GW Work Ethic

please don't respond unless you've read the following. i don't need to get flammed because you only read three sentences.

I read many of the posts in the "Haves and Have-Nots" thread and I would just like to throw out my opinion on the matter. It seems that the people with solid accounts--having rank, and characters with 15k armor and gold rare skin weapons--are being accused of being ebay'ers because of jealous people and because of losers that want to buy things on ebay so they can feel superior to others in a superficial way. But when you really boil it down, it comes down to this:

It's all just a matter of work ethic and/or commitment. I've only been playing GW for the past 2 months, but I feel that I've got a good grasp of the game and have earned some nice things for myself. I'm only rank 4, but my warrior and ranger have 15k armor and use rare skin gold weapons, my necro and monk also have some nice things for them but aren't as complete as the other two. I put in a few hours each day, pvping, farming, and b/p running, to get good items. For example:

I was lanning with some friends today and they wanted to do some bp runs together. On my first b/p run of the day today I got victos axe and bulwark and sold them for a total of 55k. On the next two runs I got no greens, and on the last I got an elswyth's. I ended up with 2 ectos at the end of the day and make 13k. So I played for about 4 hours, lanning with my friends, and made 68k today. Some of my friends were just as lucky, others, no so much. I might play for 6 hours tomorrow or I might go to the beach with my friends and not play gw at all. If I do the latter I'm not going to whine about not having any shit because I made the choice not to put in time that day.

You get what you put into the game, and hopefully your hard work will be rewarded with the respect and admiration of others. If your warrior's got FoW armor and a crystaline sword only because you spent all your money on ebay, I'm not gonna whine. Because at the end of the day, you know that your posessions are hollow and that you spent hard-earned money on something intangable and I either saved my money or spent it on something nice I can actually touch.

The most disturbing trend however, is the increasing number of people buying accounts on ebay. Because, even if someone accused you of buying things on ebay you could just bust an emote that proved your rank. Now any schmuck with a credit card can buy one and pretend he put that time into pvp. Maybe that's what makes some people happy, but that's gotta be a sign of a deeper issue, that you need to attain things illegitimatley in order to feel good about yourself. If I achieve I highly ranked account I'm going to feel good because I knew that I put in that work and that I was better than so many more people because of what I did. If you buy it on ebay you'll only get pride from running around and flashing your emotes.

But in the end it's about being able to look at yourself and knowing whether or not you deserve what you have. All the money spent on ebay and all the haters can't change that fact. Simple as that.

IN MY OPINION buying money on Ebay is plain stupid. not because i want a FOW armor....because its REAL money spent on not real things.

Other then this, as long as the person wearing the FOW armor and wielding his Cristalline doesnt say "U N00B I CAN PWN U CUZ I GOT SUPER-UBER SWORD AND ARMOR SO STFU AND KISS MY l337 ASS" i couldnt care less. if you decided to dedicate your time to farming, as long as you enjoy the game and dont bother me you can wield 10 Cristallines.... same goes for rank. I know that the players who want fast and easy rank go IWAY.... 100 times a day! OK if you enjoy it FINE! as long as they dontruin my own game experience.

to me, someone who bought a /rank 10 account on Ebay and runs around feeling all important and stuff, is nothing then a show-off, and as soon as you ask them to go 1v1 with you they ignore you or dont respond.... if they feel good about themselves....let them be.

I agree with the above posters. Before Factions came out I was putting time and energy into farming Ectos & Shard (solo I might add) to make FoW armor for My Necro & my Warrior, I completed my Necro's armor and got my War down to just needing the chest plate when a guild member of mine (and unfortunatly another officer too) started showing off his Warrior's Fow armor and bragging about how he Ebay'd the money and just bought the ectos & shards & found a group to carry him through fow. Many in the guild's thoughts where, "why to do, you are bragging about cheating." I very much didn't want to finish my War's armor then cause I didn't want to look like him. Luckily I happened to like 15k Kurzick Armor better so I AB'd for faction which I turned to Amber and made my armor with money I made by selling the ectos & shards I had left over for my war's armor

I agree with ya Trout. I'm not concerned with rank, but everything I got I earned with time spent on the toon. I hate getting accused of buying stuff. All I ever bought was materials in-game. Just because perfect weapons are on Ebay doesn't mean people don't find them in game and keep them.

wow, for 2 months those are some pretty meaty accomplishments, i wish i had of accomplished as much as you after i had been playing for 2 months.

There is no accurate display of a player's skill level today via the rank emoted or the equipment toted. Instead, the representation is an invitation from eViL to PvP, or War Machine to GvG!

har har.

Don't let it bother you man. If you are enjoying the game, that is good enough. Just sit behind your monitor and smile when that FoW Armor Totin', rank 10 emotin', gold skin boastin' warrior runs up and slams on heal sig and frenzy whilst under attack (true story, i laughed so hard).

You can't buy GW knowledge! :P

credit card =/= skill.

and its easy to spot such people when they charge their W/mo into battle with full FoW and spam frenzy+Vamperic weapon+mending and die on the first mobs and start to scream: REZ ME!!!11 WHY U DUN HEAL MONKEY!!11.

Thankfully theres an Ingore list but just not long enough.

Those who buy gold and weapons on Flea-bay goes to show how many morons there are in Real Life, this isnt a difficult game to make gold at all and despite the community telling everyone else it isnt, theres still those complaining about how they cant afford anything since they wont work for ascetics.

Some people are lucky. They get that perfect drop and voila... instant craploads o' cash.

No need to hold it against them (though admittedly, after three runs through Tombs and not a single green/decent drop I do start to feel more than a bit resentful...).

Happily, things like rank, FoW armour and uber-cool weapons are not necessary to be tactically equal to someone with lots of gold (legitimate or otherwise) in their virtual pockets. Gold (or dollars, or yen... etc) won't buy you talent.

I agree with the comments. I do however realize that without ebayers, a lot of you guys wouldn't be rich and nothing valuable (>20k) would be easily sold since people that earned their gold legit would rather farm for such items themselves.

heh, thanks, but i owe it more to my being unemployed this summer, worked a lot during the school year and figured i'd take the summer off. my friend got me into GW and i've been playing since graduation. my level of play will probably drop a lot in about 2 weeks...freshman year of college and all.

Id go further and say peeps take to much value to armor and weapons,i get the best i can get,IN PERFORMANCE!And i do believe anyone without 15k armor or an uber weapon gets severely underestimated,for example,i got shreaders talons and kurzich armor on my assasin,the armor you buy in House Zu Heltzer im not the madman getting 15k armor,would folks think of that i can use my skill to pwn an e-baying Warrior with 15k armor and crystalline piece of sh*t or would they think im far weaker due to my armor and weapons?While it dousnt even make a diffrence in preformance!In the end its about skill not how expansive youre weapon or armor is!

Would only buy an account if I needed to get another account with ALL SKILLS UNLOCKED. I PvP mainly so dont care for armor or weapons, and really I can't be arsed to go through the game again to unlock the skills. Also wish A.Net allowed you to merge accounts so 4 + 4 = 8 slots therefore there wouldn't be a need to do that. Please don't say buy another character slot... its more value if you buy the game again plus Pounds Sterling POUNDS on the Aussie Dollar.

Maybe I'm naive, but when I see someone with FOW armor or godly weapons, I don't automatically think, "ZOMG!!1 eBayer!!1" Maybe that's because, like most of you, I earned my 15k armor and godly weapons. I don't have FOW because I actually don't care for the look. Like Trout, I've spent many hours in Tombs and, frankly, made A LOT of gold. But the main reason I did Tombs so much is because it's fun. I don't do it as much these days, but I'll still go back once in a while. Now that I'm rich in the GW world, I spend my game time earning titles for other chars and just plain exploring.

Usually if someone is a jerk and they have fow armor, you kinda get a feeling that they either got it from ebay or scamming. One guy with fow armor tried to scam me when I was trying to sell my crystalline sword (like I didn't notice that was gold and not plat.....). Probably paid for his whole set through dishonest deads. And now I saw that guy trying to buy a couple hundred flames of balthazar to unlock everything since he sucks at pve and pvp. /sigh

I,ve worked for all my armor weapons ect over the last 6 months that ive been playing and its not armor that defines someone if someone is being a jerk to u in hoh or ab ask them to scrimmage u make them guest of your guild and see whos better and over 50% of the time you the personwith 1.5k or 15k armor will win.

While I disagree with Ebaying money as it inflates the economy


1: Yes it is real money for guildwars money, but for say, £40 i could buy 1000K , i can earn 40 quid in 4 hours (or 8 hours at minimum wage), it would take Significantly more time to farm 1000K by hand (and no farm spot earns you 250K an hour) . buy buying the gold on ebay you save yourself hours and hours of time


2: 1v1 Has abosultly Nothing to do with playerskill , Period.

Ive never been a big fan of fow armor, except the mesmers (and maybe just about the necs), and Ill agree with Woody here, when I see people with these armors, I dont think "ebayer", maybe thats just been naive, but I dont think so. I have more respect for people who have earned cool titles that cant be bought, Im not really fussed about people spending their money on ebay. if it makes them happy.. so be it. its not changing the way I play, or enjoy my game.

You mean the Bulwark actually drops?

Congrats on your accomplishments ^^ wow youve done more in those months than some people will in a year. lol

While I agree that you get back what you put in, for me its the people and friendships i built that i invested in that matter to me.

In 2 months? I can't believe I've been playing for 15 months and I'm only rank 3 1/2. I never really did HA for real >.<. And actually yes, it's really funny when a person buys a ranked account, I mean a ranked player joined my group yesterday, and didn't have a single clue how play. Not sure if he bought the account, but he sure did suk.(was r9). And also, yes a 1vs1 doesn't mean anything, well maybe if they went 1vs1 with same skills, build, armor. =P

I think one of the main issues here is in the title of the thread itself. I'm willing to bet the requirement of a "work ethic" to play is not something most casual gamers are looking for in a game. The OP talks about playing over ten hours in two days. I think a good number of people feel they have enough hard work at school and work (Imagine that).

Thankfully, Guild Wars has collectors and perfectly useable collector items, so you really don't have to spend every spare minute of your life logged on to the game just to keep up with people like this. Some people might still buy gold though just because they like the way something looks or just to piss off eliteist jackasses who like to lord their armor or rank over everybody. I don't really like the concept of buying gold due to its distortions on the game economy, but I understand the motivation behind someone wanting to have fun in a game without having to work for a thousand hours to get what they wanted out of it. And frankly, I find the people who don't realize that this is supposed to be fun a bit more disturbing.

Ok, tbh, I've kicked people before I've seen them play before, but not because of their armor/weapons. It's because of how they talk. In my opinion, you're going to get a lot more out of someone who is willing to cooperate and discuss what is going on, even if they have lower level armor or weapons than someone who is an angry jerk/troll with max armor. Is it a good idea to go around with underpowered stuff? Not really, but sometimes it's just that they're new to the game and don't understand how it's supposed to work. If you take the time to set up the mythical "decent PuG," you can usually find out what someone's attitude is just from a few questions. As far as a "work ethic" goes, I think that as long as someone is willing to listen to what you have to say, and YOU are willing to listen to what THEY have to say, you have the makings of an excellent group.

It burns my soul to learn that someone ebay'ed their FoW armour because I earned mine with hours of ass-numbing farming and trading to achieve mine. I urge Anet to do more about the Asian gold farming community who are making and selling the gold or employ me to seek them out. I know who they are and what they're doing. I even know where most of the gold-buying transactions take place and so do Anet. Go to Ascalon Int.1 and you'll see wammos asking for their gold delivery in local chat and I even have a screeny if people want to see it too.

Large gold transactions in this district? Anet should get suspicious and investigate. If its thousands of gold for no reason then it is bought gold - ban the seller.

Earlier there was some punk warrior in Granite Citadel bragging about how he bought ebay gold to get fow armor at lvl 12. He went on at length (without anyone inquiring...) about how he got Weh No Shu (or whatever it's called..) in Cantha and then came back to toa where he leeched off a forge group. It seems with Factions out; ebayers have an easier time
Then he stood around just being a jerk praising himself ad nauseum.

Yes, I know it's in your opinion,... but.. I spent REAL money on Guild Wars, which is, after all, just the cost of accessing a virtual world on a server that belongs to Anet, and again on Factions

Not that I agree with ebaying gold, cause it IS against the EULA. And I'd be inclined to report the people who brag about having done so, depending on my mood. However, who am I to say how someone else should spend real money they earned (hopefully)?