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[Guild Wars 2]Gold Sinks and TIME SINKS, keep one kill the other
Alonmy
Member Posts: 1
GW2 has both gold sinks and time sinks. Gold sinks in the form of small charges for this or that activity that will over time remove considerable gold from the game. (I am using gold as a term of convenience, it may be coppers or gems or whatever.) Based on what I saw in the Beta Weekend Events (BWE) it looks like the gold sinks will be a nuisance, but not to the point of disrupting play. Another gold sink is ARMOR REPAIR, which again costs you each time it is needed. But the BIG PROBLEM with ARMOR REPAIR is not that it is a gold sink, but rather that it's a TIME SINK.
Charges for travel? Getting your pocket picked while you are waiting in line to travel is just part of the experience. But armor breakage and repair? That is NOT something the player wants to experience and its happening has consequences beyond the cost to fix it.(gw 2 gold) When your armor breaks or needs repair you have to stop what you are doing and spend time going someplace to get it fixed. Traveling to the armor fixer takes TIME, and since it NOT something you wanted to spend time doing its burning up your gaming time while providing no benefit is the very definition of a TIME SINK.
Regular visits from TIME SINKS are going to be a significant cause of annoyance and disruption to the GW2 player experience. When your armor breaks while you traveling with a group of guild-mates what are you going to do? Continue with the mission as you become more vulnerable? Ask everyone to wait for you while you go somewhere to get it fixed? Leave the group to continue on without you, and try to catch up with them later? Assuming of course you can (not in an instance)?ANY of these options disrupts not just YOUR game play it interrupts EVERYONE in your party. In WvW this may not be much of a problem, BUT in small group adventures the loss of even a single player may bring action to a halt, FOR EVERYONE.
I belive ANET needs to take another think about this, and ask themselves what the real benefits and downsides are to this game mechanic.
Now I have seen in the forums people defending this TIME SINK on the grounds that it is ANET's way of FORCING players to improve their game play. To force me to learn how to play without getting my armor broken. My response to that is simple: IT IS NONE OF ANET'S BUSINESS HOW GOOD I AM AT PLAYING THEIR GAME, NONE. If I want to play it with characters in their underwear, wielding dull hatchets, who always walk around backwards and never get past level 5 THAT IS MY BUSINESS. Are people advocating that anyone who hasn't gotten to level 30 within 60 days of buying the game should have their account wiped out? Or that anyone who hasn't completed some elite mission within the last 90 days should have their characters deleted? If I want to be BAD at playing this game that is my problem, I am the PAYING CUSTOMER.
TL/DR: Armor Breakage and Repair is a TIME SINK, that interupts play and BOTHERS the players for no benefit, Get Rid of It.
Comments
If you are going to copy/paste stuff from gw2guru then at least credit the OP and change it so it doesn't clash with the black background on here.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/42124-gold-sinks-and-time-sinks-keep-one-kill-the-other/page__st__0
IF ONLY THERE WAS A WAY TO AVOID REPAIR BILLS. . . IF ONLY.
I think the OP is the OP from GuildWars2Guru, look at his join date.
I wouldn't call repairs or teleporting a gold sink, they are sooooo cheap nobody should ever have a problem with those, unless they die horribly every single minute, which is also hard to imagine.
Repairs a time sink? Really? There is a repair npc on each city, you can teleport there after you die, repair, then teleport back to where you died. Also there is a small anvil inside any dungeon instances, you can repair your items there.
Block the trolls, don't answer them, so we can remove the garbage from these forums
So it is an agrument for removing the death penalty. So now the spectrum is:
This guy <----------- GW2 ------------------------------------------- EVE --------------> Permadeath
Cool.
Howbout WvW? you can barely cover the repair costs in WvW, let alone get on the positive currency (unless you ignore the reason of WvW and go gathering whilst in there, which i consider dumb at best) and the grey scrap loot you sometimes get from enemies, isn't worth picking up because of the inv space they hog, since everything seems to drop atleast 3-4 different "junk" loot regularly.
I don't mind teleport costs nor repairs in general, but the repair costs should never lighten the balance so heavily it overgrosses your net "income" from general stuff (some players die often etc. and i've even heard stories of newbies going out of cash because of dying, repairs and teleports)
There's rarely more than 1 repair guy in any given zone (and i think you know, zones are quite big) and teleport + repair (red) + teleport, can rack up to some silver easily and given at level 25 i had roughly 80silver (hadn't spent on anything, nor did i sell anything on the auction) nor did i die often, those silvers rack up quickly if you die often, having to tele+repair+tele (or run+repair+run, which is again TIMESINK). I think a "return" tele should be free within say like 5 minutes or so (if you tele back to same location)
Sorry but you probably not even played the game
Yeah Teleporting to any camp near you and repairing will take insane 20 sec of your time. Whooot nooo. (reasonable time price for any1 who have no clue how to play and dies all the time-- Time to rethink if you want
)
So i must ask are you one of the crazy persons who cant get up to eat or drink while playing? because it will be such a TIME sink.
Also if you are going with Guild for a "mision" its you natural instinct to check and repair your gear.
and Teleporting/Repair costs is great thing which will be balancing price for gold at the market also. So its Win win situation.
Less inflation and more time for average "awesome" player to think before going outside with his hummer.
OP and/or guru OP must be new to MMO's. How about we talk about the huge decline in time sinks in GW2? I am one that HATES pointless time sinks to the point I will simply stop playing any genra of game with it if its to severe. GW2 on the other hand I found myself thinking that the time sinks where not to bad. Except in towns and with the waypoints even that will be reduced alot once you learn where everthing is at.
I HATE timesinks but I also see the evil need for them from the companies standpoint. So long as they arent to bad or blatently obvious (like some MMO's needing 30s+ to craft an item) I will deal with them. GW2 seems to have struck a happy medium imo.
MMOs using the standard MMO mechanics must have goldsinks, otherwise the inflation becomes the same as it was in Germany in the 1920s.
Since there is a constant growing amount of money in the game you must take some away as well.
Now if there only was a certain amount changing hands all the time like in the real world (or at least how the real world used to be a while back) there would be no need for moneysinks but as long as mobs drop gold that they wont need to get from somewhere you must have goldsinks.
If the mobs had to kill players for the gold and vendors would need to get the gold in from players things would be different.
As for timesinks, are you kidding me? Real MMO timesinks are about grinding faction or running the same dungeon/raid a zillion times to get good enough gear to go to the next dungeon/raid.
Repairing your armor a few times because you suck is no timesink since you easily can avoid it, it is more a really pathetic death penalty.
+1
Repairing broken armor in WvW can be a frustrating play ender especially early on when copper is thin, once naked and broke you have no choice but to leave the battleground to go PvE to make silver and i have had this happen numerous times..
I am against being charged repair costs to fight for my server at least up to level 20 or so but i am not against having to take the time to get repaired when items break..
I have also asked anet to reconsider this, at least for players under a certain real level to where cost can be prohibitive especially when pinned down and dying a lot..
Playing GW2..
Only thing every1 will agrres on including ArenaNet
is: they are planing on selling Bag/bank slots as their main shop income 
If you want ONLY WvW as your income source you kinda Must be on wining side 
and with lotos space in your bags. it can be very easy as lots of space comsuming items are "colectibles" and can be magicly teleported into bank from any place 
(Personally i loved mining and trees choping in WvW 
)
Cant agree on 1 repair guy in a zone maybe in the begining zone but later they are always near by and anyway it will be cheapest teleport . its not like you will go to main town for repair. Same issue about "silver" if for some reason you are limiting yourself in activities maybe you can have some broblems with money. I Never sold a thing in the Market, was vendoring all items and the are always cheap like 60-80 cooper for a good weapon. 30lvl i got 5 12 slot bags from AH green Armor and weapons from it and more silver to waste on cooking ingredients.
Teleports and repairs not even a small problem its not a problem at all.
MAYBE at 80 it will cost us 40silver to teleport somehow and 3gold to repair. but now not a problem
It is still one of the weakest death penalties I seen. In DF or MO people would take all your gear every time you die. In the original GW you will lose a lot of hitpoints everytime you die until you visit an outpost.
But sure, characters lvl 5 or lower could be excepted from this.
There are however stuff in the itemshop that repairs your gear for a few bucks, if taking a break at times annoys you so much you can either buy it or just not die.
GW2 don't need any more handholding, thanks.
You need gold sinks, period.
It takes time to use the gold sink, I dont see how anyone can avoid that.
The little money sinks that annoy some people is what gives a feeling of a fuller more realistic economy. Having those little fluctuations and costs to your gold gives purpose to the money. Otherwise you end up with everyone having millions of coins and nothing to spend it on apart from armor and weapon upgrades and how often does that happen.
Time sink. Seriously this is an issue? The death penalty of having to stop what you are doing for 15 minutes to repair after dying 5-6 times is too much? Ok it may not be arenanet's job to teach you to play well but it is their job to make sure their player base has fun...
Just like with gold... there has to be some sort of time sink to give something to compare other activities to that it cannot all be about only the combat. Like gold, if there arent little time sinks then time as a resource losses meaning. The next step is "Why do I have to travel to the bandit camp. Its just wasting time from what I want to do!" At that point why not just have an mmo that has two rooms. 1 where all the vendors are, the safe room. The next room a series of monsters load up for you to kill. Time sink problem solved!
Me personally after playing the BWE I cant really say I've found a time/money sink worth complaining about and this contributes to the bigger picture I got of GW2, and that picture is awesome and beautiful! ^^
I think the OP and some of the others make a few good points, even though I disagree with much of what they say. A few changes I could see being reasonable:
So, you joined this site just to post this????
As has been explained already, gold sinks are necessary to keep the in game economy healthy.
Time sinks - in the case of broken armor repair - really don't take very much time. In most cases, with fast travel, you can repair your armor within a couple minutes. Not much time for anyone to wait, even the ADD crowd. However, if you start a dungeoun with full armor and need repairs by the time you're halfway through, maybe you're just not good enough of a player and you need to do something else.
Ultimately, you're the reason for the wasted time in that you apparently don't play your character well enough. I've participated in the BWE's and haven't had any problems with having to repair my armor. Sure I've been in sticky situations and needed repairs while playing, but had no trouble at all fast traveling to a town, getting my armor repaired, and fast traveling back close to where I was before. It took about 2 minutes each time. Not much time if you ask me.
There are some legitimate gripes from people about GW2. this isn't one of them.
Edit: Some advice: Use the dodge mechanic every once in a while and stop standing still while fighting and you won't have much of a problem, even in the starter areas.
You want me to pay to play a game I already paid for???
Be afraid.....The dragons are HERE!
I didn't play much WvWvW to see if the repair costs are huge or not, maybe they need to make WvWvW deaths "easier" on the repair costs or something. From my PVE experience I got 3 (almost 4) gold at level 26. Teleport + repair + teleport has only a minimal cost that can be covered very easily through normal gameplay.
Block the trolls, don't answer them, so we can remove the garbage from these forums
No, no, no and no! We could dumb it down until you could actually use a bot doing the leveling for you, but it SHOULD be a challenge and what you mentioned above isn't really difficult to overcome as it is... just my opinion.
I am really tired of these threads that got copy pasted over GWGuru or something...
I agree it should be a challenge, I just think the cost of repair and transport for a new player is a bit....overtuned. Only slighlty. Especially given that I feel the game has the second highest learning curve I've ever seen in an MMO. Second only to the Cliffs of EVE. Mind you, it's not that hard to get for some people. I got it pretty easily, and a lot of old school MMO players probably will too. But the game is not friendly to people who are used to WoW. It shouldn't have to cater to them and hand them everything, but a couple levels of an adjustment period doesn't hurt anyone.
And dying often is more or less expected in a WvW match. Now, one suggestion I forgot to make (and which Arenanet is already implementing), is increased rewards in WvW.
Valid points and I guess what I really oppose is the notion that Anet should build that bridge between for example WoW and GW. I on the other hand look at it like "This is what you get from us, get used to it" hehe
I think it is important to keep the death penality ( Especially in WvW). My reason for this is that often when you try to take a keep and there is defender it come to a war of attrition. If the defender keep resurecting there player they can keep defending the place for a relly long time but if eventually there equipment break then they have to go repair and it give a little edge ton the opposing team. Of course if you fight long enough in the same place for the death penanlity to make a difference you probably do it wrong.