It scales surprisingly well.  I managed to play it decently on my shitty HP laptop on a low resolution, which I wasn't expecting would work.  Played for about an hour until...  I don't know, I guess the server went down or something, and I couldn't get back in.  I'm guessing there's a lot of lore, but the initial story is really weak.  "I come from [background] and now I want to save people!"

So - watched an awesome movie. Time to try again.

I played for about half an hour but the lag of about 1000 people zerging around together was too much. Even had 5 sec delay in my own instance thing.

Surprisingly smooth experience. No lag and logged on right away.

I've discovered one major bug so far. The human tutorial area keeps restarting after you kill the boss without warping you to the new area sometimes. Worked normally with my first character. Glitched for my second one.

Played a little bit of PvE and PvP. PvE was okay but the early parts are boring, as expected. PvP was a clusterfuck, especially with thief. I don't know what my skills are even supposed to do so I'm just teleporting between people doing some flying spins and stuff, and dying. Trying out my guardian in PvP right now, but I can't figure out how to equip weapons in PvP. All I have a is a mace, shield, and staff available. I want one-handed sword and hammer though.

Also, how do we get to WvW?

I get an error when I try to join Yak's Bend I may have to just pick a different server

I'm getting huge choppiness, game not running above 20fps or so. Pretty sure it just has to do with drivers though, as Afterburner shows it only using ~30% GPU. 

Well, after playing a bunch with my little guardian, I decided to go with a norn shaman type.

Played through the starting zone, and still have absolutely no problems playing on max settings, I'm not even getting any lag. Pretty weird how it's apparently running so badly for others.

But I've done about all I can for one night, so I'm logging off for now. Maybe one of you guys can take my spot.

Been playing a human engineer with a noble background, my dude is Nolan North and I've been hanging out with Yuri Lowenthal and the Saint's Row 3 guy. So yeah, I'm loving it.

gave up joined blazeridge mountains will try and server transfer once things get resolved

games not running so well on my system, i5 760, 5770, 4gbs of ram

and I'm noticing signifigant lag between my inputs and the action on screen

Anyone know how to unlock weapons in PvP and how to get to WvW?

Click to read text :P

@1337W422102 said:

It scales surprisingly well. I managed to play it decently on my shitty HP laptop on a low resolution, which I wasn't expecting would work. Played for about an hour until... I don't know, I guess the server went down or something, and I couldn't get back in. I'm guessing there's a lot of lore, but the initial story is really weak. "I come from [background] and now I want to save people!"

What spec laptop are you using? I wanna find out if my friend (who can run StarCraft 2 and Shogun 2 on his laptop) will be able to run it.

@1337W422102 said:

It scales surprisingly well. I managed to play it decently on my shitty HP laptop on a low resolution, which I wasn't expecting would work. Played for about an hour until... I don't know, I guess the server went down or something, and I couldn't get back in. I'm guessing there's a lot of lore, but the initial story is really weak. "I come from [background] and now I want to save people!"

What spec laptop are you using? I wanna find out if my friend (who can run StarCraft 2 and Shogun 2 on his laptop) will be able to run it.

It's completely broken. This needs a really long stress test kind of beta.

When I could get in, there was about a five second delay on everything. Haven't been able to get in since. Been trying for 6,5 hours. Played about 2.

Fucking worst beta ever, been trying to login for 5 hours and got "Check your internetz bro" error every fucking time.

Okay, so I did one of the instanced story missions, and then did some WvW with RobbieMac. That shit is fun. Although it did take quite a while to storm a castle seeing as we didn't have any siege equipment.

I've played about 15-20 minutes. The Diablo 3 beta was much easier to get into.

@Maystack: Yeah WvW was fun. I was getting quite a bit of lag during big battles. Though that is fine, to be expected. Really enjoying the beta so far, also Divinity's Reach is sooooooo good looking!

@RobbieMac: I actually got surprisingly little lag in the big battles. Apart from that time where everyone was wigging out, but I think that was on the server side.

I got insane lag before (several seconds delay on attacks) but now it's fine. The game is great so far.

@Liber said:

Fucking worst beta ever, been trying to login for 5 hours and got "Check your internetz bro" error every fucking time.

lol that's the point of these betas. to work out all of these problems before release.

@TheHT said:

@Liber said:

Fucking worst beta ever, been trying to login for 5 hours and got "Check your internetz bro" error every fucking time.

lol that's the point of these betas. to work out all of these problems before release.

Wasn't that the point of the previous closed betas/stress tests? So people who paid to get this bonus won't sit clicking "log in" for 5 hours?

@Cake said:

@TheHT said:

@Liber said:

Fucking worst beta ever, been trying to login for 5 hours and got "Check your internetz bro" error every fucking time.

lol that's the point of these betas. to work out all of these problems before release.

Wasn't that the point of the previous closed betas/stress tests? So people who paid to get this bonus won't sit clicking "log in" for 5 hours?

i don't know, but this is still a beta. whatever the problem is here, better that it happens now than when the game is released.

I think i am the worst Necromancer in the world.

@Cake said:

@TheHT said:

@Liber said:

Fucking worst beta ever, been trying to login for 5 hours and got "Check your internetz bro" error every fucking time.

lol that's the point of these betas. to work out all of these problems before release.

Wasn't that the point of the previous closed betas/stress tests? So people who paid to get this bonus won't sit clicking "log in" for 5 hours?

Previous access was for press and YouTubey type people, it was never for stress testing the system. Now, for this weekend, we are talking about thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people from all over the globe hitting this thing simultaneously. It really fucking sucks that you are having trouble, but you should be doing the normal thing of leaving it on the login screen, trying again, then alt tabbing out to do something else for 20/30mins. Don't just sit there trying over and over and over again!

All that being said, the couple of hours I've put in so far have been glorious.

@Fattony12000 said:

@Cake said:

@TheHT said:

@Liber said:

Fucking worst beta ever, been trying to login for 5 hours and got "Check your internetz bro" error every fucking time.

lol that's the point of these betas. to work out all of these problems before release.

Wasn't that the point of the previous closed betas/stress tests? So people who paid to get this bonus won't sit clicking "log in" for 5 hours?

Previous access was for press and YouTubey type people, it was never for stress testing the system. Now, for this weekend, we are talking about thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people from all over the globe hitting this thing simultaneously. It really fucking sucks that you are having trouble, but you should be doing the normal thing of leaving it on the login screen, trying again, then alt tabbing out to do something else for 20/30mins. Don't just sit there trying over and over and over again!

All that being said, the couple of hours I've put in so far have been glorious.

Been at the login screen for the past... 7 hours now, retrying every 15 minutes or so. I know things like that happen, often, but considering it's something they advertised as bonus for pre-purchasing, they should've made sure they can actually pull that off. Also, because it's only pre-purchase they know roughly the amount of people that are logging in today, and could've prepared better for it. At least that's how I see it.

Structured PvP is awesome, lag free & very smooth.

The opposite can be said for everything else. The game desperately needs optimization.

Looks beautiful and plays extremely well overall though. The final games gonna be somethin special indeed.

@MannyCalavera said:

I think i am the worst Necromancer in the world.

I feel like the worst Engineer in the world. Then I tried greatsword Guardian and face-rolled entire groups of mobs. Methinks there are class balance issues ATM, lmao. XD

Took me all day to realize I needed to do the tutorial in the Mists to get weapons and WvW lol.

@Adamsons said:

Played thief til lvl 7, took about two hours. Most of the events ended in a massive zerg, with aoe being tunneled at piles of enemies. Also killed a dredge boss in a mine with about 30 people, which involved ranged auto attacking him. Negatives aside, the world seems pretty thick with content, the dye interface for armor is pretty sublime and the animations are better than expected.

Performance is terrible as is latency, but it is hardly worth mentioning really.

All those issues seem super specific to the beta (and launch) experience. The sheer congestion of player population means all encounters are pretty well zergy derpfests. Nothing you can really do other than auto-attack and hope you don't get one-shotted from the scaled mobs.

For those who have played in the beta, how is the movement/ combat? Specifically, does it control like WoW or more animation oriented like ToR?

Definitely the real deal. It's fresh, full of new mechanics, and there's so much of it. So much to learn. I feel like when I first started playing World of Warcraft all those years back. Overwhelmed, but more than sufficiently intrigued to invest time and effort into it.

• Did the first couple of steps of the Norn storyline. Like the solo instances a lot. Quite challenging.
• Did the frist couple of heart-events and some minor dynamic events. Turned into a snowleopard and hunted prey. Solved riddles from the raven spirit. Fed fishes to bear cubs. Commited genocide at the molepeople. Hunted poachers with a pack of wolves. Killed a a demonworshipping shaman. Good stuff.
• Explored a bit in Hoelbrak, the Norn capital. Learned some crafting. So big, there's like 15 quicktravelpoints in there.
• Did all the tutorial stuff in the mists and grabbed a bunch of PvP weapons.
• Played a couple of matched instanced PvP matches. Great fun.
• Checked out WvW, but didn't get into it. Attacked some mob, and I definitely did not have the gear to go around and kill NPCs yet.

Got disconnected in WvW in the green team camp on some map. I'll leave it there and go to bed for a full 3,5 hours sleep cycle. Just enough to emerge from deep sleep back into REM for the first time. Hopefully the servers will admit me swiftly back into the game.

@plop1920 said:

For those who have played in the beta, how is the movement/ combat? Specifically, does it control like WoW or more animation oriented like ToR?

It feels closer to WoW than TOR. Gameplay over animation. Outside of insane zergs in the starter area, it's super responsive too. Not as organic feeling movement as WoW, but pretty damn close. Active dodge is awesome. Pretty much every skill can be used while moving too. If a swing would visibly hit multiple enemies, it hits multiple enemies. Feels very good. Easy to pick up. With the emphasis on movement/positioning and active dodging and loads of various short duration debuffs, there's also a lot of depth to combat too. And that's outside of cross profession combos. Good stuff.

@plop1920 said:

For those who have played in the beta, how is the movement/ combat? Specifically, does it control like WoW or more animation oriented like ToR?

I wasn't too impressed with the combat/movement system. I expected it to be much more fluid and intuitive. It definitely has a learning curve to it (at least for me). I'm sure I'll grow to like it once I get used to it though.

I've never played WoW or ToR so I can't compare it to those. The only other online RPG I've played is GW1 and that was about 6 years ago so I don't really remember it too well. I guess that's part of the reason why I found it kind of awkward (I don't play MMOs).

Didn't care for what they did after the opening quest. By that, I mean that they made me do some shitty busy work quest that wasn't fun. The first one I came across was likely the first one most people see and it was the one where you water the plants, feed the cows and fight a few wurms and flatten the holes they dug. It was really, really, really lame (EDIT: Totally forgot that this particular quest is in the Human area, so people not playing Humans wouldn't encounter this right away). Also paying money to teleport (regardless of how little it starts at) is dumb. Why is that even there. What does it accomplish?

After that I did some main story quests and it got better. This open world stuff seems pretty boring though and overall I feel underwhelmed. Though my feelings are probably that way because I loved the original Guild Wars so much and kinda hate MMOs.

@SuperWristBands said:

Also paying money to teleport (regardless of how little it starts at) is dumb. Why is that even there. What does it accomplish?

Goldsinks. I'm actually worried there aren't enough in the game. A repeat of the mass-inflation GW1 economy would be a bummer.

@project343 said:

@Adamsons said:

Played thief til lvl 7, took about two hours. Most of the events ended in a massive zerg, with aoe being tunneled at piles of enemies. Also killed a dredge boss in a mine with about 30 people, which involved ranged auto attacking him. Negatives aside, the world seems pretty thick with content, the dye interface for armor is pretty sublime and the animations are better than expected.

Performance is terrible as is latency, but it is hardly worth mentioning really.

All those issues seem super specific to the beta (and launch) experience. The sheer congestion of player population means all encounters are pretty well zergy derpfests. Nothing you can really do other than auto-attack and hope you don't get one-shotted from the scaled mobs.

I have about 4 hours more experience with it now. It is 4 am and the beta crowds have really died down.

So far I have an elementalist and a thief to level 10 and a guardian to level 5/6. General thoughts:

Steal mechanic sucks, the shadowstep with it is amazingly finicky.

Thief feels pretty solid, burst damage is much higher than the elementalist so far. Cloak and dagger into backstab will drop 75% of an even level enemies health. In the mass zerg fest aoe balls, melee is really undesirable, mobs can switch and drop you so fast. Shortbow has decent aoe in a compramise.

Elementalist aoe damage is pretty nice, some skill combinations which can bring out a little bit of finesse - knockbacks into stun aoes etc. Water healing isnt amazing. Glyph of lesser elementals sucks. Staff is a pretty well rounded weapon.

With the servers quieter I have been leveling up my guardian to a different experience really. Did a quest to defend some farm from bandits, went into bandit cave, find and kill bandit boss, then a locked up bandit becomes a merchant who sells garbage.

Last few notes:

Surprisingly underwhelmed with the weapon sets, in the sense that with my thief at level 10, double daggers 1-5 skills were alright, but the thought that I would be using the same ones 70 levels later is kind of daunting. There is a lot of choice with the passives and elites, though a bunch of them are pretty boring, passives more so. Will start looking into the trait system tomorrow.

No real complexity in the combat yet, I had to roll out of a meteor shower once, that was pretty much it.

Took almost an hour to get the game to actually let me make a character. Took another 10 minutes for the game to actually load after the intro scene. Performance right now is atrocious. Lag is terrible, frame rates are low, and last time I tried I couldn't even get past the login screen because according to the games error message "I am having an internet connection problem". Could have fooled me.

As for what I did play.... story segments seemed like SWtOR light, and the gameplay itself felt well... like a faster guild wars 1 with warhammer public quests. So far I am not particularly impressed by anything but it is too soon to tell for sure.

EDIT: For those who care about PC specs lets just say my PC demolishes the requirements for the game and could get 30+ fps on Witcher 2 at max. So no, the bad performance is not my pc or internet. I am also on a US server not euro so it isn't euro only.

@Karkarov said:

Took almost an hour to get the game to actually let me make a character. Took another 10 minutes for the game to actually load after the intro scene. Performance right now is atrocious. Lag is terrible, frame rates are low, and last time I tried I couldn't even get past the login screen because according to the games error message "I am having an internet connection problem". Could have fooled me.

As for what I did play.... story segments seemed like SWtOR light, and the gameplay itself felt well... like a faster guild wars 1 with warhammer public quests. So far I am not particularly impressed by anything but it is too soon to tell for sure.

EDIT: For those who care about PC specs lets just say my PC demolishes the requirements for the game and could get 30+ fps on Witcher 2 at max. So no, the bad performance is not my pc or internet. I am also on a US server not euro so it isn't euro only.

The gameplay was nothing like GW1 (although I wish it was!).

The lag is server related for the most part. The game ran very smoothly on my low-end system all day. It finally started to lag around 9-10 pm EST, which is when I turned it off as it became unplayable (10-15 second delay on skills after clicking).

Also, having a good computer won't help you much for the beta as the game is heavily CPU-bound right now:

"We are currently optimizing Guild Wars 2, making ongoing improvements to the game’s frame rate. Presently, the game is CPU-bound on most high-end systems, so lowering graphics settings or upgrading your video card may not have a large impact on performance"

Ive thought the first 14 levels were awesome. Dynamic Events are fun and sometimes very unexpected. My favorite part is working as a team with random people, there isn't a need to group up if you don't want to.

The only part I am having trouble with is finding enough content in the human starting zone, Ive done everything and I am only 14. and the zone is 1-17, there are ways around this of course, grinding, or world traveling to a different races zone, but it feels like there should be enough content to hit 17.

It doesn't prevent you from moving on to the 17-25 zone, so I can go there and probably get owned.

Wow, you're fast. I'm only level 4 lol. I'm finding the leveling to be very slow (then again, I'm also doing a lot of exploring and deviating from what I should be doing).

I really love how the dynamic events work, even the early ones turn into something more interesting. You can start doing something as simple as collecting apples to bake a pie, to having to stop a spiders from over running the orchard, to having kill the queen spider who attacks, because you killed all her minions. If you stick around, the quests usually chain into much bigger and better things.

I think the only real problem at the moment is the congestion, there's so many people around do the same things, it makes the events insane, sometimes to the point of not being able to tell what you should do. Hopefully the actual launch will be a bit more calm, with the extra starting zones for the unplayable races opening up.. and people should quickly spread out a bit.

Actually just playing in a small group was a lot of fun. The guardian can set up wards and buffs, summoning mystical hammers and drawing "lines" that the enemy can't pass, while the elementalist burns them with fire magic or creates a wall of flames that other classes can enchant their weapons with. The synergy between the professions is great.. when it's not so crowded you can actually tell what's going on.

Love the art design in the game. I loved it before, but actually seeing it for myself just reaffirms that it is beautiful. The painterly style has impressed me.

Yeah, obviously the game needs to be optimized. I didn't expect any less; this is a beta.

I'm learning not to spam combat abilities because it seems like you can get locked into a queue of abilities. It will probably take me a little while to get used to the combat system after wow and the global cool down system.

Grouping without actually grouping has completely changed the mmo loathing that I had. People are naturally working together because it is rewarded, and that is just great. I've been revived and done plenty of reviving, helped random people and been helped myself. They nailed this concept.

I feel like crafting needs some sort of tutorial-ish thing. It isn't really explained much so it is up to you to experiment and figure it all out.

Oh, and I can't end this without saying ... Dude, this game is actually challenging. Expect to die. I'm not auto-piloting through hours of play. You need to be on your toes or you get creamed.

Boy I dunno how the other areas are yet, but the Charr starting zone is atrocious. Just finished 100% exploring the starting zone, dying way more often than I would've liked, and I'm still 2 levels below the lowest quests in the next zone, which basically means there's no way in hell I can do them. Fantastic. Also, my reward for 100%ing the zone? 5 onions and two pieces of armor for a different class. One of my story quests had me fighting a mob whose health regenerated almost as fast as I could take it down. On top of that my NPC buddies would occasionally just stop attacking. Took me a full 15 minutes to kill that one mob. It's hard to know if I'm missing some nuance about the combat because there is zero tutorial in place at the moment, and it seems the tiniest mistakes get severely punished (when I first started I would often just give up on melee and run around reviving casters in a big group because I'd last less than a second against the scaled up mobs).

On the bright side, though the balance is a long way from tuned in, the quests themselves are pretty well structured. Ultimately it's your standard MMO fare, just dressed up a little differently. But it's a nice change. Crafting seems really deep though again at the start it's too complicated. That's not to say you can't figure it out, but from the get go you have a screen full of recipes. Just give me a handful to start and ease me into it, introducing a new ingredient or two at a time. As it stands I have no clue what to sell and what to salvage. Actually that seems to sum up my problems with the beta so far pretty well. There's too much just dropping you in the deep end. Hopefully they'll tune some of these systems to a more reasonable curve over the course of the beta. At the very least it'd be nice to be able to play a warrior and not be afraid to run up and hit things.

12 hours later, still can't login.

I absolutely love this game!!!!!

The difficulty with scaling is freaking fantastic!! Can i say lvl 4, 80 player raid on one lvl 8 boss? Oh man i ran around reviving people , throwing in some dmg, utter chaos! Fantastic Chaos! Can you imagine how long it would take to group up a 80 player raid, in a traditional mmo? It took literally no effort, and people were playing like a team. Everyone is helping each other, rezing each other, dodging left right, using actual strategy right from the first boss you encounter.

Combat is great, it seems simple a the start, then you start dying and realize you actually have to think about every single encounter. Positioning, kiting, dodging at the right time, switching form long range to melee, i don't think I've ever had to pay so much attention in an mmo before.

Structured PVP is really addicting, haven't played enough WvW yet. The cities are gorgeous, huge, intimidating, and so worth exploring. The environment is great as well, following from marshes, to forest, to cave ,and mountains. I can't decide what i want to do, go craft, pve, pvp, WvW , i wan't to do them all!

Again the difficulty is spot on, as @Subjugation said there's no more auto-pilot, gotta stay on your toes. You never know whats around the corner, coming up the road, or what ability a mob will throw at you.

I'm really excited for this game, and i just want it to come out so i can roll my release toon. I haven't been this excited for an mmo since the release of Vanilla WoW.

@Beaudacious: WvW is basically how you described that 80 player raid, but instead of against a boss, it's against another 80 player raid party.

There was a fantastic moment where me and robbie were playing where we were trying to break down the gates of a castle, and every so often, a lone enemy invader would try attacking us to no avail. Suddenly, a whole group of invaders stormed us and it turned into a massive brawl outside the castle. They killed us all, but then we got the aid of some local ogres and captured the castle. I don't go throwing the word round often, but it was epic.

One thing I just realized I forgot to do was add stats points after each level. Perhaps I should have paid more attention. That could explain why I was dying a lot. hah

@1337W422102 said:

@Chavtheworld said:

@1337W422102 said:

It scales surprisingly well. I managed to play it decently on my shitty HP laptop on a low resolution, which I wasn't expecting would work. Played for about an hour until... I don't know, I guess the server went down or something, and I couldn't get back in. I'm guessing there's a lot of lore, but the initial story is really weak. "I come from [background] and now I want to save people!"

What spec laptop are you using? I wanna find out if my friend (who can run StarCraft 2 and Shogun 2 on his laptop) will be able to run it.

Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz, 3 gigs of RAM, GeForce 8400M GS. Keep in mind that I was running it at the lowest visual settings and even then the framerate wasn't spectacular.

That's okay, I'm running on an i7 with a GTX580 and the framerate still sucks on medium haha! My mate has very similar specs, the only thing I'm worried about is how poor his graphics card is. He has a integrated intel something-or-the-other with the minimum requirement for video RAM. But otherwise his specs match yours, especially considering how CPU intensive it is atm I think he might be fine...

Yeah, I just stopped playing the beta for the first time since 1pm. It's a pretty fun ass game. The performance issues almost make some combat moments unplayable, and I hope they fix the issues very soon, but that was my only complaint from the game so far. LIVE BETA FOLKS