The primary problem I have with WoW at the moment is that I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time farming gold for Epic flying. Even with the cost reduced by grinding the correct faction to the maximum (It’s not that hard if you frequent instances with any kind of regularity) it’s still four THOUSAND gold. That’s time that I don’t have to play the game, so I’m just going to be happy with my normal flying.

To effectively sap money from players to keep them from getting super-wealthy (If players are dirt poor then the economy will follow suit with the model I’m using. Money is worth more if you have less of it, and therefore the cost of items will simply shift down based on their relative worth when compared to the money) you have to attatch a cost to something, in my case epic flying while in CO respeccing, and then manipulate the cost to try to find a good desire/benefit balance so that players will pay the price to access that content.

What is sounds like CO has done is drastically cranked up the price along with the desire/benefit for the system. They are “giving” players something great, but asking them to spend way too much time to be able to use it. It’s almost like dangling the proverbial carrot in the players faces. “Here is this great new system! Now work work work for days on end to be able to afford it!” I think that’s an unfortunate design decision, but fortunately for the devs they just have to crank down one variable to make it work (perhaps it’s more work than just ONE variable, but I think my message is clear).

The whole forum is full of people whining that they cannot afford the respec fee.
And well, what is the point in making respeccing HARD, actually? WHY?

There is not much reason why it has to be hard at all. Except to keep people grinding and paying?

Sure, if folks don’t bother to test powers out in the Power House you could probably gimp yourself but even then I think it would be hard to do considering however powerful most abilities seem to be.

If you gimp your character in this game, I’d wager its 99% because you didn’t bother to test your powers or put them all in one basket because a power was overpowered to begin with.

Not sure what else I can say about that.

Guild Wars is different because it’s such a tactically complex game. You’ve got very few choices to make in character building, so you need to make them very well. You need to consider what you’ll need to take on the popular teams, what you need to support your teammates, etc. You also need to be able to deal with metagame shifts. GW is a very different game than the average MMO, so I don’t mind it’s ‘respec’ system.

The way Guild Wars handles “respecs” is brilliant, and it doesn’t seem to hurt the game, other than not making players grind up the respec fee thereby making them play longer and extending the sub time thereby leeching more money for the company. Oh, wait, GW doesn’t *have* subscriptions. That’s not an accident.

Of course, I’d go further than even the GW brilliance by allowing *full* respecs, all the way down to basic class choice. In CO, where your “class” *is* your skill setup, a full respec would be a great tool for letting people actually *play* the friggin’ game, rather than grind to the point where they can play.

Beyond that, if learning to build your character is a skill to learn in itself, why attach a penalty to learning that skill? Adding a “processing” fee to respec is effectively “double dipping” on the fee to learn the skill; it costs the player the time to learn how to play *and* the time to generate the fee to change. That’s not cool.

Going off the above though, build is only half the equation. Having the skill to actually use it is another matter. Hybrids may often come out stronger then single focus characters but in my experience across games are also vastly harder to play.

Or heck, someone might simply get BETTER at playing the game and no longer need or want something they took before as a crutch.

Imagine an ability that required good circle strafing skills or the ability to respond to reactive events (parries, dodges, whatever). When you start off, perhaps that sounds too daunting “There’s no way I could have that good of reaction time.”

But then you play the game and you get better and better. Now you DO have the skill. And since reactive skills tend to be some of the strongest, you are ready to try them.

Now you have to reroll?

That’s an instant cancel for lots of people.