably needs to be brought back but in some new variant.

GW2 interests me lore wise enough to enjoy this new system of story telling. With their dungeons, their dynamic events and day to day strolling around listening to NPCs talk in proper VO about what is happening in the world. Even though the dynamic events are more used to disguise the old quest hub npc.

In the end of it all, a lot of MMOs have become a grind fest of “collecting X thing” and that’s how it’s evolved from table top RPGs. A more dynamic environment like GW2 is like a stepping stone into something more.

SWTOR was actually great fun for a while. It’s niche thing – full voice acting and story, worked well.

The only trouble is… every character was a typical Star Wars cartoon, meaning I got sick of them. Eventually I was skipping most dialogue.

That was fairly typical for a lot of others from what I read.

However I don’t think a game needs to completely reinvent the wheel. And I’d prefer it if they don’t. I like making builds and figuring out the system.

I like playing fps’ too, and they are basically exactly that, just reskinned versions of quake with a different story and extra cool new features tacked on with each iteration.

I guess i maybe just over the multiplayer aspect of mmo’s after years of raiding in wow, but i still like killing mobs and levelling up in an interesting setting.

The financial risk to an mmo going f2p would be people like me i guess, happy to just play through the levelling process, do each dungeon once or twice and keep my money.

Which i guess is why the most expensive ones to make stay on the sub model till they can’t anymore ;D

either that or the cost to update them increases over time as eventually you run out of fresh template, it gets progressively harder and harder to design new ones that work well in gameplay and yet still new and fresh..

Yeah, it does always tend to boil down to rehashing mechanics.

It’s something I’m curious about Bronze, and I’d like to reflect on the game’s progress in say… 3 months.

I do like the variety, though. Spent 3 hours doing a quest called The Cost of Magic the other day. Why 3 hours? It’s basically Mario, lol. Think of the SWTOR lore jumping, just more intensive… with minefields.

I loved it, but others hate it. The variety is enough to keep me coming back, and paying, though.

However, I absolutely wouldn’t pay a sub without this variety. MMOs need to do at least SOMETHING new to justify a sub. The key problem, I think, is not the business model, it’s the rehashed mechanics.

A 25GB client is what is stopping me from trying it out right now, but I’ll seriously consider it come November.

I’ve gotta say though, the concept of investigation missons doesn’t really work for me, i would be cruising along doing quests and getting more of the story of a zone, then one of those would crop up.

I want to play the game , not crack open a browser and go looking for clues on websites then trying a bunch of hunches till i get the right answer to the puzzle to continue.

I am sure someone will point out that i should be playing a different game then, but when its 90% kinda normal mmo stuff and 10% investigation missions, i can live with googling a walkthrough for them rather than spending hours trying to figure out a puzzle.

I am not saying they should remove them either, the people that like them…really like them, for me though it’s just more fun to keep getting further into the storyline.

So Marius says , “As to people asking others or looking up spoilers, well looking up spoilers or asking for them in a puzzle game is like buying a crossword puzzle book and filling it out according to a cheat sheet. A complete and illogical waste of money.”

Imo , it’s not a puzzle game, for 90% or more anyway..
I can appreciate the time and effort to put the puzzles in, and as said earlier, some people like em, some just want to get on with the content.
Not illogical or a waste of money either, it’s entertainment, consume it how you wish.
By that logic, people should be “puzzling” the bosses out as well, but i don’t forsee you or anyone screaming “SPOILER!!” when a veteran explains each bosses abilities to you the first time you do each dungeon.
Or you could wipe until you figure it out!
I know which option i will be going with.