New Player Observations

Hail All,

I joined the Beta Event last weekend and I must say I enjoyed the experience and will certainly be purchasing the game. However, I was concerned with a couple of things:

1st: I have a quality PC and a Cable connection. I played at different times of the day and night and I experienced some really bad lag and rubber banding.

Did anyone else?

2nd: I found that as a new character it was extremely difficult to acquire cold. Most drops were unidentified and required the ID kit that cost 40 gold. I found this ridiculous because it would take a very long time to acquire 40 gold pieces and when I did purchases an ID kit, all the items that I identified were worth a grand total of 1 gold each so it would cost me 40 gold pieces to make 5 gold in sales... this is absurd!

What was I doing wrong or will this be changed?

I didn't notice any lag, in fact that was one of the greatest things about this game I've seen so far. In the instanced areas I felt like I was playing a single player game, there was no delay between actions. In the arena it felt like playing a fps over a lan. On occasion in the arena there would be a character that would be skipping around and they were obviously lagged, but I never noticed problems like that with myself.
From what I've found, nearly every item sells for just 1 gold, and early on the identification kit is really not worth it because of how bad the effects on the items are. I'd suggest instead of getting an ID kit, get a salvage kit. It will allow you to carry more sellables. The materials you get from breaking down equipment sell for 1 gold each anyway, and they are stackable, so you can hang out outside of towns for longer before filling up your inventory.

I'm fairly certain that values on items will change on release so ID kits will be more worthwhile. I don't like unidentified items dropping this early in the game, I'd prefer for those to be magical items that drop at a later point and to make it worth using the id kit on.

I agree. I couldn't believe that new players in newbie zones had to ID most of the item drops where all of the items (at least those that I found in four zones) had no special attributes or magical properties. And you would that the game developers, so close to release, would of realized something as obvious as this...

I also think the "Newbie" zones should drop low level items pertaining to individual classes. All I found were very basic bows, swords, axes, and hammers-this is great if you are a warrior or ranger class but I found nothing that was specific to a Necro class...

[QUOTE=Skult ShadowWalker]Hail All,

I joined the Beta Event last weekend and I must say I enjoyed the experience and will certainly be purchasing the game. However, I was concerned with a couple of things:

1st: I have a quality PC and a Cable connection. I played at different times of the day and night and I experienced some really bad lag and rubber banding.

Did anyone else?
[QUOTE]

Well... i noticed after playing for a while i would get some wierd sort of "lag" in which it would nearly freeze, and be unplayable, and then it would stop, and then start up again... but when i reboot my computer it would be fine... so i dont know what i would call it...

Unfortunately, there is nothing at all you can do: when you go questing with a party, the game is hosted on one of your allies' computer. If the person has an evil firewall... well, then you are not lucky.
However most players have good connection.

As everyone said, all items sell for 1 gold (mostly) and the ID kit is only if you have found a rare (yellow or green) item and you think you will either use it or sell it.

I had lag issues myself with a nice computer and cable connection. I even lost connection on more then a couple occasions. But I am not too worried about at the moment and will wait and see what happens after it goes live.

I too just joined for the 1st time last weekend and was both very impressed and a bit frustrated as well. The graphics are fantastic and there is plenty to do in the game (Have only made it to 10th lvl so am unsure how far along I am, but thus far I am very impressed).

The frustration came, much like yourself, when I was constantly broke.
Until I found the beauty of a Salvage Kit thats right, the Salvage Kit . I found that after I broke everything down into raw materials to sell, instead of selling them out right, netted me a return of about 3 to 1 on my investment in the Salvage Kit itself.
So, what I have found, Salvaging can help jump start your fianances.

Ahhhh! Thank you for that Tidbit of information. I had no idea thats how things worked. Good to know.

I had a wee bit o lag in the beginning, for maybe an hour or so, but then it cleared up. This game, for me, is wonderfully lag free.

ID kits? Grrrr, I would bet some silver dye that they are going to tweak that system a bit. This was the first beta event we have seen the ID stuff, so time will tell.

See? Yet more great info from the Members of this Site. Glad I picked it to join.

This is interesting. Is this discussed in detail elsewhere - the fact that a party is hosted on a player computer?

As far as connections go, I've got a 56k connection and solo gameplay was fine which surprised me since in other game I experience some lag and quirky video during spell effects. None of that happened here.

51% of the players have good connections (broadband) there's still the other 49% of us waiting for broadband to get it's act together or become affordable. This may become moot in the next ten years or so as the phone companies finally get the fiber optics lines to the home - and everyone else jumps on that bandwagon - but right now it's still a wide gap.

Ciarre

True. Also some countries such as Russia or Australia have very expensive broadband.
You can play Soloplay because the game's hosted on your computer. It's like if you were playing Singleplayer, I suppose.

Where have you heard that the game is hosted on someone elses computer. I'm 99.9% sure that is not true. This isn't a game like NWN or diablo, all instances are hosted on the server.

Overall a lag free weekend.
I did have some rubberbanding effect (Walk 20 steps and start over again) in one mission. I was actually in the mission by myself and on cable connection with high end system. So it can happen, but overall I suffered from much less lag and "rubberbanding" than I did last bwe. I also had a couple crashes but blaming my Nostromo Mouse Wheel for those.
-Pyx

Also, trade your Salvage kits in with 1 salvage left, you will get half your money back. Read that somewhere and it does work...

He either made it up, or heard it from someone who made it up. Arena.net isn't retarded enough to distribute out individual instances like that - that's just begging for abuse.


Yeah, definitely do that. The last salvage from even a normal kit isn't worth 5 gold, and very little that you'll pick up in a mission is going to get you more than 5 gold from an inventory slot. Always bring 'em back to town to trade in.

Don't bother with ID kits unless the item in question is rare (gold name). Normal items are just that - normal. Identifying them is just going to waste your money. Spend the 5 gold to identify something that has the potential to be worth a good deal, or salvage into something valuable - the aformentioned rare weapons and armor.

Just salvaging should be higher priority, though. If you can afford to identify and salvage those rare Charr armors hoping for a rune, great. But if you can't it's no big deal, just grab the cloth and deal with the upgrade parts later, when you can afford to gamble.

Peace,
-CxE

I admit, I have not heard that from reliable sources. I heard that from several players in the game as well as read it on EBGames. I know those sites are not reliable but that seems logical to me as the only way an MMO-like game can exist. It's otherwise hard to believe that an RPG can have free online play. Diablo had free online gaming but I have the lowest possible opinion on it so it doesn't count. I apologize if this lead to anyone's confusion.

I didn't know about the salvaging - will look into that next time

You cannot give control of the environment to an individual player unless you desperately want cheating in your game. Anything off of the server has to be assumed to be compromised - if a client is running the game, there's nothing stopping them from spawning monsters or any items they could desire. Keeping everything server side is the only way to make sure that nothing gets broken.

All they have to do, then, is figure out the way to synch up what the client sees with the actual game state with the lowest bandwidth overhead possible. They're clearly doing a very good job.

What's made this sort of model possible is the plummeting price of bandwidth. 5 years ago trying to run this game would have broken the bank, but now the price of serving everyone is entirely managable. New games evolve to take advantages of new technology, and that's exactly what Guild Wars is doing.

Peace,
-CxE

Nope, that is not correct. Everything is hosted on secure ArenaNet servers across the world.

Here's some links to cool articles about the technology behind Guild Wars. Very interesting stuff.

http://www.telefragged.com/interviews/guildwars/
http://pc.ign.com/articles/534/534454p1.html?fromint=1

I actually had more lag this BWE then ever, dont know why. I would window out and come back into game and would seem to be gone. /shrug, prolly my computer that I got out of a cracker jack box.

Sinfear~