Know why I hate playing Proph & Factions?

Customization is incomplete. For example: You cannot set up a staff that is Req 9 Curse, +10 En, +5 w/Ench, HSR Water Magic Spells. Such a staff would have specific uses for very specialized builds. One cannot set this up because the mod system is incomplete, but one might find one in Prophecies or Factions.

The odds of purchasing one are tremendously poor. Such a weapon might be worth 15 to 50k to the person who wants it for a certain build. But the person who finds it will never keep such a weapon because it is not worth wasting limited storage while wandering through 3 million players to see if anyone has a current need for it.


I agree with Mithran about the reasons it was started and reasons it should be abolished. I have never cared for or supported the politics of greed which promotes the overpriced economy in GW. That is a major reason I virtually never trade for anything, simply because those trades of 100+Ecto exist. Frankly, I will find my own and do without. I would rather do without than cater to the jerk-wads that feel they are that important.

However, to complete the crafting system, there would have to be a lot more mod.s. There would have to be specific mod.s for specific skill areas, instead of modding items attribute. I can only guess that the programming somehow complicates making this happen and is why the inscription system remains incomplete.

Inscriptions were a partial answer to the lack of a decent trade/crafting system in the game. They never completely answered the potential needs of the player base, and stifled build creativity to what the weapons would support.

Its still a damn sight better than what is available to you in other games...

The inscription system is a failure of epic proportions and they should better not touch it again - it's done too much unrecoverable damage already. List of reasons is long and I've posted them in many threads before, starting in the huge thread before NF release - I knew it was about to be something absolutely horrible for the game back then without even seeing it in action. And I was 100% right.

Ideas like arcanemacabre's are totally horrible, it would be a meganerf, an extreme overkill. Completely removing great rare drops from the game, replacing everything with insc shit, only keeping the last existing oldschool stuff to gain a lot of value with no more chance of getting. And adding new fake rarities not appealing to the crowd loving to hunt for and collect virtual treasures for the simple reason - they would be insc shit aswell.
Uber nonsense.

Instead I'd love to see the old system expanded to more areas, more weapons and ideally even more kinds of inherent (unchangable) mods possible. Way to revive Prophecies while keeping it's old system, which is far from perfect but *FAR* better and more fun than the post NF failure.

Oh, and quote for TEH LULZ:
'politics of greed'
'never trade for anything simply because trades of 100+Ecto exist.'
Bwhahahhahaa

Arcanemacabre has a good idea. I doubt that they will do this in GW1, but maybe something similar in GW2.

What really puzzles me is that so many loot hogs play this game. Guild Wars is one of the worst games for rare item hunters out there.

What really makes me laugh is that that is partly against the whole idea of GW anyway...

So, the beef isn't with the rarity of the items, but rather you (and others like you) dislike change? I can't imagine that if there were always inscriptions from the very beginning (beta release and on), there would be this much ire.

"adding new fake rarities not appealing to the crowd loving to hunt for and collect virtual treasures for the simple reason - they would be insc shit aswell" - Please explain this further if I am incorrect in my assessment.

Pretty much agree. People, in general, don't like their 'livelihood' messed with, virtual or not. I honestly think this is the biggest issue a lot of these people have with inscriptions. Make it a staple from the beginning, and there's nothing to miss; nothing to be mad about changing.

I'd rather buy an inscribable item than an item with a fixed base mod. In the long run it's more convenient.

Wouldn't it be a blast if you traded your armbrace for a tormented sword with random mods? (req 13, 1.1 vamp, +18 to life)

NOT!

However, this would make a torment item with perfect mods worth more then a panda. I'm afraid people exist out there who would actually love it.

Id quit. .. ... .. after 48months there aint rly much to do except collecting items. and if items were inscriable i wouldnt bother collect em. i could say if all items would become inscriable 50% of gws ectos etc would go to ebay from rich ppl are most ppl would quit, there just wouldnt be anything to do.

Id rather want em make eotn and nf items non inscriable, and just collector/craft items would stay inscriable.

And for ppl who said that if there was no inscriable there would be perf Bone dragon staffs etc. thats not true, some staffs from cantha example are even rarer and yet still theres perf ones around.

Non-inscribables are pretty and fun to look at, but inscribables make it easier for someone to equip out a new character. I do like it when I find a non-inscribable that I can use, but if I want something quick, cheap and functional, I'll slap an inscription onto something that was relatively easy and cheap to obtain.

Actually by ruined i mean that. now ppl only want perfect items. in 2005-2006 when it was so rare find perf item. ppl were happy with 13-14% weapon. its as good as 15%. so not techically any difference.
for Swords example. between 15% and 14% theres 0.2dmg. and between 14% and 13% 0.3dmg. so in Guildwars its nothing. if you use 13^50 wep. or 15^50wep. wont change anything for your damage.

I think so, too.
This just inspired me to talk about the by now totally blurred "vision" of GW, what it is, what it should be.

Mike O'Brien and other ANet designers already pointed out that Guild Wars attracts a very diverse audience.

I am not sure if this is a curse or a blessing. We have not only a PvE/PvP preference split, but also different interpretations how "their" PvE or PvP should be.

It starts with discussions about inscriptions or not, unlimited levels, mounts (heck, sometimes I think people want a F2P WoW and just refuse to realize this is no DIKU MUD), farming as a passion, people who basically ask for more grind, those who totally refuse it, the idea to "work" for skills or not and all that. There are people who rarely play HA/GvG but tons of RA/CM/AB.

There is something for everyone in Guild Wars, maybe this is part of the reason for GW's success. But you cannot please everyone, and the lack of focus with such a widespread audience is always going to leave someone unhappy. I wonder if Anet will make more (foul?) compromises or if they will more clearly communicate their vision of the game in GW2.

Right now I cannot say what their vision is, it changed too much over time. The initially assumed PvP focus waned over time, and the "skill over time" and "no grind" ideas also got thrown overboard. Even if we can argue about how much of the more grindier stuff is just optional or mandatory.

How lucky for us that you and people like you constitute < 1% of the playerbase.

We could give a shit.

There are times when you chose to no longer show your titles, use collector weapons and wear the armor you can buy in Boreal station.

And then you get into TA and lay waste on all the Fow/Blindfold/chaos gloves/GWAMM types.

In about 5000 hours of playing around GW I have found maybe 10 non-insc weapons that are useable. All martial weapons(axes, swords, a hammer and some bows). I have never had a good shield drop, never had a good caster weapon drop, and indeed have had many mutant bizzare abortions drop that have no practical aplications at all, things that should not be, like a R13 strength +1 earth 19% -3 while hexed eternal shield. The Staves with 3 reqs, a R13 inspiration, 19% HCT water, +1 smiting 19% staff... what the goredengine is that.... Then there's all the crap ass staves that reduce poison duration, caster weapons and offhands with 1 mod and other junk. This crap shouldn't exist. They were wrong to make the system drop weapons with random mods in the first place. It was broken, inscriptions fixed it for the most part, the only thing they did wrong when inscription slots were implemented is they should have ret-conned all the non-insc stuff in faction and proph, and in the case of those stupid dual modded bugged shields and useless offhands and staves they should have picked one inscription( the one listed at the top or in the case of a +1 death shield the att that doesn't fit the shield) and allowed a handle or core to be added to them, then added in the appropriate +1 att and +10 vs creature handles and mods. The weapon smiths should sell mods and inscriptions like a rune trader too.

If the economy crashed, tough tits, it shouldn't have been that inflated to begin with. if you can only have 100k on hand and 1 mill in the bank why is stuff being sold at 500k-10 mill prices? It was BS and it's good they balanced it out. There's still rare skins that aren't easy to obtain and they're being taken out of circulation by customization all the time. If you still want to mess with rare commodities screw around with the minis. It wasn't skill that made you rich(outside of halls, even then you had to get lucky at the chest) it was luck(i pop "the good chest" in hells precipice, the one near the portals, and get a grape fire wand, the next guy gets a non insc 20/20, +30 15^50 r9 sephis axe, back when that meant something...) grinding(griffins, ettins, smites, traps, ect) or ebay.

While true that the damage difference between 13 and 15 is mathematically insignifigant in GW, it is very much not true that people wanted those weapons. Only in ascalon where people were fresh from pre, maybe in lions arch after 20 minutes to a half hour of spamming would you be able to dump that stuff on a guy for 5k or less. Everyone else got by with quest reward junk or collectors items from the desert/shiverpeaks till they learned to farm(if they were the type to grind for the good stuff at all).

Yeh, I am of the same opinion. There was no need to do this with the addition of green weapons.

I'm cheap, I use inscribables alot simply because i have huge mounds of them, all equally perfect and boring....

But I enjoyed the game FAR more when they didn't exist. It was the best back in the first few months, when ANY gold drop was a woah! moment. When nobody had anything anywhere close to being a perfect and nobody complaied about them being hard to get. Everyone was having fun playing with whatever they had and finding better things over time. 'Perfection' was out of reach and people didn't care - using nonmax purple 12^50s didn't make anyone unable to complete a mission or anything like that. There was no *need* to grind or buy expensive rares to progress in the game and having the first high quality golds fetch 100k++ectos prices had NO impact on the game of those who couldn't afford them - they simply didn't have to buy them.

GW's item system was always very simple and primitive, but it was more appealing to me and showing great *potential* than those used in other MMO's (based on straight enforced progression into much better and better tiers of gear, instant soulbinding of the best gear or having a system of upgrading to uber power levels with increasing risk of breaking the item, resulting in the need for unlimited grind). All the potential unfortunately got wasted as subsequent updates only made it easier and easier to reach absolute perfection and reproducing more and more of the same, instead of expanding the system into more possibilities.

Right now the closest to my ideal dropsystem exists only in Pre-Searing. For many kinds of items theres simply no perfection at all, instead among the sea of mediocre and bad there are some good, great, or amazing drops! Number of possibilities is so high many high-end items are one-of-a-kind and getting a good drop *really* feels great when you know it can't be just copied by anyone from a few cheap components.

And the best of all are PreSearing STAFFS - they have as many as 5 variable unchangable values (HSR, +Energy, Dmg range, requirement, inherent hct mod) depending on each other in a certain way and giving a huge variety of possibilities... yet the mediocre ones are perfectly usable and enough to pwn the charr.

*** Way to go for GW2:

-Items MUST have some unchangable values differentiating their quality. They should be generated randomly but the system should be designed in such a way that those random values don't make the vast majority of rare items near useless because of coming in very odd mixes -minimize the amount of bad combos, make some mods define what the item is supposted to do, just make them vary by numeric values (see Staffs in PreSearing)
-Moddability should only be used to adjust an item to better fit playstyles or builds, but shouldn't make a common item into a perfect.
-There should be NO such thing as a strictly defined and obtainable 'perfect' at all. Instead there should ALWAYS be a possibility for finding a better one, even if only a tiny bit better. The high level plateau of power shouldn't be totally flat, following the hopefully no max char level system.
-Players don't like imperfections - don't make them clearly visible! Use the "Above the max" philosophy instead! If the expected 'max' is say +50 make the mod occassionally drop as a +51, or in very rare cases +52, and who knows if +53 is possible or not? Also, having multiple variable unchangable values connected to each other in a certain way so whole items won't appear Strictly Better than other ones, which can add a lot of depth.
-Watch carefully the fixed stat 'unique' (green) items, they're prone to overfarm and heavily impact the value of every other similar item. They should be either inferior to some of the better 'golds' of the same area or customized on pickup (as much as I hate this mechanic, it may be a must for the greens)
-Players do want Uber weapons even if they don't admit that. Make the bestest weapons feel really Uber without being significantly more powerful than typical high-level stuff. Combine the best aspects of the gear-based MMO's with the casual-friendly GW philosophy, make a system where no progression into hard to get rares is *required* but where such progression is possible in a balanced way, say uber = ~3-5% above the 'max' accessible for the masses.
-Looks is not everything, there should be room for a little statwise progression and truly unique stats and effects.
-But looks are very important to many, so instead of reducing an item to 'a skin' and 'a pile of separate mods' add a way to transfer *full stats* of one item into a skin of another one of similar or lesser rarity level, resulting in destruction of whole 2 old items and creation of 1 new item, which should be customized to character that did the transformation. Note that this doesn't create new value, but it's a great sink removing top stat weapons AND top looking weapons from the economy, this process could also be a major goldsink.
-But that thing should be only the last resort - the most rare epic skins should be automatically of better quality than typical rare of the same level, so there's no "I found a Crystalline but it's crap" without resorting to something as lame as full moddability.
-Weapons and Mods should leave the economy almost as fast as they enter it - add severe penalties for using not customized weapons, and mods put on an item by a player should not be recoverable without complete destruction of the item it's salvaged from.
-Player based crafting can be a great thing, but don't make it a game of building blocks, significant randomization is important when it comes to magic modifiers on items.

insc = insta fail merch junk

It has EXACTLY the same impact on them as having inscriptions exist does on you.

Why? Why are you more interested in being obsessed about gear stats in a game that is focused on everything but?

Honestly, I think every item and mod should have 'max' stats, but with a lot more options on what 'type' of stats you want. People would still be able to trade and switch out mods, with the only difference being what they think works with their build better. Forget different numerical attribute requirements, too. I do like character level requirements, especially if the level cap is high as has been alluded to in GW2.

Why? What is so great about having items with unchangeable values? In my world, that makes NO sense. What is so evil about customization and more options?

I totally agree with the first part. The second part shouldn't have any meaning - 'perfect' items shouldn't exist. This is a construct created by the players in GW. In other MMOS (the ones you don't like playing), this makes perfect sense since that is the ultimate goal, pimping out your character in 'perfect' gear.

IMO, no item should be more 'perfect' than another, period. Unless you're talking about how good an item is for a particular build.

Wait a minute...
Hmm....

Aaaand again?

I like unique stats and effects; that sounds cool. Make 'em purely cosmetic and we have a deal!


The rest of your ideas sound more like the other MMOs you claim to dislike. I really prefer GW to them others, as well, but it seems like for a completely different reason than you.

It comes down to this...rarer items = moar e peen for the obsessed types who have more ecto than they know what to do with. The average Joe Gamer likes inscribable weapons because they are cheaper & easier to get his hands on. Anyone trying to argue, with a straight face, that non insc weapons are statistically better in terms of value than inscribable weapons because they like to be different needs to stop talking.