What games are you playing and why?

There's so much about the game that I still don't quite get. Doesn't that indicate that it's in both my best interest AND that of the guild that we all are on the same server, since my 'influence' (or whatever that means) is only accued locally on my server? Which means that any benefits that I accrue for the guild only benefit me personally, and other members from my server.

I have no idea what that even means in GW2. I know there was no such restriction in Rift, since worlds (I assume that means servers) had no bearing in rift. But some of the guild benefits I'd get in Rift, if they exist in GW2, and I wouldn't have access to them... well that kinda would suck. But as I said, I don't know what the equivalent benefits are in GW2 (other than the guild bank).

/edit is 'influence' the equivalent of experience for guilds? Because Rift had something of the same concept, only it was called experience.

 

Goawaygoawaygoawaygoawaygoawaygoaway

 

Both Rift and GW2 do not require that you are all on the same server to group. For Rift, initially, I believe it was only for dungeons and raids that you could group, and in fact if you were of different factions, you could not group except for zone events and rifts. But now anyone can group, cross server, and cross faction (cross faction actually makes sense from a plot standpoint but I won't go into that).

The technology really has gotten to a point where a lot of games aren't going to need to restrict almost anything across servers. Rift already has that, and GW2, has most of that.

 

I feel like The Secret World is pulling me in two.

Once you get 'flowing', it's actually a really competent game in some regards. The removal of running back-and-forth for quests really does smooth things out (particularly as when you finish a quest you just 'send a report'), and limiting gear to what would count as accessories (with clothing being, well, clothing) does mean you're not carrying around thousands of low level weaponry from mobs and stuff.

But it's the classless system and the lack of 'levels' that's really getting to me. Shotgun/Elemental feels frustratingly slow and heavy-handed, which is not particularly great. To relate it to more "traditional" MMOs, it feels like I'm playing in tank gear, including the drop in survivability (tank gear being, in my experience, among the worst thing you can solo play in), and the lack of levels and clearly structured maps means that it's really hard to know if you're going to be in for one hell of a beating. I mean I just about coped with the enemies at the top of the Savage Coast after finishing Kingsmouth, but I mean you're constantly skirting areas where enemies pull in groups of two or three and where they're higher, um... something than you.

In a way it's like it knows there'll be a number-crunching subset out there who will spend hours working on the best builds, and as such it doesn't need to put the effort in to reach out to players and say "hey, guys, do this first, then that". The limitation to seven skills on your task bar is pretty frustrating, too. AFAIK there's no way to reset your skills (but as the community loves to say, "there's really no need" (except there is, really, even if just to make you feel more confident))

I mean I want to love it but I've already come close to tearing out my hair a couple of times in the past day or two.

 

Guesting it looks like HAS been implemented, or at least I see the option (haven't actually tried it yet). Switching servers is a paid service. I didn't do the calculation to see how much it costs in dollars, since they show the cost in gems, but my guess is it's about $15.00 or so.

In Rift, there's often no way to know if you are grouiped with someone from the same or different servers, at least if you are in a dungeon, Chronicle, or raid group created through the LFG tool. I don't know how, but I sometimes see global chat that's cross-server (I can tell because it gives people's server name as a prefix). I don't know for sure if Instant Adventures and other non-instanced content that is accessed through the LFG tool does cross-server grouping, but I think it does in Rift (I'd have to verify that to be sure). I do know that PVP instances are cross-server, in any case.

 

Well I just checked, and the way it works with Rift is that the servers are grouped into 'battlegroups' or 'wargroups' (seen it referenced by both names, assuming it's the same thing). All the cross-shard grouping is within the same battlegroup or wargroup, and EU is in a separate one from North America, so there is that restriction.

 

BTW, I did some digging and did find a small casual guild recruiting on my server -- it doesn't seem like a perfect fit, but it's the closest I could find. It's a new guild so they have no website or even any kind of structure (at least at the time they created their recruitment post) but I did send their leader an e-mail. Your guild can really make or break your experience in an MMO. Sometimes you dont' realize you are in a bad one until you see what a good one is like (and vice versa).

 

So you might remember my previous experiences with Planetside 2. After the magical-fix-everything-january-patch shipped in Februrary, I decided to give it a shot to see what got fixed.

*Logged on. Oh yeah, you only get pity points if you log on every 48 hours, so missed over a hundred certs. Meh.
*Find a good spot to fight, DEPLOY!.....reappear at warpgate. WHAT?
*Alt-tab, check forums while waiting for DEPLOY! cooldown.
*Alright this time, we'll try Insert. Check map, ok cool they're all fighting somewhere. Spawn at leader...aaand I am now one zone north of the warpgate, which is 3 zones south of the nearest enemy and 7 zones west of my nearest squad member. WHAT?!?
*Logout, login 48 hours later, no magical-fix-everything-patch-attempt-2 yet so logou- oh, friend sees me login and joins me. Meh, I guess I'll try playing for a while then.
*DEPLOY! Holy crap the DEPLOY! button deployed me! And there's like bad guys and everything! And my droppod lands on a allied tank. Oops. I happen to be Engy from when I quit in disgust a month ago, so I repair the tank; get zero xp for doing so, which is expected since I caused the damage.
*Hop in a sundy, cruise to next zone...people in voice chat ask me if I can hear them. I can, but it appears that my voice and text chat are not working. Alt disables my ability to aim but doesn't free my cursor to change chatbox settings. Whatever.
*Sundy gets shot. I hop out and repair...still no XP. What?
*We reach a fight, deploy. I drop ammo box and start getting XP, Q a flyer, shoot a guy, get XP, repair the Sundy, zero XP. WHAT?
*Head to capture point, shoot some guys, get XP, drop ammo, get XP, repair a Max, zero XP. Ok I don't remember seeing that in the magical-fix-everything-but-not-really-january-but-not-really patchnotes...
*Throw a grenade, get XP. Yay! Cap facility, get XP. Yay!
*Frames per second has been fluctuating between 1 and 22 as usual. Suddenly it jumps to 31, and my screen freezes for 5 seconds. While frozen, nothing moves, and the planet disappears. The screen then moves for a second, FPS drops to 17, screen freezes for 10 seconds, planet still invisible. Screen moves for half second, people still standing on invisible planet, FPS still at 17, screen freezes for 20 seconds, sound cuts out. Screen flickers, I have lost some health. Screen flickers, I am dead, screen freezes for a minutes while my corpses rots on an invisible planet at 17 FPS. CTRL-ALT-DEL, cya next January.

~_~

 

I've got some complaints about the game I've been playing as well lol.

I've been having graphical problems in GW2 that range from mildly annoying to very annoying, almost game-breaking. The issue is that terrain and walls and floors turns transparent, more so in some places than in others in the game. It's so bad in some places that I've walked off cliffs.

Don't get me wrong -- I've seen this kind of thing before -- there are a few places in Ashora in Rift where I've had the smae problem. But only in that one zone ( There were few enough locations that I could report them). But in GW2, it's in all the newbie areas, it's in all the instances, all the cities. It's not EVERY location, but when it happens, it just ruins the experience. Sometimes I feel like I'm in one of those roadrunner cartoons where the coyote suddenly realizes there's no ground under him and then falls (only I don't usually fall).

When this happened in Tabula Rasa in only 1 zone, that zone was considered broken. But this is just about every zone for me.

 

The middle repair attempt was from a VS tank we killed. We are TR. Unless we got shot by a Spy with a purple hovermask, it was not self-faction damage. First attempt was 100% me as I said, Max I dunno.

My performance was better before the patch. I got 11-18 fps instead of 11-22 fps, but the planet disappeared less often. Render distance I reduced the first week I played (along with shadow occlusion and whatever else was in that 11-step "how to make the graphics suck less" thread on the Steam forums), had no noticeable affect on fps/planet; it does make enemies invisible more often, but I left it down because if it helps *most* people I might as well try.

The friend who logged on with me had the invisible planet prepatch (while getting 40+ fps), hasn't had it postpatch yet. He had the 0xp repair thing though, and again unless TR can buy purple hovertanks in the cash shop, the damage came from an enemy faction.

 

I'm playing the "sieve through all your folders to transport your important stuff over to your new laptop" game. I set the the difficulty to "Nightmare", which includes no folder organization at all and millions of duplicate files as well as size limits.
In addition to that, Pharaoh! Best citybuilder ever, you can actually build ghettos, which I use for gold diggers. They don't even get water, and from time to time they die to malaria or other illnesses. Oh, and the wages are lower than everywhere else. But hey, industrialization!

 

I followed your advice and it turns out that nVidia did release some new drivers (even though Windows told me my drivers were all up to date lol). The problem is not TOTALLY gone, but with the brief test I ran last night and this morning, it SEEMS to be improved. I still get it a bit when shifting my view up at an angle a bit, but I don't think it's as bad. That's only a first impression based on a very limited test. If it's as it seems now, it's definitely something I can live with.

I'm trying my hand at crafting, to the point that in order to be able to keep my crafting skill up to snuff with my leveling, I'm logging out broke almost every evening lol. There's something about crafting and playing the AH game that I love in (some) MMOs. It's so bad that at one point when I died I sort of did not have enough money to come back to life (turned out I found a waypoint that only cost 4 copper to rez at). But since I HAVE logged out at times with literally 0.0 copper, I can see that being a problem in the future if I keep up that habit. At least that one time, I had killed something that gave me 4 copper before I died. I am spending an awful lot of time hoofing it long distance, and it's kinda annoying that unlike other games where low level stuff won't bother you (or in Rift, at least, their aggro range shrinks proportionally to how much higher level you are than they are). So there's no fast way to hoof it. If you can't afford the admittedly cheap transport costs, you are going to have problems. So I'm going to have to curb my crafting addiction just a tad. Makes me wish for a mount, and I recently learned that there are no mounts in the game. I'm so spoiled by other games (such as Fallen Earth and RIft) where you can get a mount right at the start (in fact one of the very first quests in FE was one that had you getting your first horse, but that's because mounts were pretty much mandatory in FE due to the HUGE distances between civilized areas and places of major interest). I can see that mounts are not so much a necessity as a convenience, except for newbies like me who insist on spending money until they are broke lol.

I do of like how the AH is set up in the game. I think it is well-implemented. I like how I can put things I find up for auction straight from my inventory, how I can price things for purchase or sale either by standard formulas that I would normally use anyway. I wish I could do that with stuff from the bank also, but that's a nitpick. I'd also like to see the option to have resources going directly into the bank instead of having to periodically clean up my inventory manually, But the way it works now is still something that other MMOs should have been doing. And I love how active the AH seems, with thousands of orders for items, so if you really need money, you can go for a quick (meaning immediate) sale. As someone who loves playing the market in games, it's something that really impressed me.

Crafting also is fun -- not the best setup I've seen for it, but it's good. I just hate how everything is kept so wide-spaced (bank, AH, and crafting facilities). At least mail is always at hand. The way Rift does it is problematic also -- not because it's inconvenient -- it's EXTREMELY convenient. But at least in the new social center, it's SO DARNED CROWDED in the crafting areas, particularly during prime time because they purposefully put everything into this small area, so getting to an auctioneer or banker is sometimes annoying when there's a pile of people on that one banker or auctioneer. As annoying as that is, I think GW2 went too far in the opposite direction, honestly.

I did find a guild and I feel sometimes that I have to check to see if I'm the only one on, because EVERYONE is so damn quiet all the time. I hate being the one who has to get others to start talking in order to not feel alone in the game. I'm used to popping in and out of ongoing conversations in more social/sociable guilds.