is the game p2w? and how grindy is it?

[ChezzyBalls]

i'm downloading the game now as i write this. just wondering if the game is p2w and if is it grindy since if i'm lucky all i can afford is playing for 1 hour a day

[Ammo]

can people stop commenting cosmetic in a p2w discussion pls.
if by p2w is buying expansion to unlock powerfull spec for classes to do pvp then yes it is somehow p2w. (but come on people, expansion is the goat in gw2)
but no amount of cloak and backpack wing cosmetic can win you pvp and wvw game.

[parseval]

It's not P2W. It's not even based on what you'd expect from a normal MMO progression point of view. If you like exploration, completion, achievements and walking around a lot (Flying mounts in this game aren't as great as WoW) you will enjoy it. Otherwise it's not really a game you get attached unless you make your own decision on what to "progress". I still play it from time to time and I wish I could use my account on Steam to make use of regional prices for gems.

[Gh0st.exe]

Hot Dog Master님이 먼저 게시:

This game is very pay to win

There is subtle trolling, there is obvious trolling, and then there is...well, whatever the hell this is supposed to be.

[mysaga]

I haven't read all of this, but the few cases where this game is may-be-pay-to-win-if-you-define-winning-in-a-specific-way don't change some mayor facts:
- You can have fun for a very long time without spending any money.
- Just buying the expansions goes a long way already.
- Some convenience, Living World Seasons (basiaclly smaller content dlcs) may help, but can also be bought with ingame gold.
- There is a level boost, but you get there so fast it doesn't even matter. Also, over time you will get showered in xp boosting rewards. I can literally boost five more characters to 80 just using the stuff the game has thrown at me until now. Keep in mind that there are games with a monthly sub that sell them as well. This doesn't make the existence of the boost better.
- You can convert RL money to gold and you can get some stuff from the trading post. But you never get an advantage over any other player that he could not achieve without spending money.
- Due to horizontal progression (including equipment tiers), there is a limit of power you can get anyway. Exotic hear is easy to get and all that is required for most of the content (fractals are a special case due to the agony stat). Knowing how to play your class is more important than the difference the higher tier gear will make. So many people don't even care.

And that is the only thing that matters: Regardless of your conclusion in this discussion: You can have a ton of hours of fun without spending any or very little money compared to the biggest competitors. And there is no endless RL sink that you need to feed to keep having fun.

[wowMuchGame]

You can buy gems which can then be converted to gold which allows you to buy gear but because of how gear and the combat works the vast majority of your power comes from skill and build, the games treadmill does not revolve around gear but skill meaning that just because you have the "best" gear it doesn't mean you will clear all the content.

[Tyrian Mollusk]

Sychon님이 먼저 게시:

Tyrian Mollusk님이 먼저 게시:

Personally, I know modern gaming has pretty much forgotten this, but fun makes a much better incentive.

If you are not having fun playing a game, maybe it's not the game's fault? I don't know... Play something else? Who is forcing you to spend real money? If you can't help it, you have an issue, mate.

You focus so much on fighting, you fight without even knowing why or what you're fighting about, like you just attack on instinct for the sake of attacking.

I do play the game for fun, and I was pretty clear I don't throw cash at buying gold with gems.

You're the one that claimed the game allows you to buy enough with cash that there's no remaining incentive to play.

[Mellowdy]

Sugam님이 먼저 게시:

There are some p2w aspects to the game but most fans, hoping to get new blood into the game, might overlook this part of honesty. Its not as bad as some others but it is there.

Remember we live in a world now that people reinvent terms all the time and think nothing about it with word-play gymnastics and such like "QoL".

But if this does not bother you to go for it, its your choice. Just know you will never be any better/advanced then the player next to you in TIME and EFFORT if you do not swipe that card as he/she did.

Ignore this obvious troll. If you want an idea of the game, look on twitch. Aydinn Shieldmaiden is a good one. Tell her Sam sent you.

[Mellowdy]

Ruke (Soreasan)님이 먼저 게시:

parseval님이 먼저 게시:

(Flying mounts in this game aren't as great as WoW)

The skyscale everyone rips on as the holiest hail mary is a discount half speed wow mount. Like people froth over how unique gw2 mounts are, and then point to the discount version of the LEAST unique mount with the most stupid grind completely defeats the point lmao.

Skyscale is a half speed version of Wow's default 2x speed boring mount with endurance bars and crippling height loss.

Griffon and beetle are the zippy zoomers that are 2x funner to use and amazing rides that 90% of the average player base is so incompetent at using. I remember a thread where 90% of people were labeling everyone without a skyscale as noobs because they DIDN"T know how to dive.. or keybind 2-3 buttons.. or use them at all legit lmao. They were trying to compare 0 speed boost 0 mastery griffons walking to skyscale having the same speed lmao.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnwuz3gPSUg
https://youtu.be/3LE3ZM0jrLE?t=555

People only like the half speed wow skyscale because it flies on one button and is good for short distances and doesn't need buttons to operate. It's the dunning kruger effect, 90% of people think they're the apm jesuses of the world while being unable to operate more than 3 buttons to fly a mount, much less do a 34 part rotation memorized in sequence repeating every 20 seconds frame perfectly while adapting on the fly to stuns, alacity breaks and group boons to reach the snowcrow benchmarks you need to beat a afk or 4 button pressing 35k mechanist with only a 1% performance leeway on a 36k frame perfect, 30k-34k top 0.5% good, 25-30k exceptional, 5k-20k eh okay average.

90% of players in this game are like between 2k-15k dps, so a mechanist afking to 28k is a huge gap. and a mount requiring more than 1 button to use is why people play gw2 to unlock the most GENERIC one and boring one of all.

Blizzard is 10x more pay to win. Hell it's pay to play!

[Sychon]

Tyrian Mollusk님이 먼저 게시:

Sychon님이 먼저 게시:

If you are not having fun playing a game, maybe it's not the game's fault? I don't know... Play something else? Who is forcing you to spend real money? If you can't help it, you have an issue, mate.

You focus so much on fighting, you fight without even knowing why or what you're fighting about, like you just attack on instinct for the sake of attacking.

I do play the game for fun, and I was pretty clear I don't throw cash at buying gold with gems.

You're the one that claimed the game allows you to buy enough with cash that there's no remaining incentive to play.

Are you for real?
You said in earlier posts:

Tyrian Mollusk님이 먼저 게시:

ascended gear is generally a tedious PITA to reach even with credit card in hand helping ease the work. Gearing above exotic is setup to be pretty tedious. Skipping that is also a win.
---
...if someone asks whether GW2 is a game where rich people get to buy fancy things the rest of us don't, well, it kinda is exactly that.

I claimed nothing. I interpreted - or at least tried to interpret - what you were going on about. And now you are trying to turn it around and pretend I was the one who came up with it first. Serious mental gymnastics...

[Gh0st.exe]

Val the Moofia Boss님이 먼저 게시:

Insanely grindy. Outside of completing the story (which can be done in 100 hours or less), the only other thing to do in GW2 is to grind for something. If you're doing PvP then you're grinding for the legendary armor and backpiece. If you're doing WvW you're grinding for Gifts of Battle (used to craft legendaries). You're doing any meta events then you're grinding for something to make a legendary weapon.

Also, don't bother trying to gold farm in GW2. If you do the absolute best gold farm (doing ranked PvP with the final chest unlocked) and make 8 gold per hour (which you won't because it requires months of prepwork), you will make about 35 cents in gems per hour. You are wasting the limited hours of your life grinding for imaginary pennies. Working a minimum wage job is 50 times more efficient, and you can actually spend that money on other things. If you are older than 15 and you want to buy stuff in GW2, it makes literally no sense to farm for gold ingame. Flipping burgers at McDonalds, etc - is orders of magnitude more efficient. Even off-the books jobs for less than minimum wage, such as mowing the neighbor's lawn or dogwalking is going to be far more efficient. Farming gold ingame only makes sense if you're 10 and your ignorant parents bought you GW2 for $50, but aren't willing to drop another $50 to buy you all of the content.

Or maybe just play the parts of the game you perceive as "fun / entertaining" and then leave it at that? Legendarys arent necessary for any content, even ascended gear hardly is needed ("needed" as in "required to complete certain content"). Same for the cosmetics.
I mean, what you are saying pretty much boils down to "dont play the game in order to make RL money that you then throw at the game in order to have even less reason to play it", doesnt it?
In other words: Dont grind for something. Play the fun / entertaining parts and just let the grind happen in the background.

[armyguy]

Ammo님이 먼저 게시:

can people stop commenting cosmetic in a p2w discussion pls.
if by p2w is buying expansion to unlock powerfull spec for classes to do pvp then yes it is somehow p2w. (but come on people, expansion is the goat in gw2)
but no amount of cloak and backpack wing cosmetic can win you pvp and wvw game.

Cosmetic and QOL is all the gem store sells. As for anything that will help in competitive modes (spvp and/or wvw) no, nothing. Boosts for exp and ranks is all. But rest assured that if for whatever reason ANet deems a class mechanic to be "frustrating", they'll destroy it then tell you it's somehow better for that class.

[Sychon]

armyguy님이 먼저 게시:

Ammo님이 먼저 게시:

can people stop commenting cosmetic in a p2w discussion pls.
if by p2w is buying expansion to unlock powerfull spec for classes to do pvp then yes it is somehow p2w. (but come on people, expansion is the goat in gw2)
but no amount of cloak and backpack wing cosmetic can win you pvp and wvw game.

Cosmetic and QOL is all the gem store sells. As for anything that will help in competitive modes (spvp and/or wvw) no, nothing. Boosts for exp and ranks is all. But rest assured that if for whatever reason ANet deems a class mechanic to be "frustrating", they'll destroy it then tell you it's somehow better for that class.

When you don't have anything on the the actual point but you still want to trash the devs...

[Graphiknight]

Paying for power in GW2 is just like you've bought a max level account from someone. You can do that, but your are just paying to not play the game.

Usually MMO players want to collect stuff and progress, so you will always have something to do in a game with 10 years worth of content.

- No GW2 itens from cash shop give you power advantages that cannot be obtained in the game. (you can buy mount skins, but cannot buy any mount). Some things like slots and bank space are just obtained there, but you can buy or craft bags with more space in game. Also, you can make other characters to bank things.

- sPvP (arena battlegrounds) have standardized gear builds, it not uses nothing farmed from the game. BUT elite especializations (similar to classes in other games) are locked by their respective release expansions. You will have no access to all builds if you do not have all expansions.

- WvW use PvE gear... So it's a game mode that caters for ppl that want their power progression matters in their pvp. Once you reaach level 80 you will have the gear necessary to go there. That said, gear will not be the reason you are crushed in this mode, but your lack of knolodge of builds and other classes capabilities.

- About End Game PvE content: It depends what is your poison. But in general ppl talk about instance challange PvE content. In this regards, no fret. By the time you get to level 80 you will have the necessary to get into those, but you will have to go after the information to perform well these contents.

If you don't want a game that will give you lots of things to do and collect... Maybe the MMO genre is not for you...

[Sid Icarus]

Whether or not you define GW2s monetization as P2W, you're not really "winning" anything. Other players aren't inconvenienced if you level 80 boost or if you buy a generation one legendary. You don't harm anyone's experience by having all the bag slots or salvage kits or world boss alert devices. You only make things marginally more convenient for yourself.

I think the most important aspect of GW2 that people are failing to mention is that (in PvE at least) it's designed to be entirely cooperative. You're encouraged to help people and group up. No one can steal your kills or lessen your rewards be being there. Quite the opposite, more players means more chance of success and better loot for everyone involved. If someone else decided, for whatever reason, to splurge on boosting immediately to 80 and buying ascended armor with cash, well you only stand to benefit from their assistance.

You don't need to spend money on those things, they're perfectly attainable through casual play. There's no definitive endgame to conquer, because the endgame is what you want it to be. In GW2 nearly everything is optional, so players are free to choose whatever activities they find fun to participate in.

[Tyrian Mollusk]

Sychon님이 먼저 게시:

I claimed nothing.

Sychon님이 먼저 게시:

My point is, you don't win anything even if you buy everything in the gem store with your credit card. In fact, it would seem to me that you lose any incentive to actually play the game.

I interpreted - or at least tried to interpret - what you were going on about. And now you are trying to turn it around and pretend I was the one who came up with it first. Serious mental gymnastics...

That's a pretty gymnastic "failure" to interpret on your part just so you could shift to weird personal attacks on me for nonsense like being unable to resist spending. Me talking about spending cash having obvious value and benefits for people with plenty of cash to spend doesn't mean I'm one of them, especially when I already specifically said I wasn't one of them.

Your being combative and insulting doesn't make it my fault you claimed the game allows you to buy enough with cash that there's no remaining incentive to play. My claim is merely the game does allow and encourage rich people to buy fancy things most of the rest of us have a hard time getting. Settling for not having such things doesn't mean there isn't fun to be had playing, but that isn't actually the topic.