Update - Thursday, April 23

Personally, it kinda pisses me off that we can't get the stylist changes in-game whatsoever by any means other than coughing over real life money...

But...

Been waiting 4 years for this, said I'd pay, and $2 per character isn't bad. So, I bought a makeover pack, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

So, thanks for at least making it available.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Really, I shouldn't expect any better from the denizens of Riverside, but I was hoping that people would look at this from an objective point of view. (ie not "Gimme my free stuff now!")

We're all spoiled from what Anet has given us over the years - for the marginal price of a game we have been given an amazing amount of content, free upgrades, events, everything that you expect from a p2p game. Granted, the game is 4 years old and most veterans have moved on, but I'm sure the majority of us got more than our money's worth. If they want to charge for character recustomisation, so what? As Rahja said, $2 is dramatically different to the $15 that Blizzard will charge you.

Great update, but i think they should have given atleast 1 point for remaking chars. Especially the names...

Can someone please show me the supposed "signed statement" by ANet employees that said that they would never charge us for anything other than the campaigns? Because I don't remember seeing that, ever. When they start charging for s*** that matters, like skill updates, or a high level cap, or better gear, you can come back here with your epic QQ. Until such time, shut the hell up. I'm willing to bet that fully half of you wouldn't have batted an eye about not getting a stylist npc had it not been for the fact that you get to call ANet a fascist, capitalist pigdemon in yet another thread.

Potions in Lineage II can though. You get them at a Priest/ess of Dusk/Dawn.

I made a similar post to this in another thread, but it would be appropriate in this thread as well so I'm reposting with an addition.

It really stuns me how so many people are ok with all these microtransactions popping up. Stuns me.

The argument I keep seeing pop up is "Anet is a business they need the money so its ok". Fine...I have no problem with them making money. They have been doing so for years WITHOUT microtransactions. The problem? Do I have to make a list of companies and games that give these types of updates out for free? I could do so if neccessary (the list is very large). This isn't content. This is simply an Anet money grab.

Not only that, but it is a slap in the face to the players and I don't know why more people don't see that. These are things that players have requested for YEARS. YEARS. What is next, they sell access to an auction house and everybody is ok with that too? Wake up people! How can you support this? If they were selling content such as the MOX quest or Sorrows Furnace or etc, I would be FINE with that because it is content. But this is not that. This is ridiculous. More and more becomes optional for money and less and less comes with the game.

Don't fool yourself that this is over. Microtransactions are going to be RAMPANT in GW2 if this is any indication. It is making me even more confident and happy in my decision not to buy it.

Finally, the next person to use the "it is optional" or "it doesn't affect gameplay" arguments get the big dunce cap. Please read other threads on this subject where those arguments get destroyed. And those threads were made long before the news that even more microtransactions were coming. Now things are even worse, and they will get even more worse (grammatically bad but who cares).

the update is great.
the amount of storage is great.
the makeovers are great.
the equipment bags are great, but how you get them isn't.
i bought 5 sets of elite armor on each of my 10 characters for the HoM ages ago, having the heavy equipment bag would really help with holding them along with the different weapon sets. currently only having ~5-15 slots open is annoying to say the least. 15 Gold ZCoins = 7500 Copper ZCoins. 7500 Copper ZCoins x 10 Chars = 75,000 Copper ZCoins. Are you serious? Seems too much imo. And no, I'm not saying make them free.

i wont even start on the whole microtransaction crap, im sure a lot of people will talk about that

Nice update in some aspects, others are not so good. PvP characters are still worse off so for me this update does pretty much nothing.

I love most of the updates, thank you Anet!
However, I am a bit saddened that the z coins seem so unbalanced (I am not going to grind for a weapons storage pack), and that one of the coolest features of the updates, the character modification option, is available for RL money only. I'm not QQing about it, just too bad I won't be able to change a few things on my secondary char.
But, since I'm a mostly PvE player, I am very happy for the updates I do like, they're spicing up that part of the game for me big time, so thank you anet for that!
Especially that I got an everlasting cottontail tonic from the traveler's gifts. ^_^
My first ever lucky drop like that since I've been playing GW (about 1 1/2 yrs.).

Good to hear that the inability to put in your storage is a "bug"... but this will unearth new problems if they fix it. With PvP quests you can just keep deleting and remaking characters to repeat the daily quest as often as you like. Where this will be a real issue is HB and all the /rolling that will go on there. Any "reasonable" rewards will be attained very quickly and repeatedly, and it will kill zcoin/key value.

I dunno, I'd like NOT to be encouraged to grind 7 PvE chars through a mission every day either, but they probably balanced the rewards with this siliness in mind.

I've got mixed feelings atm. A lot of good stuf, some I won't use or buy, but well it does have a slight feeling of change. I'm not sure yet. I'm enjoying rollerbeetle race atm, I think we need to wait a few more days until we understand it all.

There's "woaw" and "meh" in this update.

OMG stop q.q'ing about the money...I hope this becomes popular enough that Anet is able to justify more PvE content for GW1. I for one, am not sure I will be playing GW2 (as it sounds more & more like a fking WoW clone), so I'd like to see GW1 get some loving.

If you dont like having to pay a few dollars for features we've been begging Anet for such a long time for, then GET THE RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO OUT.

100 days of grinding for a 20 slot pack. 30 copper zoins for a sparkler. What a complete fail.

I thought we passed April 1.

Best update ever.

Sigh. My thoughts exactly. Real shame they decided to make equipment packs grind. How little can spoil update. Oh well, Time to collect some pets, gets free tab and call it as day.

Right now they are funding the development of Guild Wars 2 without the release of another chapter to funnel money into the company.

I would also imagine a lot of this is trailing ideas for Guild Wars 2, more than actually trying to squeeze money out of the Guild Wars community.

If you can tell me another MMO of the class of Guild Wars that does not use a monthly fee sub model and provides these updates for free I would love to see it.

I could not disagree more.

Actual game content should always be free. The reason I don't object to the microtransaction based content is that it is all optional. You can have a perfectly good experience of the full game without spending a penny over the box price.

I agree there is functionality they are selling now that would have been great were it included from the start, but it wasn't, and there's no point crying over spilled milk. Maybe more of it will be included for GW2.

What you have to consider is that I don't think there is any way they could have developed this new content at all if there was no way they could get money from it. The microtransaction based parts of this update probably funded development of the free part of it too.


That's absolutely fine with me, as long as it helps NCSoft/ArenaNet fund development of the game.

Pass a dunce cap this way then, because it is optional.

You say that they should use microtransactions for content updates, and that would be fine. I am telling you that they fund the content updates by using microtransactions for other things.

With your suggestion, you would not be able to get a full experience of the game without spending more money. Yes you would be able to change your characters name, but you would be missing out on big chunks of content.

With the current situation you can play through all of the game (minus the BMP?) without doing anything but buying the chapters. Sure you can't change your hairstyle but you can PLAY THE GAME.

How that doesn't seem preferable to you I don't know.

seriously less QQ just cause you have to work for some stuff seriously put your dummys back in your mouth and crawl back to your pram...

Grind? You call that grind? I call that Playing The Game, and most likely visiting a bunch of places in the process that have long been forgotten. Sounds good to me.

Yeah, 100 days is a long time, but then again we've managed for years without bags for gear... what's another 3 months? Spend what, 30 minutes on a quest each day, and spend the rest of your time... doing whatever it is you normally do in GW. Doesn't sound like Sky Is Falling to me.

Compare that with what I did to get max Kurzick (for GWAMM). It was before the faction changes, and the HFFF nerf... so I did HFFF for hours a day, for about 4 months. Manually. No macros, no botting. Now THAT was grind.

So maybe it's time to take a step back, and accept that many people don't care / don't agree with your point of view, and never will regardless of how long you keep banging on and on about it?

Be excellent to each other...
LOL

So you have high grind tolerance.

Some people have low grind tolerance, and hate it when motivation to log in mutates from having fun to chore.

50 hours per bag is by my standards quite a big grind.

To me, "grind" means mindlessly repeating the same task over and over. But the Zaishen quests change all the time, which is why I think of it as "playing the game" rather than "grind".

The "update" has arrived, all aboard the failboat.

meh... it's okay i guess.

The thing is it's still a hell of a lot of time invested to get something as simple as a bag. In my case, it's 108 Missions quests since I can't do anything else to get ONE freaking bag. That's 108 days, 3 and a half months. FOR ONE BAG! Seriously, leople spend less time grinding to get Obsidian Armor on their characters, why on earth should anyone spend that much time for something that basic?

I'm hoping they change that like they did the number of gems for a Tormented weapon back when NF was released, either by lowering the bag costs or lowering the exchange rate for silver/gold coins.

Change all the time?

You mean asking you to REPEAT something in the game each day, right? Because I'm sure we all have done all of these stuff before.

THAT'S a grind. WoW's leveling process always makes you travel around the world for each level range. Hell, each quest usually asks you to go to different places, do different things. Yet people (mostly GW BFBs here) call WoW "A grind". But now that GW implemented something way way WAY WAY WORSE, it's suddenly called "playing the game"?

Please. Hypocrite much?

@Hissy and company: GTFO! I'm at 28 titles myself and helped two friends with a dozen other grind titles. So what if you have 30 and I have 28, it doesn't change the fact that a handy feature like this equipment pack should never be linked to a 100 day grind. Maybe they don't have the server space ready yet or are waiting to see how much space they need and add space graduately to spread hardware costs.

Repeating the same old quests you already did several times in the past and this for like another 100 days to get one 20 slot pack is not fun, at least not for me anymore. If you find that fun, more kuduz to you then.

Mindlessly repeating the same missions, is the same. Most people have beaten all of them ages ago and beating them again isn't doing anything to respark interest in the game. Though the end game content could be fun, 100 days of this is still ridiculous.

Just pointing out that doing a wide variety of quests etc like this, is worlds away from some of the real grind and repetition that exists in the game. No need to throw your toys out of the pram over it.

I am intrigued... At this stage of the game, what is it that you're going to do in GW, for the next 100 days, that is new and fresh and not a repetition of stuff you've done dozens (if not hundreds) of times before? What stuff do you do, that makes these quests (with a valuable reward at the end) so terrible?

Same question to Proff, Cacheelma. By your definition of grind, unless you are new to the game - by this time, there is nothing left in this game BUT grind, and isn't it time you moved on? Or if you've already moved on, why do you still care about this stuff?

People really don't get it do they? The "free" storage pane requires you to attach your account to ncsoft, outside of this storage pane i have no real reason or want to attach my account to ncsoft.

Why isn't the same as before, storage tabs are added by the campaigns/expansions you have automatically, can someone tell why its now this way?

Also the equipment packs are "free" yet again there loads of grind/playtime required to get them. The grind/work to obtain them is done on purpose to make the stoarage upgrades in the store look as attractive as possible.

To the people saying waaahh stop complaining/qq'ing, its optional, you don't have to pay for it, its a free update stfu etc... look at it this way now advantages can be brought now inside the store... i have to go through all the stuff i talked about above yet a person with his wallet out can get it all instantly. Anet are really starting to blur the lines now how long before i can i start buying gold/weapons/armor/mats/titles/overpowered skills from the store

Don't think you'll get 7 heroes for free, its additional, just like this update its going to come at a cost...

cool update, good job ANet!

Hmm, got to see a bit more of it in game, and it's not that bad. As long as they keep giving out end game and pvp bounties, I won't count it as grind. But asking for 7500 coins for armour storage and basically your entire reward for a flask of firewater is too much and the whole thing will become useless in a months time.

Just wanted to add, why the hell are the 4 optional tabs grayed out on accounts that don't have them?

I agree wityh Proff, why taunt everyone who doesnt buy the panes by having them greyed out?

I am HAPPY that the "Free" pane was free and not one of those "Buy to get" deals. However it's too bad I've yet to get the NCSoft site to load so I can get it. 3 tries so far, all of over 20 minute waiting for pages to load without success. A+ for the offer, F for site traffic preparation, A+ for new storage

The "Stylist" was a nice surprise, though I'll never use it I'm sure it made many happy. A+ for the offer, B on how to get it(real money?)

The zoo was an unneeded waste of dev time and server space. F for the offer, F for the waste of Dev time.

Z coins are stupid (WoW money, what a joke), more grind, now before you go do ANYTHING you need to
A) get the appropriate book to fill out
B) Go Get a Zashien Quest aswell
F for the idea, F for trying to create somekind of nontransferable money system.

THose of you that say its not a grind, please come back here an post that its not once youve ground out enough zcoins for 20 slot equiptment packs on all your characters, Even if you just have the basic 8 slots.

Not going to happen in my case because a) most of my chars are fine with 5-slot bags, and b) even my main character might be OK with a 15-slot and c) even for 15-20 slot bags, I won't have "ground out enough zcoins" because I won't have been grinding (by my definition) to get them.

Those of you who say it IS grind, tell me what you do in GW these days, that ISN'T a repetition of stuff you have done before. Isn't EVERYTHING a repetition by now? And therefore (by your definition) EVERYTHING is grind? And why do you keep playing GW if you hate grind so much?

Sure, no problem 9.99$

Not only are we repeating missions we have already beaten but at least the 1st one (Blood washes Blood) was one many of us have already done multiple times to fill books for title tracks. Now we go back and do it again! Yes, that is grind.

Lol...excellent. 10 points for humour!


I will say I am generally happy with this update. Just too bad it's going to take a while to get the equipment bags. That is my only gripe. With my 14 characters and how much I play on average I will expect it will take about 7 months to get them all sorted unless I buy them from other players. That'll probably be my best bet. Too bad really cause they are they only reason for me to do the challenges which is too bad in and of itself and now I find it'll take too damn long for me to get them all myself to get all my characters sorted. Really wish there was another way to get the heavy eq. bags so I guess it's back to farming for cash so I can start buying em off other people. At least I can farm an area more than once a day

Well, I must say that this update was a lot more than I was expecting.

Ok, so some of it will cost real world money if you make use of it, but the amount of extra free stuff is more than I was expecting and of a much higher quality that I expected so late in a game's life.

I must say bravo to the whole team at anet for delivering much more than I expected and a particular bravo to Lindsey who must have been coding in her sleep!

Good job :-)

Indeed. ANet are either very greedy or so desperate for money that they're so bold as to charge this amount of real money to just tweak your character!

not sure if its not here already but aegeis of augh is now aegis of aaaargghh

This update made my day! I'm not buying anything from the store for now, but we got Equipment pack + 1 FREE storage pane. Zaishen Quests seem like great idea, can't wait to log in