1k for skills, still ok.

I always thought they were trying to merge pve with pvp char..This is so you can use you pve char. in pvp as I am seeing more of it.PvP aren't all the great to play with as you are relegated to the Battle Islands only.

*raises hand* I'd still do the quests. I enjoy being thorough and completing everything at least once.

But anyway, a lot of the arguments I'm seeing in here sound really silly. Do people seriously expect the game to hand them every skill they want without having to work for them? I mean, what's next, people wanting PvE characters to start at level 20? Doing that would be the same kind of change, as making skills easier to acquire also detracts from character progression.

The fact is, you can buy nearly an entire profession's worth of skills by the time you finish Factions if you do all the quests and avoid wasting money. I know because I did just that, as mentioned in my earlier post. And I can say from experience that that's plenty of skills for a casual player. My old guild had lots of casual players in it who would play for an hour or two every other day or so, and changes in many of their builds would happen over a gradual period of time as they played through the game. I'd be surprised if any of them ever actually used more than 50 skills altogether.

So, what I'm hearing in here basically amounts to, "But I want it now!" Well, we all want something out of the game, and nobody likes to wait. But really, what fun would it be if everything was handed to us for free? If you can get skills for, say, 500g instead of 1,000g, why not 250g instead of 500g? Why not free? Why not let you get elites at the trainers instead of having to go cap them? If you carry the concept to its logical conclusion, you'll eliminate nearly all character progression in the name of eliminating grind and increasing fun. But, ironically enough, that would also eliminate a lot of fun for people who like building up their characters. Which is why it's silly to argue over the amount of time it takes to acquire skills, since everyone is going to acquire them at different speeds depending on how they play; it is very literally impossible to please everyone.

If there's something worthwhile to argue over here, it's the number of skills you should be able to acquire over the course of the game without having to farm for them. If that number needs tweaking, then a change in skill pricing might be a good way to fix it. But the ease of acquiring an individual skill is moot, since that will vary widely from person to person.

Myself, I found that being able to buy around 60 skills over the course of the game without farming seemed comparable to the number of skills I'd receive from quests in Prophecies. I don't care to go through right now and look up exactly how many skills you can get from quests in Prophecies, to directly compare numbers, but I was satisfied with the skills I ended up with at the end of the game. And thus I see no problem with the 1k cost of skills.

60 skills is not even 1/2nd of the number of skills for a char... from both standard primary and secondary without even counting the elites.

In prophecies i could get around 80% of the total number of skills not counting capturing of the elites OR non farmingbehaviour. I'd easilly end up at around 95- 99% of all the skills with casual game play and without farming. This is a striking difference for me.

On top of that, if we don't voice ourselves now, then in chapter 3, 4 , 5 , etc the same problem will ensue but will get worse since getting skills from skillquests in stead of having to buy them will be entirely gone. Reason why i came forward with the point that finishing a quest should be able to earn you 1 skill, seeing as you do get 1 skillpoint for them... And why i lowered the monetary reward you'd need to acquire new skills to put them more in line with casual gameplay (ergo finish 1 quest be able to afford a capsig "and do some work yourself" or near afford a skill bought from the skilltrainer). On top of that I didn't want to increase the monetary rewards of the quests seeing that that would just end up making 15k armors, etc more easilly acquirable, something which I don't think a casual player really needs in contradiction to skills. And for which i then don't mind having the need to work for. Not to mention that once you change secondary you will STILL need to work to get the skills you want. But at least that would be understandable as being part of your primary profession decission.

I have never found money to be acceptably provided in the game. Things are better now. But the cost of things that I would want to play is much higher than I will ever have. Performance is a product of button smashing. Player representation is completely in appearances and theme. Without money the latter is impossible. I won't violate the EULA just to get things I want. I am looking for a better game to come out this fall and see how or if that changes things.

With the ''cheap/bad looking stuff''? So sacrificing personal integritty and value is ok because one is a casual/relaxed player? I will never agree to this position. If I wanted to debase self-esteem and value I would not have to play a game to do so. Everyone is worth what is decent looking stuff without having to be professional players or e-bay golders to get it.

Fitz

This is very true. Think back to when you all started playing Guildwars (Prophecies). Did money grow on trees then? If you had to pay 1k for the majority of your skills, and almost all of your skills were not unlockable via quests, you would have virtually none. You would have to focus all your gold on to equipping your character with skills. You would have standard or sub-standard equipment and luxury goods would seem miles away.

Many of you are posting with months of playing time under your belt from GW-Prophecies and 1k per skill is not an issue for you. It is definitely not an issue for me, but think about the new players who just bought Factions and never played GW before. It is very hard for them to come up with that kind of money for their newly created characters and without any knowledge of this game. There have been many ways to make good money at the release of Factions, but who do you think capitalized on those opportunities: us veterans or the new comers to the game? This is a disturbing factor you all haven't been thinking about, and makes you think twice, again, why Guildwars Factions is hardly a stand-alone game.

I see you haven't run the numbers either. Because I just did, from looking up all the skill quests on GuildWiki, and this is what I came up with: Not counting the skills you can get in pre-searing, (to account for the fact that you also get some free skills on Shing Jea Island in Factions), you get 34 skills for both your primary and secondary professions, making for a total of 68 skills. That's pretty close to my estimate of being able to buy 60 skills in Factions. And that was also from playing through the Kurzick side only; you'd be able to buy more if you also wanted to play through the Luxon side.

So, with that in mind, think about the effect of lowering skill cost to 500g: Suddenly you'd be able to buy 120 skills over the course of the game instead of 60. And that would be far in excess of the 68 you get from quests in Prophecies. Assuming ArenaNet wants to keep the balance between chapters fairly constant, that would be way too huge a change.

But it's not getting worse as it is. Not by much, at any rate; 60 compared to 68 is not a huge difference. And really, it's a difference I'm willing to accept, given that with Factions I can pick and choose which skills I want and when, rather than having to rely on whatever I can get from quests at the point in the game that I'm at.

Also, the whole argument for 500g skills so that you can buy a new one after every 2-3 quests is pointless. Again, it comes back to the ease of acquiring individual skills, which is pointless to argue over because of how widely that varies from person to person. Some people will do quests to get a new skill and spend an hour or so on it; others will go out and farm for the money and get it in less than half the time. You simply can't balance that kind of thing because people will always thinks it's either too easy on one side or too hard on the other.

I KNOW!

Skill prices should be decided upon depending on how far you are in the Skill Hunter title track.

I agree, If it was any cheaper people would have all the skills in no time and it would make the game feel even shorter.

Winge winge winge "Im a casual gamer I dont play much but yet I still wanto be able to do everything oh and can I have 15 k armour to its to hard to get"

Reality check people you complain about the game being to easy it does not take long to make 1k. And if you havent noticed with everything in Life you do have to put time and effort into it if you wanto get better. Guild wars claims to be more about skill over time yet regarding that skill is something developed through time and effort.

If u didnt know farming is actually a skill . What annoys me is Anet are listening to you causual gamers and are making it easier for you so called causal gamers. Effectively or they will end up doing is taking away that sense of accomplishment which others have worked for.


Its one of the reasons its very hard sometimes to find a decent party due to the fact that some of the players in your party have been hand fed or pulled through the game by others. "Oh anet its not fair im a casual gamer is it possible for you to let me do the final mission without doing anything. I'd actually like to see more areas only accesible for people that have worked for it.

Competition, comparison, rank and elitism are all factors for me that make a game more enjoyable, If you chose to ignore these factors
and play for fun thats your choice to, you wanto play casually thats fine, you can do that to just dont expect everything for nothing.

It's a 1K maximum, people! That means that up to a certain point, skills cost less and then they never cost more than your one thousand gold.

I have both Prophecies and Factions. Personally, I prefer Factions method of skill acquisition for the simple fact that with Prophecies, my characters ended up with a multitude of skills I never used, never wanted to use, and never intended to acquire! It's like having a dictionary that includes sixteen languages when all you want is to look up a word in English.

Factions forces you to more carefully plan your skills. In some ways, it's definitely more of a training/strategy exercise. For those of us who like to roleplay (if given the opportunity), it is more 'realistic' than being handed arbitrary skills at the end of a quest. "Oh, and since you delivered that message, have a skill or two that are completely unrelated to what you just did." Now maybe that doesn't appeal to a great many of you, having to think about what skills you may use. For me, it does.

It's this title thing that bothers me more than anything (about skills). I play the game for the game, not to see if I can cap elite skills I will never use only for a title! Who cares if you have the elites for every profession? You can only use one at a time, anyhow. Seems completely unrelated to the game itself.

If I were to offer a compromise I would say that each quest should provide a token or two usable to purchase ONE non-elite (non-capsig) skill from a skills merchant.

Fitz

i find it funny that people seem to forget that in factions, you gain skillpoints and money from completing a mission. by the time you go through that mission and get your skillpoints and money, with the items that dropped for you adn sellign them to merchant only, youll average about 1.5-2k per mission...

suddenly having to buy a skill or two dont seem all that terrible now does it...

also about 1/3 of the new skilsl are merely carbon copies of the prophicies skills. so therefor, you dont need all the new skills from ch 2 if you have the same skills from ch 1

oops double post

I had a whole bunch of stuff in here, but in the interests of not being flamey, I'll re-edit it and boil it down to three points:

1) quit it with the Martyr Syndrome. The "poor me, i'm so misunderstood and alone" stuff just wastes time and confuses the issue. Get your self-validation elsewhere.

2) You're not "sacrificing personal integrity and values" by using collector equipment instead of 15k armor... it's called "making intelligent, practical decisions based on available time and resources".

3) It sounds like what you want to play is a "Sandbox" game. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(videogames)) GW is not, strictly speaking, a Sandbox game. While some of its content can be played in that style, it is not fully a Sandbox game, nor should one think of it as one.

eudas

But here you start with the fallacy (sp?), since during the normal game time i can get a number of skills by using the standard buying method at a reasonable price level ergo 50 ->500 gold (about 20 - 30 skills) which where calculated in your 60 skills. Which is money that you can get without any real farming just from rewards or picking up stuff during missions as in factions. And this does constitute for around 90 - 100 skills. On top of that I still had the advantage during prophecy of having the advantage of buying capsigs at half the normal price, but that is out of the window now. Heck using the same maxvalue of 1k you can first start with buying the skills that are not available through questing up till the moment you bought them all together with sufficient capsigs while afterwards using your skillquests to gain the others easilly. Which imho will give you all skills for a lesser investment, so non farming gametime.

but here comes the cat out of the bag. These 60 skills can only be bought during the levelup of a completely new char. If you however would make the same count for another chapter, you'dd end up with way less extra skills "generous guess: 40, prolly less" because your skillcost was already maxed and 400 gold is nowhere near the 1k skillcost of skills in further chapters. Which was the reason for the entire reduction of costs to 500. this in conjunction with the marketresearch of a little while ago by the esteemed anet themselves that a MAJORITY of people only have a stack of 10k money in their storage to draw on, which doesn't even pay for more then 10 skills for dragged over characters I considered the reduction to 500 gold as a max a wise decission so people can actually experiment more with builds as a dynamic "skill over time" game, or a game for the casual gamer, should be in stead of having to farm to be able to compete in the dynamic stage of the game.

But leave the aesthetic stuff still in need of farming to be gettable. Ergo work for it, and not get thrown the rewards in your lap which the reduction of skillcosts to 500gold would do in contradiction to the other alternative of raising moneyrewards of the quests.

But here is the newsflash:

farming != playing the game, seeing as it does not stroke with the statement of skill over time or a casual gamer.
while completing quests has been integrated as a part of the game and therefore is the legitemate method the unlockrate should be geared towards. So once again as you stated, you can't balance the game around both, but point remains farming is not the method skillacquisition should be balanced against.

OT: Although I have always been in favor of decreasing the quality and quantity of drops if you go outside of a town with a smaller group than the maxed one. It should be more profitable to go with a full group of henchies then soloing or dualing, or trippling, or quadring or..., mostly not because farmers hurt me in any way, but I don't consider this part of the game due to the teambased/focussed character of GW. But meh this is completely off road of the basic premise of the thread, just put it in to show a linearity in an opinion which prolly differs from other people but does seem logical if you compare with the mission statement/corporate intentions of Anet with the introduction of GW.

I see Loviatar said this but for some reason deleted his post, but his message is valid. It boils down to this simple fact, which Anet has decided on.

Getting All Skills != Casual Player

I don't care if you think it SHOULD be that way, it's NOT. If you want to get all the skills there are for every single profession, Anet has decided that guess what, you're going to have to put a bit of extra work into it. Is this necessary at all? No. You could go through with 4 characters and easily unlock all the skills and then make PvP chars as you see the need to.

(Insert picture of a piece of cheese here to go with all the whine.)

Casual player:
Gets skills he needs.
Serious player:
Gets useful skills from many different professions.
Crazy player: (me)
Gets all the skills he can afford then works to get the rest.

Please reread what I stated, I never stated ALL SKILLS. I did however state all skills for the initial primary and secondary.

casual player:
gets all skills of the initial character (ergo mesmer/monk) without 'farming'

serious player:
gets all needed skills for different professions(Me/N, Me/A, ...) and all skills of initial character(mesmer/monk) with some 'minor farming'

crazy player:
gets all the skills for all prophessions but starts with the usefull ones for the non initial character with 'major farming'.

At least you'dd play to be a casual player and work for everything else as you yourself admit to be anets goal as evidenced in the bolded part. And that is imho how it should be according to me and hopefully a lot more people. But hey, like evidenced before the opinions of anet change during time.

What about armor and materials for that armor?The skills are one thing the armor is the next and if you are new to Faction and never played Prophecies so you wouldn't have any gold saved up for either skills or armor.What are these ppl suppose to do?

I have seen and talked to many people who do not have Prophecies but started with Factions. They don't seem to have many problems such as you propose, Age. Yes, FActions has a much faster paced 'pre' section than Prophecies, but with armor collectors, there are all the options available for at least modest protection while questing and saving for the "perfect" armor and weapons.

Perhaps the problem isn't so much that people need x amount of gold for high level armor and weapons and skills as some people feel entitled to only 'perfect' and nothing less. It's a game. If you can't find something to not bitch about, please refrain from playing.

My thoughts all along have been that cap sigs should always be about 1/2 the price of skills to encourage the capping of non elite skills. I'd be totally fine with the 1k, or even 1.6k maximum for just buying them, if they offered another alternative for aquiring them that cost more time and less gold. So I guess I'm fine with 1k, but I think cap sig should be 1/2 price, or a fixed price lower than the maximum. I do NOT feel this is in any way unfair to PvP only characters. The time invested in finding and capping skills has as much value as the time it takes to earn faction.

Thats a good idea it would actually make quests worth doing, seing that alot of quests dont really achieve anything.

You can buy 20 skills before you hit the 1k cap, and you'd have spent 6,450g on those 20 skills. So, sure, you can buy some before you hit the cap, but 6,450g is quite a bit of money for someone playing through Prophecies for the first time. If you don't have anything in storage to help you along, affording each new set of armor as you get to it, even if you only buy sets when there's a base armor level increase, can be difficult. You make money much slower through most of Prophecies than you do in Factions, and most of what you do make goes towards armor. So you're still relying on the skill quests for the most part.

After getting to Droknar's and getting max armor--which is where the skill quests stop, incidentally--you are able to put more money towards skills, so you've got a bit of a point there. However, my estimate of 60 was a minimum estimate for Factions, just like the 68 from skill quests is the minimum estimate for Prophecies. So if you want to bring in buying extra skills in Prophecies, there's also more you can do in Factions to earn extra money and buy more skills without farming.

For example, my estimate of 60 skills in Factions doesn't take into account playing through the Luxon side, since I only played through the Kurzick side before beating the game and tapping my storage. It also doesn't take into account any money you can earn by selling amber and jadeite which you'd get from doing Kurzick/Luxon quests and getting faction. (From the ones I've known, casual players don't care much about 15k armor and would rather sell the materials for gold.) So, figuring that you can make at least 10k while doing the quests/mission on the Luxon side (which I know is easily possible on the Kurzick side), plus at least 10 amber and 10 jadeite from doing the two Befriending quests (worth at least 1k each at the trader last I checked), the number of skills you could buy could easily reach 90 or 100.

Oh noes, the skills start at 1k for a character being brought over from Prophecies. That means you've missed out on a whopping 14 skills. The horror.

Seriously, though, characters brought over from Prophecies don't need to buy as many skills as new characters do. Remember, they already have all the skills they learned in Prophecies--and were already able to take advantage of getting their first 20 skills for cheaper--so they don't have as many to buy as a new character does. As well, they should already have a build that they used in Prophecies to fall back on, rather than having to come up with something from scratch.

Also, you should take note that the leveling up of a new character that you mentioned occurs almost entirely on Shing Jea Island in Factions. And, while on the island, Factions characters should primarily be saving up for their 1.5k armor. Prophechies characters, however, should already have max armor when they arrive in Kaineng Center. So even if a Prophechies character arrives in Cantha penniless, they'll still have an advantage over a Factions character in their inventory of skills. And after they set out from Kaineng Center, characters from both campaigns will be earning the same amount of money from quests and missions.

You're right, raising the monetary rewards of quests would be worse than lowering the cost of skills, since it would affect other purchases as well. But lowering the cost of skills would still throw the current balance between Prophecies and Factions out the window. Especially lowering it to 500g. Suddenly the low and high end estimates for Factions would be 120 and 200, while for Prophecies they'd be only 68 and 132 since the number of skills gained from quests isn't affected by price changes.

I would disagree and say that farming is a valid part of the game. But that's getting away from the real issue here, so I'll let it go. (Plus, I've already shown in another thread from a while ago why it's valid, and I don't care to repeat myself.)

My point was that there are people out there who are going to farm in order to get more skills than you can get from simply doing quests and missions. They could be going for the Skill Hunter title (as I am), or maybe they're trying to unlock ever skill on a single character, as a personal goal. These aren't casual players, but they are players nonetheless, and they deserve to enjoy the game as much as anyone else.

So, on one hand, you've got casual players who might like skills to be cheaper so they don't have to spend as much time on acquiring a good selection. And on the other hand you've got more serious players who are trying to acquire many more skills as a goal that they enjoy working towards. Now, if you lower the price of skills, you might make the casual players happy, but then the series players' goal would be easier to attain and not as satisfying, which could make them unhappy. Either way you swing the pendalum, then, someone isn't going to like it, and thus trying to balance skill cost that way is pointless.

And "skill over time" does not mean everything short of 15k armor and perfect gold weapons should be super-easy to get. Again, I'd bring up the fact that if you take too much character progression out of the game, you're actually going to make a lot of people unhappy. You still have to work your way up from level 1 to 20, you still have to save up for 1.5k armor, and you still have to save up for skills at 1k each. It's all the same thing, and if you speed up one, why not the others? The phrase has to be applied to PvE in moderation or else it will ruin a lot of the fun that this side of the game has to offer.

I think that if someone absolutely has to have every skill from their primary and secondary profession, they're a little more than a casual player. Again, from playing with friends in my old guild, I'd be surprised if any of the more casual players ever actually used more than 50 skills total. For the most part people would bang together a basic build early on, tweak it to their liking with whatever skills they had at the time, and then just make adjustments as they got new skills that looked good. Rarely would anyone but the more active and serious players just up and decide to change their build for fun and variety.

With that as a reference point, being able to get somewhere between 60 and 100 skills over the course of the game seems like plenty to me.

My low end estimate of buying 60 skills throughout Factions took into account the cost of 1.5k armor. Like I said in my first post in the thread, I did take 10k out of storage to get my assassin's armor as soon as I got to Kaineng Center (since I wanted the Seitung set, which uses a lot of steel), but I put that much money back soon afterwards.

If you save up while on Shing Jea Island you should already have most of the money needed to craft a set of 1.5k armor by the time you get to Kaineng Center, provided you don't insist on getting one of the sets that uses a ton of expensive materials. Also, there's always collector armor, which works just fine until you save up enough for better stuff.

I agree with pretty much all that you've said. If you have a link, I'd be interested to read your post that you reference above.

eudas

I was actually going to include a link to the thread, just for reference, but then I found the search was disabled and I figured digging up the link was more trouble than it was worth. Since you asked, though, I dredged it up (no thanks to the Google search) from some old instant message logs.

My first post in the thread is on page five, and then I made two or three more after that as well. The basic argument that I put forth is that rare and highly expensive items such as FoW armor can only be attained through farming, so ArenaNet must have intended such farming as a valid part of the game. Otherwise they wouldn't have made the items as rare or the costs as high.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...=120082&page=5

neve rha dproblems moneywise with prophecies and i have never botheed to farm. I did however complete all quests and picked up loot which i then in turn sold to the merchant. I won't say that I was a rich person, but i was able to buy all skills together with the armor at the end of the game. just by not buying excessive stuff like every AL upgrade possible. Ergo only when it was a substantive amount: after presearing, and in droks, rest i used collectorarmor and made sure to have collectoritems from around the jungle without farming.

my point was that it was during basic gameplay without anything else then completing the storyline and the secondary quests.

the characterprogression revolves around completing 1 side, therefore I wouldn't count this. In some way this could be seen as cheating but meh it might be a tad overboard.

On top of that, amber doesn't only get used for the 15k armor, but also for the 1.5k armor. Something which some casual players might be holding out on in buying a certain item off their armor, like you saved for droknars armor starting ascalon by collecting the materials (steel, silk,...). Besides if you hadn't noticed amber has been steadilly declining in price for a long while now, so it wouldn't surprise me if at some point in hte future amber won't even be worth 100 gold anymore. Which therefore can't be used as a consistant base for skillbuying

that is still 14k. An amount the majority of players hasn't even got storaged according to anets own research.

Again, pushing casual players in cookie cutter builds in stead of letting people experiment with the dynamical endgame in mind. Something you'll do more if all skills for your original character get mapped out.

which can be stated just as well for a canthan char visiting tyria, therfore rendering that kinda void in my opinion.

so lets agree to disagree

And I never stated they shouldn't be let to do so, what I did state was that the acquisition of skills should not be balanced on these people but on their primary target, namely the casual player who plays 1-2 hours a day maybe and finishes a quest or 2 making him able to afford 2 skills if he went out and used a skillcap to get them or 1 if he bought them from the skillsmerchant

same point as above, the serious people are not their main target, but the casual players are. therefore any balancing should not be done in favor of the serious ones.

but this progression has already been sped up, just compare the time spend levelling up to 20 in prophecies or in factions and it is seriously different. The acquisition of 1.5k armor has been sped up as well. Just the possibility of popping into kaineng to craft max armor is already an example of this, you don't even need a runner anymore to get maxarmor, henchies will do. So I'll ask you the same question, why have these been changed but not the price on skills?

Reason why i consider this to be a must for casual gamers is out of pure characterdevelopment point of view. If you finish the storyline + quests without rushing then you should be entitled to have all skills for your initial primary and secondary unlocked. If they ever use them yes or no is outside of the question, but it does hinder them in testing out different options from their basechoice, something which i consider to be a prime necessity.

but meh, lets just conclude that we agree to disagree, since we can keep on discussing i won't budge from my opinion, but neither will you even though we both might think that we are drawing logic conclusions.

here's my opinion, sometimes you will use the same skills with different characters, just lower the price for skills which already unlocked
how about it?

that is the biggest mistake in perception i think you have.

a casual gamer is like the minimun specs on GW.

a serious player is like on the high side of recommended

hardcore is watercooled,OC and even more radical.

you are saying the casual player should have serious level equipment.

a casual player will play the game (as Ensign says) with most of the presear/ascalon skills with one or 2 there that they think will help.

they dont need them and if they want to tinker later they will pick up skills if when and as they feel like it.

example of my 13 month old e/mo has a whopping total of 72 skills of which i use less than half.

my brand new E/N from cantha level 20 and 200 point with 20 hours has 31 skills and 14 skill points that i will keep until i decide what skills i really want not gimmie anything you got now

and yes i have a big list to choose from just not decided yet

casual does not need the all skill (pri/sec) flexibility because they are casual not serious.

simply i disagree with your definition of casual player (i consider myself casual)

Sure, if you skip out on buying armor and just go with collector stuff you'll have more money for skills. But you can do the same thing in Factions too, so that's kind of moot. Bottom line is, if you want good armor throughout the game, you're going to have to fork over more gold in Prophecies than in Factions.

And playing through all of Faction's missions and quests--which includes both the Kurzick and Luxon sides--is somehow different?

Actually, the story involves uniting both sides together, so it would make perfect sense to play through both. You don't have to, but it wouldn't be unreasonable in the context of the story.

Yeah, there are the 1.5k Kurzick/Luxon sets. But people should already have max armor, so if they choose to buy extra armor instead of skills, that's their choice. It's the same thing as buying 15k armor in Prophecies instead of loading up on skills at Ember Light Camp, just on a smaller scale.

And true, amber and jadeite have been getting cheaper. But I think it's going to be a long while before they drop down to 100g. I can't see them going much below 1k so long as there's decent demand for the armor.

So they can't buy a ton of new skills when they first arrive in Kaineng; another case of, "But I want it now!" Maybe they should try doing some quests and earning some gold? And they already took advantage of cheaper skills once, why should they get to again?

Yes, God forbid that Prophecies characters use their old skills when they first arrive in Cantha. Seriously, you can walk outside Kaineng, do a few quests, and afford a couple new skills. Walk down to the Marketplace and the Bazaar, do some more quests, and you can afford a few more. After an hour two you'll be able to buy enough skills for an entirely new build. And it will be a build of your choosing, unlike what you'd get with skill quests.

Yeah, um, that was my point. Any character traveling over from another campaign is going to have an advantage over a newly created character. And that advantage more than makes up for the fact that the new skills are 1k each from the start.

As such, that refutes your argument for lowering the skill cost on the basis of characters from other campaigns not being able to buy as many skills as new characters. (And that argument is somewhat faulty in itself, as the vast majority of money-giving missions/quests are still available to Prophecies characters when they travel over; Shing Jea Island provides only a small sum compared to the rest of the game.) The cost doesn't need to be lowered because those old characters already took advantage of the cheaper first 20 skills and already have a bunch of skills to play with.

Since when did casual players become ArenaNet's primary target audience? Did I not get the memo or something?

I would think that, if anything, ArenaNet would be targeting the more serious players. Casual players come and go as they find other games to play, but the serious players are the ones who are going to stick around the longest and be most likely to purchase future chapters.

And I read plenty of whining over how fast you level in Factions compared to Prophecies. Some did like it, yes, and others didn't, just as I said. Speed things up and the casual gamers cheer; slow things down and they cry. The opposite goes for serious players.

As for why only skill acquisition remained steady, I would guess that ArenaNet wanted to maintain balance between the number of skills you can easily unlock in Prophecies and the number in Factions. Just like I've been saying all along. Lowering skill costs would benefit Canthan characters much more than it would benefit Tyrian characters, thus creating an imbalance in skill unlocking and giving Factions-only characters an inherent advantage over Prophecies-only characters in PvP as well as PvE.

Level and armor, however, don't have this problem. Sooner or later you're going to be level 20 with max armor in either campaign, and both of those are standard fare for any PvP character. Skills are not, and must be worked for by questing, buying, or unlocking with Balthazar faction.

But most casual gamers aren't even going to care about getting every skill for the primary and secondary. And just to experiment, 60 skills is actually quite a few considering that a build only consists of 8. That's five or six different builds right there, without having to farm at all. I mean, heck, I'm a serious player and I rarely go through five or six completely different builds while playing through the game; I've only played three with my assassin so far, plus one PvP build.

Whatever. I'm kind of getting tired of this discussion as well, truth be told.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/42/3

read the section where they talk about "making churn their friend" \.

Casual gamers are a focus of NCSoft. They want casual gamers because casual gamers a) give them their $$$, b) don't have enough time to invest to really *use* the service much (comparatively), and c) frankly, probably don't bitch as much (see point (b)).

Remember, at the end of the day, It's all about getting your $$$.

there are other good quotes in there, but that ought to pique your curiosity.

but, yes, to go back to your question/point, i believe that while casual gamers are a business focus for the $$$ issue, serious/hardcore gamers should be a maintenance focus for the long-term longevity of the game; casual gamers will move in and out of the game but have only a very light impact on the internal economy and "feel" of the game, but the long term players have much more of an impact and drive entire internal sections of the game -- how groups are made, how organizations inside the game are run, how the economy runs.

to ignore either side, the casual players for their cash-attractiveness, or the hardcore players for how they affect your game, is to invite self-destruction, because they are both sides of the same coin. and at the end of the day, you want that coin in your pocket.

eudas

Wow, you may have had a point (which was lost) but that's no reason to be a total ass.........which you are being

I played this game less than 8 hours a week up until I decided to break from it so I consider myself pretty damn casual. I don't know why you bother bringing up 15k armor and game difficulty in your idiotic rant. They has absolutely nothing to do with this thread at all.

Why did this discussion end up being "let's pit the casual vs. the hardcore gamer"? Being casual means that what someone else does in 24 hours in 2-3 days, I would do in 24 hours over 2-3 weeks. That's really all. I still put in about 4-500 hours last year and got everything 4-500 allows you to get, regardless of how long it takes to put in that much time. The only difference between most of you and I is when we play, not how efficiently we play.

The main difference between Prophecies and Factions is a player could start at the beginning of Prophecies and have enough skill points and gold without farming or grinding to end up with every skill for their primary & secondary professions as well as enough to have a suit of Droknar's armor with a good savings. I know this because I did that and ended with all my Monk skills (except 1 which I still have a cap signet for), all of my Ranger skills (yeah, Mo/R.....great choice on my part ), 2 sets of Droknar's armor, and a savings of about 5-10k.

Now imagine starting a new Assassin/Ritualist character in the "stand alone" game Factions. You hit level 20 in about 2-4 hours, suddenly realizing that not only is the armor you bought on the newbie island useless, but the set you [B]actually[B] needed is a mere 3 towns further and is going to cost you 7.5k + materials which you have had no time to collect yourself. You then go look to the Rune trader who is selling runes for your class for 500-4k each.

Anyway, I digress. The point I am trying to make is that I seriously doubt anyone could go through Factions just doing missions and quests (no farming or grinding) and end up with enough gold to have every single one of their skills, 2 sets of armor, and a little built up on the side. Maybe you guys feel differently but I have no idea how much it would have sucked to be without my storage unit and the gold within.

I should try starting a new character and just play as if I was new.....put my theory to the test

Beat_Go_Stick, by the time you finish the game? or by the time you hit Keineng centre?

I did make a new character, and while I had the money for the armor, some of the materials were 'borrowed' from previous funds (who decided to give assassins and ritualists armor requirements which are almost impossible to achieve without being rich?). Rune wise, this character doesn't have all runes yet, because they're expensive. Does however have the most needed runes. Skill wise, I haven't brought too many, not enough skill points at lvl12

Then, instead of leveling up and continuing in Cantha, I moved him over to Tyria.. and found that Magi Malaquire gives you quests Those two quests alone save you 2k for skills.

So now I have skills which give me two or three builds, I only really play one with the occasional need to change a skill/find a new skill and then buy the new skill if needed.

I'd imagine that by the time I finish Cantha I'd have the money/skill points to get all primary skills. Secondary skills are really not that important, unless you want to play a particular build.

Btw, my first character ever got to Perdition Rock and didn't have the money to buy the skills she was missing. It took time to get the rest of the skills, but eventually, I had them all. I also have a 15k set for her which was achieved without farming. And at the time, we were all happy that the skills didn't cost more than 1k now.

So in the last 6 month-12 month, we've seen the community go from happy about the 1k limit on skills to whining about the fact they cost 1k.. I love how forgetful the community really is.

Heh, I got all the skills for my first character and all of his Capture Signets without even hitting 1k/skill (for those of you who forget, they used to increase separately so skills could cost 600 while your next cap signet would cost 50 gold). Then they gave that tip to "buy your skills and signets now!" so I bought all my skill points in cap signets (probably about 15 more) and still the last one only cost about 1200 or so.

I guess time will tell whether the mandatory buying of skills is a good thing or a bad thing...I just hope that it doesn't turn out that all non-wealthy players (both hardcore and casual) will be forced to spend their time farming for cash instead of enjoying the game.......well, unless you enjoy farming, that is

No way you hit level 20 that fast. I took my new assassin through every quest I could find on the Island and still got to the mainland as level 16, a couple days later with some serious playtime in there.

Unless there's a fast road to experience, if you sit down and play that's not a realistic scenario.

I really don't like the prices. I want to try an illusion/water magic build, but I can't spend 7k just for 7 skills, so I'm sticking to my domination build (with mostly only the skills I started with on my Canthan character).

Ya if u farm Nahpui Quarter, doing chest runs, u can make about 70k in an hour

Why did they made them cost 1K each. To balance Guildwars?

To make skills more affordable. Before the 1K change, skills went up in cost every time you bought them with no cap. Some folks were paying much more than 1K for a skill.