Nuggetty Goodness

People who have played GW1 will know why "balance" is bad.

True, a PvP system based on skill only and nothing else is fair. However, such a system has three fatal flaws.

Firstly, it is uninteresting, because the skill gap between players in an online mmo is never going to be large enough. People switching from gear-based MMOs like Forsaken World to skill based and super balanced games like GW2 tend to see themselves as the under-appreciated "pros" that could easily beat the "noob" CSers, if only there was no gear difference.

Lol.

These same people will probably get their asses whopped roundly and soundly by real "pros" in GW2, and feel more worthless and have less fun than they did in Forsaken World.

Anyone who made it past rank3 hero and r1 gladiator in GW1 will know that only a select handful of r11/g7 players in GW knew how to play the game at a level truly above the masses. To attain their level of skill, one must practice interrupting/KD locking/synchronized damage spiking with their teams constantly. Getting to this level of skill in GW is much more difficult than getting level 3 wings in Forsaken World. GW PvP is much more selective than Forsaken World PvP.

The second problem with these "skill based" games where gear does not matter is the lack of connection between the player and his character. If all your achievements and efforts in PvE will never contribute to your combat effectiveness in PvP, then what is the point of accumulating wealth/power, which is what an mmo is all about? Characters are created and deleted every month to catch up with the new meta-game. A player can be any class and any spec. Nothing is permanent. Long-term investments mean absolutely nothing. You might as well play a FPS or RTS game.

The last problem is best demonstrated by a quick example:
An extremely skilled and experienced warrior who has played GW since its release for 4 years faces a necromancer who just recently bought the game and knows nothing about it. The necromancer click on two hex skill, and the warrior is now removed from the game. Thats right, removed from the game. He is effectively deleted from the server for the duration of the hexes. Oh and one more thing: these hexes can be chained. No amount of "skill" could save the warrior from his natural counter class. That is how bad it is. In Forsaken World, an assassin could still kill a warrior through BoR if he has the situational advantage with superior gear/red hand. A priest with barely any damage can still solo a vampire with lvl 2 wings if the vampire has 0 mana. In GW, there is not even the remotest theoretical possibility for a player to defy the iron rules of "balance" imposed by the developers. You WILL get countered by your natural counters, and thats that.

Whoa. It's always interesting to read something that is right on the opposite end of the pole when it comes to what you believe.

This guy isn't trolling. And where he's coming from... I can understand due to the kind of point of view that he is espousing.

Which I can sum up in one sentence:
Balance is bad because making skill the cornerstone is too elitist.

His original post detailed why FW is superior to GW and will be superior to GW2 in every way.

(What I'm getting), FW is better because:
Cash-bought power is easier to acquire than skill, and therefore not elitist.

And no, nugget is not any kind of GW PvP god. Poster says he has R4 Gladiator, which is certainly a mark of GW PvP skill.

To be honest, I'm not even sure quite why I posted this other than, 'Wow, that's a lifeform so totally different from me that I'm surprised we share superficially similar skins.'

XD

P.S. The last scenario he's describing isn't balance, it's IMbalance. It's precisely what ANet mucks around with PvP and PvP skills SO often to try to put right.

Moar thoughts:
Maybe his view stems from a frame of mind which says, 'If I'm not proving that I'm better than someone else, then I'm not interested. GW takes too much time and effort to be better than someone else. FW just takes money. Therefore, I like FW better.'

Could be why his viewpoint seem to be the antithesis of a nugget's. Nugget is all about proving to nugget that she got better than nugget. =P That nugget beat nugget! *beat self* Beating others is just icing. From this, we can see that nugget has a much larger ego than quoted-fellow, for to nugget, nugget is the only important milestone. XD

Soo, now that I have attained Pancackle Journeyman status, wherein I can craft satisfying, fluffy variants of my own pancackles that look like photo shoot pancackles, I have realised something. O.o

...I know why these half-empty pancackle mix bottles work!

See, I've always thought it was kinda nuts that people bought these things. 'Woot! Guys! I have an idea! Let's sell half-empty bottles to people and sell it as a feature! They'll totally buy it and we'll make even moar money!' >.>

But nao, nao having attained Pancackle Journeyman status, I know WHY! And I know why it works!

I figure it's 'cause if you are a Pancackle Noob, and you don't know how Pancackles work, you don't realise that the number one transformer of Fluffy Pancackles of HAPPY into Rubbery Pancackles of SAD is... overmixing of the flour.

Enter the shake-it-around-half-empty-bottle of pancackle mix, which a pancackle noob is far less likely to overmix. With these half-empty bottles, Pancackle Noobs add water, shakeshake, make pancackles that are (hopefully) fluffy, and they go, this is AWESOME!

And so what I thought was a WTF stoopid peepul clever company turns out to be a very clever company saving stoopid peepul from themselves *while making a profit*! It's brilliant, *and* it's not a con.

(That being said, if I had understood Pancackle Principles, I probably would never have come up with these gorgeous white chocolate pancackles, which basically break all the rules of fluffiness I outline above, but are still utterly amazing.)

"Shoot a little high, you might be able to sever that spinal cord. A little to each side and low, maybe you’ll put the skeleton on the ground and incapacitated. A direct hit will probably do both, leaving the skeleton to only crawl toward you, allowing you time to escape. Or, I suppose, it could ride C3P0-on-Chewbacca style on another skeleton. Regardless, it’s one less coming after you under its own unholy power."

Importantz informationz. U must reed. Nao.

Well, if I was ANet and planning to make changes to the game that may alienate the passionate fans, then obviously I would try to get the money from those fanboys before telling anybody about those changes. :devil:

And I'm quite sure they still remember what happened when they talked about Transmutationstones for the first time...

If I could cancel, I would. But I can't, since I bought directly from ArenaNet.

If you're happy with Guild Wars 2 and where it's going, good for you. Me, I now know better than to trust any game studio again.

On Friday, June 15, 2012, attorney Charles Carreon passed from mundane short-term internet notoriety into a sort of legal cartoon-supervillainy.

He transcended typical internet infamy when he filed a federal lawsuit last Friday in the United Sates District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland. He belonged to the ages the moment he filed that lawsuit not only against Matthew Inman, proprietor of The Oatmeal, but also against IndieGoGo Inc., the company that hosted Inman's ridiculously effective fundraiser for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

But that level of censorious litigiousness was not enough for Charles Carreon. He sought something more. And so, on that same Friday, Charles Carreon also sued the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society, the beneficiaries of Matthew Inman's fundraiser.

Yes. Charles Carreon, butthurt that someone had leveraged his douchebaggery into almost two hundred thousand dollars of donations to two worthy charities, sued the charities.

LOL! I'm going back and forth between 'you have got to be kidding me' and 'epic lulz!' XD

Also, the letter The Oatmeal's lawyer wrote to Carreon is worth reading. Now there's a proper - and classy - lawyer. XD

Ok, so time to lick our wounds, get back on the horse, and find a new job. At least we stuck it out and won't have to pay back our relocation costs according to the Chief Operating Officer. Wrong! On June 1st, we get a letter from Atlas Van Lines with 10 days to pay our overdue moving bill of a sizeable amount. Six months has gone by since our move. There was no notice at any point that this had not been paid and now we get a bill with 10 days to pay. Why now? Haven't they had 6 months to collect this? Didn't the company say we would be let out of our contract since they folded? Couldn't they have given us a heads up at any point before we were broke and our savings gone to feed our children? After all, a heads up on this might have alerted us to a problem with 38 Studios before we got to this point. Well on one page in a series, of approximately 45, we signed a document stating in tiny print that we would be responsible if the company does not pay. I don't know if most people are aware, but moving with three kids, a dog, and a cat from one coast to another is a bit tiring and this document was of course presented on the day our stuff arrived in Rhode Island, which was chaos.

:(

This is heartbreaking.

:(