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the dangers of beta

i’m a tester in a game right now that for a change is doign an actual beta. the game is in an early stage and it’s pretty obvious to me, and somethign the devs have been relatively open about, is that they needed testing done before they can progress, but being a small studio with a small budget can’t afford paid testers and can’t allocate man hours to do it themselves.

ofc players who are tasked with doing some actual testing for a change are confused. because by and large betas are for the charade of lettign players feel involved and lettingn them think they are contributing by testing a product which is for the most part what it’s going to be at launch.

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me and device were derping around in wvw last night for a bout an hour. go like idk a levle or two from it even though we didn’t do much in terms of capping objectives.


anyways, these gw2 BWEs have me more and more facepalming at anet as they renege on all the hype they’ve built the game as being unlike other mmo’s and the fan based “they’re totalyl seprate from ncsoft!!!!!!!11111” as more and more paralells can be drawn between this game and aion.

first of the gem dollar value obfuscation which is deceptive and underhanded and reeks of the worst aspects of f2p and fb game cash shops preying on addicts, while insulting their customers who use the gem shop with rela money in general.

then there’s the idea that to pregress at level for the local hearts DEs and personal story legs, you need to do all this extra stuff if you don’t want to do wvw, from mining nodes(even if you rprofession doesn’t require nodes) AND crafting, to going to other starter zones back and forth back and forth, to grinding out DEs over and over again, to make up for the poor pve levels flow.

then there’s all teh money sinks here and there, which relative to early levels are quite expensive and will leave you grinding for money.

to grinding for mats which often have poor drop rates on the mobs that do drop them, leaving you to rely on gems for gold to level your crafting to keep up in levels with the pve content.

crafting exp isn’t that good btw, i’m now at the stage where i’m crafting items in tailoring that are twice my level and have gotten all of maybe a level off crafting alone. this is after spending 200 gems on gold and spending half of that on mats to get to this stage. that’s abotu $3 worth of stuff - note they increased the number of mats to craft 8 slot bags  :sparkles:


they seem to have tuned up the math on supply camps so you need more than a full group to tak ethem out. i might upload the video of me getting too close and getting instagibbed by every single camp mob last night.

teh changes to ww are a bit odd. we ran across a cap point that was unmarked and had absolutely nothing around it and it gave like 800exp for some random reason. just randomly on teh road from one objective to another.

we haven’t had a chance to try these sentinel things but they seem to be on eveyr check point on map now.

i really like the game but some o fthis nyerk leaves me smh wondering wtf is going on with anet that they would rant on and on about that stuff for years and then the reality of the game is the exact opposite- leaving me feeling chafed and much of the “optionaL’ activities *forced*.

and ofc the fanboys will say the most hilarious nyerk to defend the game, claimingthere are no mmo’s that are have better flow or or less grindy than gw2, or that don’t force you into multiple starting zones to progress or force you to do multiple zones of the same level to progress, or force you to do node mining crafting POIs jumping puzzles wvw and all of the above together to progress at level.

then ofc a subset of those people is the people that tend to marathon grind to cap at launches of every other game talking up how non grindy this game is and anyone that thinks level or xp matters at all is rushing to cap and shoudl slow down and and not play the game like boring old wow.
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and as far as wow goes, it’s been a very long time since wow’s questing content has been as stunted in terms of quest/exp/levels/grindiness as gw2’s currently is. and the kicker to that is wow actuall does have options as to which quests to do, which zones to do, to do dungeons at eveyr level range after 10 or not as you please, to level through pvp as you please, and if you do everything you will be well overleleved for the xontent…

and unlike wow, in gw2 we have downscaling to prevent the content to be trivailized, so there is absolutley no room for the usual qq about being overleleved from being a completionist.

but hey guize! let’s pretend wow is a million times grindier to level to cap in than gw2 is.

here’s tsw’s current character creation options for females.

if i can get some footage of what she looks like in the cinematics to show why i’m not super happy with how the faces look i’ll post it up. but basically she has the face and skin tone of a middle aged house wife with a drinking problem imho.

otherwise i really liked the clothing options so far, i had a hard time deciding on what to go with, and actually made a second toon to play with it more, and plan to play with it more today.

aside from that the one thing that really grinds my gears is once in game you can’t take off a piece of clothing, like yoru jacket. i guess this is to prevent having naked players running around but ultimately it makes it so i can’t decide when to wear my jacket or just my tshirt, and i really really reaally want to have that choice.

my itemized feedback for gw2 beta 1

for the feedback mega thread that’s stuck ont eh first page for the last few days:

the main things i want to give feedback on are:

pros:
- overall very solid despite from extreme overfilled servers.

-solid combat mechanics, good thoery crafting potential, good variety of playstyles by weapon combos (at least on elementalist)

-wvw was very fun wether in small group, large mutli group, or pure zerg fest. good variety of stuff to do for every group size.

cons:

-no multi key binds(ie ctrl/shift/alt + 1,2,3,4,q,w,e,etc)

-server selection was borked for half my guild, then even more of us has transfers that didn’t complete later.

-upon transfer our guild lost all our influence points and our upgrades on the new server. but otherwise our guild roster and name etc was intact. very odd to not have one but have the other.

-wvw costs are kinda high given they are on an ongoing basis and i didn’t notice if wvw produces any gold rewards from capping points. as well pvp deaths in wvw result in durability loss on gear, which really hurts the pocket book on top of siege engines and upgrades.

-pve leveling flow seemed all out of wack. i was quickly 3 levels lower than the hearts i was doing until i buffed my levels via wvw.

- guild progression is very very slow for small guilds in terms of influence gained- although my guild didn’t get to fully play together/on the same roster so to say due to the intial server selection issues then the transfer issues. we were actually running at less than 1/4 our proper roster all weekend.

- initially fairly high cost to non starter weapons so it’s dificult to try out which weapons you want to use quickly early on.

i was hoping for some more smaller group type action, but it was also nice to see some zerg action. unfortunately while i was there the zergs runninig around didn’t bump into each other or so it seemed.

i’ll note as a scepter/dagger ele it seems that yes, air is a lot better for chasing people down than fire is. i’m not used to the whole in combat switching yet.

also i want to try staff ele, as those aoe’s look fucking ginormous.

we also got fucked

on server.

i got forced into furnace because of something i cna’t discuss which was the last server i wanted to play in, and ofc all my fears about playing on that server came tryue pretty quickly.

within an hour or 2 of beta going up at 2pm est today they had capped 100% of the wvw. basically blowing their full load for moral domination.

so we’re getting the fuck off as soon as possible. we’re trying to get to eternal grove.

thanks anet for the free unlimited transfers today and tomorrow.

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