Free to play worth it?

[Mordy]

Does the base game have enough interesting content, loot & stuff in it to be worth putting in the hours or are the expansions where it's all at, the good stuff, the loots, the people?

Looking for something new to play and heard/read good things about this game but with several expansions and no sale at the moment.. well..

[Hefutoxin]

I think it's worth it:

"Everything in the GW2 base game and LWS1 … can be PLAYED FOR FREE with some restrictions: (free accounts)[wiki.guildwars2.com] like fewer character slots, reduced inventory space, some chat and trading post restrictions, and no exchanging of ingame coin/gold for gems. Also, free accounts only get a Trial Mount that lasts for 10 hours (that's probably how they get most people to buy an expansion; the tried drug dealer method)
The free game includes all playable races, 8 of the 9 professions, the eight original dungeons, Fractals of the Mists (dungeons with scaling difficulty), PvP and WvW (Competitive Play[www.guildwars2.com])."

I shamelessly stole it from:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3335333185

[ebaG-gamma]

I'd also say yes, but …

I believe the account restrictions on free accounts would bug me. If you like this game, I think you should try to pick up the Heart of Thorns & Path of Fire bundle for 7.50 on sale. The next one should hit in March.

The most annoying restriction to me would be the two fewer inventory bag slots: 3 instead of 5, so definitely get the 24-slot messenger bag: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/free-24-slot-bag-with-newsletters/ and check out this excellent guide on basic inventory management: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2862913891
(the guide is not mine, but since Hefutoxin already shared mine 🙏 I have to scratch the itch to post a guide under each new player topic in another way. This guide is very good.

My own very compressed tutorial on the most basic of basic inventory management would be this:
• best button in the game: Deposit All Materials, one of the three buttons in the top right of the inventory window. Clicking it sends all crafting materials to your account bank's material storage. This is always the first thing you wanna do, if your inventory gets full.
• second-best button in the game: Sell Junk, this is found on the sell tab of every vendor you can sell to (for example every 💛 NPC whose tasks you completed). It will sell all the grey-name items in your inventory. You also basically always wanna click that, whenever you get to a vendor. You shouldn't sell anything that has "Salvage: Standard" as the second-to-last line in its item description, because you can …
• salvage items for crafting materials, which are very useful and valuable with the benefit of being depositable (is that a word?) by the click of a button. As soon as you can (starting at level 12), you should always be stacked up on salvage kits, preferrably Basic Salvage Kit.

As long as you are in level ≤ 10 areas, you will get drops of Enhanced Mighty <armor piece> boxes. You can choose one of three armor weights from these, Duty-Bound (heavy), Ragamuffin (medium), Homespun (light).
This armor is special in that you can select which attributes it has, but also in that it is neither salvagable nor sellable to vendors, so you can safely throw away multiples of these boxes and armor pieces. Don't let them clog your inventory.

If you are ever unsure whether you should throw something out not, you can type /wiki followed by a space into the chat line, without entering it yet, then hold shift and left-click any item in your inventory, which will add its name to the chat line.
/wiki [item_name]
Then send.
This will open the wiki's page of that particular item, which usually tells you what the item is good for, if anything. (This also works for skills, places, traits etc. … and even whole builds.)

[SinisterSlay]

I played to max level as a free player. Other than the tight inventory requiring a lot of salvaging and selling to heart vendors, it was fine.
You feel a bit restricted because you can't really sell anything at the trade post, and you can only buy basic things. So your money making potential is limited.
But by level 80 my friend and I were so engrossed we both just bought the game (HoT at the time)

[Nico]

My only major complaint about the free2play version would be the bag slot limit of 3 instead of the usual 5. The other free2play restrictions aren' that bad. And content wise it is pretty much identical to the full game that used to cost money before they released the first expansion. So certainly more than enough content for quite a while.

[Mordy]

Thanks for the replies.

You guys convinced me to give the game a try so i downloaded the game and.. any early game pitfalls or nooby mistakes i should try to avoid?

[ebaG-gamma]

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

You guys convinced me to give the game a try so i downloaded the game

🥳🎉 Welcome to Tyria!

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

any early game pitfalls or nooby mistakes i should try to avoid?

using a Steam GW2 account ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


The game has two main sources of "tutorials":

• The text boxes on level-up dialogue windows, which you can click for more information.
  The infos that pop up when you click vary between really obvious and trivial and really good to know. If you want to read up on something you missed, you can go to https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Level_rewards and hover over the blue ( ℹ ) icons in the Unlocks and Information Columns. Alas, there's no codex/glossary etc. inside the game, but I'm convinced that the player-maintained wiki is one of the best in all of gaming.
  
• The 🌱 Adventure Guide, which suggests things you could do to discover different areas of the game and also rewards loads of experience for doing them. It's always (in the PvE open world) on the top right of the UI and you can click objectives to get more info on how to complete them; for example when you click on Using Emotes it'll say Emotes allow your character to show their feelings to the world. Type "/emotelist" in your chat for a list of possible emotes.

Two trailers from before launch for the story-focused player:
Guild Wars 2 - Teaser Trailer (4:51): https://youtu.be/Em0Sd60iI2w
Guild Wars 2 - The Races of Tyria (4:05): https://youtu.be/YEdr8HHJ-zU

Another newbie ✌mistake✌, if you're story-focused would be not playing story mode dungeons.
There are eight dungeons in the base game. Each of them has a story mode (which upon completion unlocks the harder explorable mode with multiple paths).
The story mode dungeons tell a storyline that runs parallel to your personal story. Narratively, it is kicked off by the first story instance on level 40 ("Setting the Stage")
and concludes with the last mission of the core game's personal story, which was formerly the last dungeon's story mode.
Thus, finishing the personal story before the other story mode dungeons will somewhat spoil that storyline's conclusion.

In short, after you did the first instance of the level 40 story, take the invitation mails with the "round-arch wooden gate" icon from "Your Herald" e.g., "The Restless Ghosts of Ascalonian Catacombs", which you start getting at level 30, but trust me, they belong after the meeting at level 40 for reasons that I'm getting into here.

Yet another newbie ✌mistake✌: not heeding the wisdom of the salad people:

You will face four challenges in your travels: Fear, addiction, power, convenience. Just remember it. You'll recognize them when you face them. Hopefully before, not after.

»Do not fear difficulty. Hard ground makes stronger roots.«
In other words, that which is gained through difficulty is a better prize than that which is gained easily. With opposition, we discover strengths we didn't know we had. The prize thus doubles in value.

Translated to normal people speak I take this as:
Embrace the gameplay challenges of not having overpowered mobility tools from the start. Don't treat the game as a race. In a way, you are already 12½ years late, so don't spoil your journey to play irrelevant catch-up with others. Being only 12¾ instead of 13 years late is not worth throwing pacing out the window.

[Mordy]

Messaggio originale di ebaG-gamma:

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

You guys convinced me to give the game a try so i downloaded the game

🥳🎉 Welcome to Tyria!

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

any early game pitfalls or nooby mistakes i should try to avoid?

using a Steam GW2 account ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


The game has two main sources of "tutorials":

• The text boxes on level-up dialogue windows, which you can click for more information.
  The infos that pop up when you click vary between really obvious and trivial and really good to know. If you want to read up on something you missed, you can go to https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Level_rewards and hover over the blue ( ℹ ) icons in the Unlocks and Information Columns. Alas, there's no codex/glossary etc. inside the game, but I'm convinced that the player-maintained wiki is one of the best in all of gaming.
  
• The 🌱 Adventure Guide, which suggests things you could do to discover different areas of the game and also rewards loads of experience for doing them. It's always (in the PvE open world) on the top right of the UI and you can click objectives to get more info on how to complete them; for example when you click on Using Emotes it'll say Emotes allow your character to show their feelings to the world. Type "/emotelist" in your chat for a list of possible emotes.

Two trailers from before launch for the story-focused player:
Guild Wars 2 - Teaser Trailer (4:51): https://youtu.be/Em0Sd60iI2w
Guild Wars 2 - The Races of Tyria (4:05): https://youtu.be/YEdr8HHJ-zU

Another newbie ✌mistake✌, if you're story-focused would be not playing story mode dungeons.
There are eight dungeons in the base game. Each of them has a story mode (which upon completion unlocks the harder explorable mode with multiple paths).
The story mode dungeons tell a storyline that runs parallel to your personal story. Narratively, it is kicked off by the first story instance on level 40 ("Setting the Stage")
and concludes with the last mission of the core game's personal story, which was formerly the last dungeon's story mode.
Thus, finishing the personal story before the other story mode dungeons will somewhat spoil that storyline's conclusion.

In short, after you did the first instance of the level 40 story, take the invitation mails with the "round-arch wooden gate" icon from "Your Herald" e.g., "The Restless Ghosts of Ascalonian Catacombs", which you start getting at level 30, but trust me, they belong after the meeting at level 40 for reasons that I'm getting into here.

Yet another newbie ✌mistake✌: not heeding the wisdom of the salad people:

You will face four challenges in your travels: Fear, addiction, power, convenience. Just remember it. You'll recognize them when you face them. Hopefully before, not after.

»Do not fear difficulty. Hard ground makes stronger roots.«
In other words, that which is gained through difficulty is a better prize than that which is gained easily. With opposition, we discover strengths we didn't know we had. The prize thus doubles in value.

Translated to normal people speak I take this as:
Embrace the gameplay challenges of not having overpowered mobility tools from the start. Don't treat the game as a race. In a way, you are already 12½ years late, so don't spoil your journey to play irrelevant catch-up with others. Being only 12¾ instead of 13 years late is not worth throwing pacing out the window.

What's wrong with using Steam to play this?

Hoping can play this for a while and if it hooks me hard enough, get the expansions and then who knows.. will see if and when i get there, hopefully this is solo friendly enough that can make it work.

[Nico]

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

Thanks for the replies.

You guys convinced me to give the game a try so i downloaded the game and.. any early game pitfalls or nooby mistakes i should try to avoid?

hmmm .. not really, I think? just make sure to salvage all useless equipment you find and deposit all your crafting materials to make sure your inventory won't get too full. And trying to always pick up crafting materials from trees or ore deposits also helps a lot in case you need some money as you can sell them.

Early on there really isn't much you can do wrong. You get enough skill points to unlock all skills, equipment isn't worth more than its salvage value and besides crafting materials most items you will find won't be worth anything anyways. Basically, you can do whatever you consider fun and you will mak edecent progress, also since no matter the enemy levels you get decent amounts of EXP.

[Mordy]

Got things installed and patched and then ran into a first issue which i didn't realize was an issue till after the game closed and relaunched and then told me that yeah the server i randomly clicked to check out the character creation and classes, that is now my home world and i cannot change it unless i upgrade?

Like how boned am being stuck on a medium population server or is this game like FF14 and group finder pulls people from all servers and whatnot?

[SinisterSlay]

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

Got things installed and patched and then ran into a first issue which i didn't realize was an issue till after the game closed and relaunched and then told me that yeah the server i randomly clicked to check out the character creation and classes, that is now my home world and i cannot change it unless i upgrade?

Like how boned am being stuck on a medium population server or is this game like FF14 and group finder pulls people from all servers and whatnot?

Server doesn't do anything except control which WvW teams you are on. And even then I think it uses your WvW guild now?

[Nico]

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

Got things installed and patched and then ran into a first issue which i didn't realize was an issue till after the game closed and relaunched and then told me that yeah the server i randomly clicked to check out the character creation and classes, that is now my home world and i cannot change it unless i upgrade?

Like how boned am being stuck on a medium population server or is this game like FF14 and group finder pulls people from all servers and whatnot?

Servers don't actually mean anythign nowadays. The only important thign is whether you are on an EU or on an NA server, since both regions have their own megaserver. But all players in EU always play together, the same with NA. There used to be another purpose, which is WvW where worlds fought each other, but this is now also done via guilds (or at random if you chose no WvW guild) so worlds are now entirelessly pointless. (besides the server region)

Also, as a f2p player it seemingly is possible to contact the customer support and ask for a server change a single time. But like I said, unless you want to change the server region there should be no reason to do so.

[ebaG-gamma]

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

What's wrong with using Steam to play this?

That's what my guide, which Hefutoxin linked in the first reply, is mainly about.

Messaggio originale di me in my guide:

Since making the switch means starting over, this is a decision that should be made as early as possible.

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

Hoping can play this for a while and if it hooks me hard enough, get the expansions and then who knows.. will see if and when i get there, hopefully this is solo friendly enough that can make it work.

March sales are a great time to get expansions at big discounts. More on which expansions to get when in the latter half of my guide.

[Astrallight]

Messaggio originale di ebaG-gamma:

I'd also say yes, but …

I believe the account restrictions on free accounts would bug me. If you like this game, I think you should try to pick up the Heart of Thorns & Path of Fire bundle for 7.50 on sale. The next one should hit in March.

The most annoying restriction to me would be the two fewer inventory bag slots: 3 instead of 5, so definitely get the 24-slot messenger bag: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/free-24-slot-bag-with-newsletters/ and check out this excellent guide on basic inventory management: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2862913891
(the guide is not mine, but since Hefutoxin already shared mine 🙏 I have to scratch the itch to post a guide under each new player topic in another way. This guide is very good.

My own very compressed tutorial on the most basic of basic inventory management would be this:
• best button in the game: Deposit All Materials, one of the three buttons in the top right of the inventory window. Clicking it sends all crafting materials to your account bank's material storage. This is always the first thing you wanna do, if your inventory gets full.
• second-best button in the game: Sell Junk, this is found on the sell tab of every vendor you can sell to (for example every 💛 NPC whose tasks you completed). It will sell all the grey-name items in your inventory. You also basically always wanna click that, whenever you get to a vendor. You shouldn't sell anything that has "Salvage: Standard" as the second-to-last line in its item description, because you can …
• salvage items for crafting materials, which are very useful and valuable with the benefit of being depositable (is that a word?) by the click of a button. As soon as you can (starting at level 12), you should always be stacked up on salvage kits, preferrably Basic Salvage Kit.

As long as you are in level ≤ 10 areas, you will get drops of Enhanced Mighty <armor piece> boxes. You can choose one of three armor weights from these, Duty-Bound (heavy), Ragamuffin (medium), Homespun (light).
This armor is special in that you can select which attributes it has, but also in that it is neither salvagable nor sellable to vendors, so you can safely throw away multiples of these boxes and armor pieces. Don't let them clog your inventory.

If you are ever unsure whether you should throw something out not, you can type /wiki followed by a space into the chat line, without entering it yet, then hold shift and left-click any item in your inventory, which will add its name to the chat line.
/wiki [item_name]
Then send.
This will open the wiki's page of that particular item, which usually tells you what the item is good for, if anything. (This also works for skills, places, traits etc. … and even whole builds.)

Why would you get spammed with news letters just to get a 25 bag ?

[Mordy]

Messaggio originale di Nico:

Messaggio originale di Mordy:

Got things installed and patched and then ran into a first issue which i didn't realize was an issue till after the game closed and relaunched and then told me that yeah the server i randomly clicked to check out the character creation and classes, that is now my home world and i cannot change it unless i upgrade?

Like how boned am being stuck on a medium population server or is this game like FF14 and group finder pulls people from all servers and whatnot?

Servers don't actually mean anythign nowadays. The only important thign is whether you are on an EU or on an NA server, since both regions have their own megaserver. But all players in EU always play together, the same with NA. There used to be another purpose, which is WvW where worlds fought each other, but this is now also done via guilds (or at random if you chose no WvW guild) so worlds are now entirelessly pointless. (besides the server region)

Also, as a f2p player it seemingly is possible to contact the customer support and ask for a server change a single time. But like I said, unless you want to change the server region there should be no reason to do so.

Oh, okay.. good, thought i maybe goofed it up right at the start already before i even got properly started.

Thanks again. hopefully it's smoother sailing from here.

[naapsuland]

i would get expansions