Changing The Cost of Unlocking Skills in PvE.

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(TL;DR)

*Proposal*
Change the cost of unlocking a skill from 1 Skill Point and 1 Platinum...
...to...
... 1 Skill Point and 100 Gold.

This still makes it a Gold Sink, but doesn't punish the player too much because he/she does not grind just to unlock the game.

This game is based all about the Skill Bar and the Skills that you use, and it is terrible that it is limited severly because of an arbitrary Gold Sink.
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(LONG VERSION)

Currently it costs 1 Skill Point and 1 Platinum(1000 Gold) to unlock a Skill.

The problem I have with this is that, you unlock Skill Points faster than you obtain Gold, from just playing the game normally.

Normal Is:
*Doing missions and selling every item you find.*
*Running through Instance Zones(Town to Town) killing monsters along the way.
*[Both above without using any CHEESE(Starcraft reference) farming builds.]

For my characters, and I have 8[No Primary Monk and Paragon(9th Character Slot is for PvP)]; I have on average for each character about 100-130 unspent Skill Points.

Now my Bank Account between all my characters is 100 Platinum in the storage, which is supplemented by the occasional trading if I see a really good deal to make some gold.

*Proposal*
Change the cost of unlocking a skill from 1 Skill Point and 1 Platinum...
...to...
... 1 Skill Point and 100 Gold.

This still makes it a Gold Sink, but doesn't punish the player too much because he/she does not grind just to unlock the game.

This game is based all about the Skill Bar and the Skills that you use, and it is terrible that it is limited severly because of an arbitrary Gold Sink.
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(STORY)

When I tried introducing someone to this game a few years ago when it was still just the Prophecies Campaign, he liked the No Monthly Fee philosophy about it.

But when I showed him what it would take to fully unlock the character Skill Wise, he got turned off.
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(CONCLUSION)

You shouldn't have to farm or grind to utilize an aspect of a game, when that aspect of the game is the core purpose of what defines it.

In Guild Wars' case, the Skills and the Skill Bar.
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Be glad they added the 1k cap to the price. It didnt' use to stop increasing in cost. But unlocking skills is not that hard. Prophecies has many quests that unlock skills with no money or skill point cost. PvP allows skills to be unlocked with no money or skill points.

I have 2 accounts and 15 PvE characters. I have never had problems with money and skills or skill points. All of my characters have ALL of their primary class skills and 5 of my characters have all of their secondary class skills unlocked.

If it is a problem for you, you are doing things wrong. Between Balthazar Faction and hero skill trainers and skill quests, there isn't a reason to have trouble paying 1k for a skill.

Balthazar Faction is PvP, although it does benefit PvE. But that is the PvP portion of the game.

Hero Skill Trainers are limited to certain skills.

Skill Quests, only unlock a very small portion of skills, and that is from your Home Campaign that your character came from.

*NOTE*

I should add, I took a 1.5 year break from the game, since last week. But none of my characters have even unlocked their Primary Proffesion Skills yet, and I don't own EoTN.

I'm currently grinding away with my Elementalist right now,JUST FOR GOLD, to unlock skills.

Refer to this table, and do the math:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Skill#By_cost

It costs roughly on average, 100 Platinum, per a character to unlock their Primary Proffesion Skills; ONLY.

That is about 100,000 gold(more if PROPH,less if FACT/NF) just to unlock your Primary Proffesion.

You might as well let them start with every skill then. Why does everyone think things in this game should be easier? There is no point at all for this, you can buy the essential skills at the start of the game pretty cheaply, and once you have a base of around 20 skills you can then expand on this for 1 plat each.

Shouldn't 15,000 Experience Points and a small gold cost, be enough?

At this point in the game.

There are already/plenty enough cosmetic Gold Sinks in the game to warrant a rebalance of the cost of skills.

I would be okay with the 1 Platinum cost, if you were to unlock a skill for 1 PvE character, it would unlock all those skills for your other PvE characters ONLY; once you have ascended.

The problem is, I don't want to see this unlock method carry over to Guild Wars 2, and hinder the core of the game. Because a DEV justs copy+pastes, the easy way.

Guild Wars' core has always been about the Skills and the Skill Bar.

Gold drops in very small proportions and is split 8 ways, assuming you are playing the game as a normal team/party.

80 Gold found is really 10.

There are so many ways to make money 1 plat is a joke. This game has far changed from just Prophecies. Even if you only buy Prophecies, it's still pretty easy to make money, it's not like back at the start where setting up a 55 Monk or Necro would be financial suicide.

please learn basic math before you try and justify your opinions with logic.

80 / 8 = 10

Cheese is integral to the game; the threat of cheese forces people to not cut corners. If you remove the cheese then everyone would be 14ccing and whatnot.

So by your reference then farming is an integral part of Guild Wars and should not be removed.

1k is not a lot. When I first started playing I bought every single skill I thought was interesting, and I still had enough money without farming.

So how long do you think it should take a person, that is brand new to the game, to earn 1,000,000 gold to fully unlock 1 character...

...that plays on average on the small end, 4 hours a day; to the mid, 8 hours a day; and to the long, 12 hours a day?

Playing 5/7 days of the week.

I always thought it should cost 1 platinum OR 1 skill point rather than both.

You don't fully unlock a character. That's not how this game works. You don't NEED every single skill in the game to play PvE. If you want all the skills at your disposal, make a PvP character. As for unlocking all skills for each prof. making a character of each prof. and buying the first ~20 skills for less than a plat certainly helps.

Personally, I unlocked every non-elite skill from playing Alliance Battles and buying them with Balthazar Faction over the course of... oh, less than a month. And this was 2 years ago. It's much, MUCH easier now that there are zaishen quests.

I'm sure if you tried to fail less you could unlock all of the skills in the game (non-elites) in about 2~3 weeks.

If you're still having problems, ArenaNet DOES sell a "skill unlock pack" for about 5 bucks to unlock all the skills for a campaign, something like 15~20 total to unlock all of them.

EDIT : I like how you're still trying to justify your comments with math when you fail at the most basic of math.

Why do you feel the need to unlock every skill on a character right away? Of course it costs a lot. You are supposed to buy skills you like, try them out, then get others. You should have money to get skills every time you come to a new skill trainer. If not, you suck at Guild Wars. It's really not that hard. And how many skills are actually that useful? It seems that you just have an OCD problem and feel the need to get every skill. It's not like you are going to use every single one.

This, right here.

/10THIS.

That is what really should be done.

That is what really should be done about what? THERE IS NO PROBLEM.

I completely agree with this. :P if they DO do this, then I propose that they just allow us to exchange ~15k xp for 1 plat, so I can make a cool... oh, ~12 million gold. yeah that sounds good to me, you should totally do this.

Absolutely yes, I mean really you could even make it cost 0 gold, that would really make me happy.

I'm so so sick of random who have barely any skills and can't run any builds, if skills costed significantly less it might mean that more random pug players would have a non-horrible build + skill pool, leading to less of the massive epic fail we see in random GW players.

It'd be even better if we dropped the attribute quests -- drop useless attribute quests, make skills free except for skill points, and I'd have to kick fewer people for being worthless due to their builds.

Right now I want to try a new build, but I'm stuck because I only have 876 gold and need to either sell ectos or gold items just to make 120g for my skill.

Vote: Remove attribute quests, make skills cost 50g. This would make most of the player base suck less.
This would also eliminate some of the intolerably awful hero builds we see these days,
I for one would love that even though my heroes rock (my heroes rock because I spent like 100k on them).

Do the devs read these forums?

you know bold and underline is used to emphasize words
all you are doing is making your post very hard to read by doing that to every other word

anyway on topic
you don't need every single skill to progress through the game
just get what you like, and just stick with it for a while, then repeat

Things cost money. Consider the money cost paying for the time that the skill trainer would be getting paid to actually teach your character the skill.

It's not hugely difficult to make small amounts of money in the game, even if you don't do anything special. I made something like 20k just playing the game normally for a few hours each day on Friday and Saturday. True, I was in the Desolation and Realm of Torment, so stuff from there will sell for a bit more from earlier portions of the game, but even so. No farming or anything like that, just doing quests and missions in NM.

Why do you need to buy every skill for your character anyway? Half of mine haven't even hit the 1k per skill breakpoint yet, because I simply get the skills I absolutely need.

I like my characters to have an array of skills, because I like to try new skill combinations and what not. Makes playing more fun for me personally.

But I've never had to grind for gold for skills. 1k is pretty simple to make imo. I think it should be a toss up between choosing to spend skill points or gold on skills. I look through most of my characters and see thousands of unspent and pretty much useless skill points, so they should be integrated more into getting skills. That way, if I dont have the money at that moment I can choose to pay in X amount of skill points, or if I dont have enough skill points, I can choose to pay in gold.