If you’ve dropped by the Guild Wars 2 subreddit lately, you’ll notice that pretty much everyone is talking about the build and equipment templates that are launching later this month. As we covered yesterday, the idea is that characters will be able to set and swap between multiple build templates and equipment templates when out of combat. The plan is to give everyone three templates by default, with more being buyable in the cash shop. Folks will be able to share build templates too a la classic Guild Wars. As for equipment templates, ArenaNet is granting two for free, with more in the cash shop, plus there’s an “armory” that’ll store excess gear, independent of normal storage.
The uproar began, however, following the studio’s recent livestream, during which it became clear that hardcore players, many of whom have spent a lot of money on extra inventory and bank space to store their gear for multiple specs already, will be expected to pay quite a bit more to integrate all their existing builds to the new system. (Yes, some folks have more than a handful of builds.) Players are likewise concerned that the cap on total templates will be too low (six per type per toon). And there’s also frustration over what some elite gamers see as the invalidation of legendary gear.
In other words, a lot of folks really just wanted something similar to Guild Wars’ system, but the proposed templates seem a bit convoluted, not to mention monetized. One heavily upvoted thread estimates that a semi-hardcore player who plays three classes in two game modes will need to invest around $60 into the new system, though of course that assumes 400 gems per template (that’s not been confirmed).
Salt in the wound is that GW2 players have been happily utilizing the unofficial plugin ArcDPS to manage their builds, but apparently the developer of that plugin agreed to stop developing that part of the app once the monetized version is in the game, meaning that while it’ll be possible for folks to just keep on playing the way they already are for a little while, eventually the third-party template system will break and be unusable and unfixable by the dev.
“[I]’m sorry for the developers that put a great effort into finally making this happen, only for it to turn into such an accumulation of negativity,” wrote one player. “I can’t help but think that if we had a more open discussion about this prior development, a lot more people could be looking forward to this today. But we didn’t, because that’s not how Anet operates, and that, frankly, is a shame. Both sides could have benefited from this a lot.”
