Lest I go another several days without posting and leave everyone thinking that Guild Wars 2 was a crate of ass during the whole prelaunch, here are some additional points gathered so far.
- The servers have been up, as far as I’ve seen. since about 11 AM Saturday. Some people are still having launcher or login issues, but I have had no additional problems in that regard.
- Lag is still an intermittent issue, but Saturday afternoon (for the two hours I played) and Sunday morning (for another four hours) nothing became unplayable. I do expect to see issues in this department come Tuesday and lasting for a few days after that. Hopefully I’m wrong and everything is now worked out.
- Other issues exist. The big one aside from login issues is that the Trading Post (think Broker or Auctioneer) has been working on and off, but mostly not working. As a general rule it has been working when I don’t want to buy anything, and undergoing maintenance when I do.
- I and a number of other people complained in the beta about there not seeming to be enough XP in the early zones. That does not seem to be a problem now, very possibly because I am now doing crafting and gathering, both of which grant XP but which I wasn’t bothering with in the beta. The XP rate may have been tweaked but it’s just as likely skipping those two things was the culprit. This may indicate that the progression rate is tuned overly tightly, as some people won’t want to participate in those activities… but then I didn’t do any PvP, either, and you get XP from that. I any case I retract this complaint; unless you’ve got a pretty weird play style or just don’t get the flow of Guild Wars 2 I don’t think it’s going to be an issue.
- In relation to that point, I did zone completion for Hoelbrak and the Wayfarer Foothills (which is the Norn starting zone,) and about level 1-10 of the personal story. Having done all that, with aggressive gathering and some lukewarm attempts at crafting but no PvP at all, I am level 16.
- The rewards for zone completion, which I didn’t hear anything about until relatively recently (as in the last week) are significant, so don’t skip them.
- I feel like I am doing something substantially wrong with crafting. I’ll have more to say on this later after I have worked it out.
- More later, of course. I am enjoying it thoroughly now that the game is running.
Ardwulf's Lair 
I’ll be skipping zone completion, unless I happen to do it by accident. I just do whatever I bump into and that works for me.
Mostly I am gathering, mining and farming for leather. Leather is ridiculously hard to get compared to ore and wood.
Also the broken mail system is a pain in a game that has no face-to-face trading option.
lol I havent figured out crafting myself yet x)
i gotta say though and not looking to sound overly negative, it is a bit much how ‘world’ aside, so many features are currently not working properly for headstart, WvW, AH, shop, guilds, overflow mechanics….all borked.
Actually overflow is working perfectly. Otherwise we would be reading Ardwulf’s experience of waiting in a queue to get in the game. I’ve played on overflow versions of Queensdale and Divinity’s Reach most of the 7hrs I’ve had in game, and been shoulder to shoulder with other players. Maybe its so transparent you just havent realized its working that well.
Actually if you were referring to group with friends who are not in your particular overflow server – yes that is not working yet. Its no Rift release stability wise (and fortunately not long-ass queue wise), but they are attempting a way more sophisticated server setup so I’ll forgive them for the first few days, as at least we are playing.
thats not what I’m talking about. 🙂 overflow is not working where it matters the most to me personally – joining partymembers. it is still impossible to join each other’s instance / find friends and play together – at least that was still the status this morning and they confirmed as much. the party ‘join’ feature is greyed out for everybody when it should be an active feature.
I find that the most pressing and frankly outrageous flaw of the game right now. MMOs are about playing together with friends. am not gonna be lenient on ANet on this one – it was already a hot topic during the betas. if you cant manage a fully persistent world without server shards, at least get the join features working…
Yea I snapped to your real issue with overflow soon as i finished posting : (. On a positive note seems it works as a buddy joined me in my overflow Queensland server, which he said he did from the party join selection. Marketplace still down today – kind of think that will work out though as there will be a glut of crafting mats on the market driving the price to a median one rather then the usual opening say inflation.
@bhagpuss: I was running into the same issue re: leather until I realized that you can salvage finished gear as well as stuff explicitly marked “salvage items”. I think this is different from GW1.
I’m level 10.5 and am finally starting to get to a decent point with leatherworking drops. (Spoiler [not really]: the human zone’s bandits and centaurs drops goodie bags that contain jute and leather salvage, in addition to the standard leather armor and scrap).
I still probably need 150 rawhide leather sections to garner enough mats to level 1-75, but the level 11-12 mobs are starting to drop salvage and gear that convert into 3 or 4 sections at a time as opposed to 1-2 sections that the lowest-level mobs dropped.
Heck, I’d even consider throwing a few bucks into buying gems, converting to gold, and buying from the trading post except as you noted it’s not working well or often.
Still, a very promising start.
I just finally finished the Queensdale map achievement and got a Master crafted spear and cloth armor chest piece(!) … unfortunately unusable by my engineer. ;/ I reported it as a bug, but it might intentional–they weren’t souldbound. Oh, and I also got a lockbox key and 40 Jute scraps. Huzzah! Ahem.
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