This week in Guild Wars 2

This week in Guild Wars 2

Posted by on September 28, 2012 in | | 1 Response

This has been a quieter week for me game-wise, as I try to get my ranger up to max level (I hit level 69 last night). For the first time since the last stress test, I finally got into WvW with fellow players from my own server (the few times I tried WvW during beta, I seemed to always be the only player on my side).

I picked a good time to join, as the opposing servers to Darkhaven this week were Sorrow’s Furnace and Sanctum of Rall. Sorrow’s Furnace was the first server my alliance attempted to join during beta, but it was far too busy and we couldn’t even get half of our members on. Sanctum of Rall was one of the alternate servers we debated switching to. Due to the difficulty of getting everyone on the same server during beta, each guild in the alliance ended up selecting a server independently. If we ever get an alliance mechanism in Guild Wars 2, the server split will make it difficult for our old alliance to re-form.

As I’m only playing a few hours each weekday evening, I sometimes find myself racing to get the last few items for my daily achievement bonus. On Tuesday evening, I just needed one more dynamic event … but the only two dynamic events in my area (the southern portion of Timberline Falls) were both frozen: in both cases, the “scheduled” waves of enemies just weren’t showing up. I ping-ponged back and forth from one event to the other, just in case they’d restarted, but neither one showed any signs of life: it was getting too late so I had to log off for the night.

On Thursday night, I found another kindly soul to help me get up to a vista in Lornar’s Pass. This one is located inside a mine up on top of a standing column. The other player and I had been finishing off a renown heart in the mine (revive injured miners, kill skritt foragers, etc.), and he asked if I’d managed to get to the vista yet. Before I could answer, he told me to follow him and he’d show me the way. Up a few flights of stairs, jump over a bannister on to a rock outcropping, jump to another rock, then up onto some scaffolding and run out along a crane arm, then jump over to the vista. Easy-peasy. (Anyone who knows me at all can predict the sequel.) It probably took me ten tries to finally make the last jump to the vista (not including the few times I’d misjudged earlier jumps and slid down the rock face back to the bottom of the mine). Jumping puzzles? You can keep ‘em.

Official Guild Wars 2 news

  • Guild Wars 2 wiki — Game status updates. “This is the current status of the most important issues we’re tracking with Guild Wars 2 live service. (This page is updated by ArenaNet staff and protected against non-admin editing.)” [Raphia: This page on the wiki should be one you bookmark for reference (I'll continue to list it every week).]
  • GuildWars2.com — Concept Artist Spotlight: Jamie Ro. “We’re going to get to know the ArenaNet concept artists and their work a little better in this weekly series of interviews. Today, we talk with Concept Artist Team Lead Jamie Ro, an ArenaNet veteran whose work has been instrumental in shaping the aesthetic of Guild Wars 2.”
  • YouTube — arenanetofficial: What is Guild Wars 2?. [Raphia: This video will probably appeal to those who didn't find the last official video to be convincing.]
  • On the official Guild Wars 2 forums, Matthew Medina posted on the topic Broken Dynamic Events: “To respond to this I can say that, yes, we’re aware of the general issues that have been reported with many Dynamic Events and skill challenges. They frustrate us as much as they frustrate you — most if not all of us devs are playing the game right along with you, and these content blockers can certainly be challenging to everyone’s enjoyment of the game experience.”
  • GuildWars2.com — E-Mail Authentication: Tweaks to Increase Security. “We have recently adjusted the sensitivity of the Guild Wars 2 e-mail authentication system to make it even more secure. One result of this change is that players may be briefly denied access to their account until they approve access from their current network.”
  • GuildWars2.com — Update Notes – September 25th 2012. “We’ve made some significant updates to dungeon rewards. I wanted to try and clarify them here. All of these changes have been the result of an original exploit which was letting players receive upwards of 20 levels by completing a single dungeon run. We initially closed this exploit, which caused some new problems. The result is this new system which should increase dungeon rewards for players who play though them normally but help curb inflation of rewards for those who are using exploitative methods to farm them.”
  • On the Guild Wars 2 Facebook page: photos of the ArenaNet launch party. “As we counted down the minutes until launch last month, we took some time to celebrate our hard work over the past years.”
  • Twitch.tv — TAD Talk with Jonathan Sharp: Combat Master Class.
  • ArenaNet blog — Now Accepting Applications for ArenaNet Class of 2013 Internship. “ArenaNet is once again considering internship applications. ArenaNet Class of 2013 will offer the following disciplines: Character Art, Environment Art, Technical Art/VFX, Animation, and Programming. Please consider the following application methods below, and make sure to include all necessary materials.”
  • On the official Guild Wars 2 forums, Mike Lewis posted on the topic On Botting and What We’re Doing About It: “We wanted to address some of the concerns around ‘botting’, and let everyone know what we’ve been doing about it, as well as our plans for continuing to tackle this issue. Our monitoring of ‘bot’ activity has already resulted in over 1600 account terminations world-wide in the last week alone, and we are actively tracking the most common ‘bots’ in use, so that we can continue to eliminate them from the game. As we continue to gather information on these ‘bots’, we will be increasing the rate of account termination to remove them. Please continue to report players that you suspect of ‘botting’ – your support is much appreciated.”

Fan articles and blog posts

  • Kotaku — Guild Wars 2’s Subtle Mind Control Makes Me Actually Like Other People. “Hell, it has famously been said, is other people. Play enough games online and you’ll come to understand where Sartre was coming from. Many online games can feel a lot like No Exit — a world populated only by the meddling, the griefing, and the incompetent, where even death isn’t an escape.”
  • Hunter’s Insight — Where To Find Jumping Puzzles. “This puzzle will end up being found by most people looking for the vista and skill point. Overall the puzzle is in the southeast of Straights, but southwest of Fort Trinity. Starting southwest of the island the vista and skill point are situated on. The closest waypoints are Lone Post or Broken Spit but they are often contested. Fort Trinity waypoint is often the most reliable choice.” [Raphia: Hunter continues to add to his jumping puzzle guide, or as I like to think of it "the places to avoid" guide.]
  • Glowing Ice — Build Guide: Dual Dagger Boons. “Hello, readers! I’m going to give you a guide to my current build that I’m running around PvE and WvWvW with, and the benefits it has.”
  • GWOnline.net — Greatsword Guardian Leveling Build. “Since Guild Wars 2’s release I have been busy leaving a lot of bodies in my wake, instead of writing up new articles. I am back to share with you the leveling build I used. I will be covering the full monty so get yourself some coffee, maybe a beer if you’re that guy, and sit down for a bit while you read this. I clocked 75h 20m from 1-80 with this build, so it works. Proof will be at the bottom of the article.”
  • Guild Wars Insider — Big Swords & Butterflies: Dungeon Play. “Another week, another chance for us to examine that master of deception, the maestro of illusions, the Mesmer. For the last two weeks we’ve covered some strategies for leveling your Mesmer and I’ve recommended a simple starter build, but one subject that we have yet to cover is how the Mesmer plays when it comes to dungeons.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Fine Crafting Materials Guide. “The crafting disciplines in Guild Wars 2 can be an excellent source of armor, weapons, accessories, consumables, and upgrades. Most disciplines tend to make heavy use of items dropped from various creature types, especially once you begin making higher quality items. These items fall under the Fine Crafting Materials collection stored in your bank, and will be the focus of this guide. Dropped gems, rare materials, and food types will be handled in separate guides.”
  • Hardcore Casual — GW2: End-game woes. “Remember that ultra-casual MMO that just came out? Hey turns out more people queue up for the PvP in that game than the number of people who raided in WoW (by % of the population). Who could have predicted that? Answer: Not Anet. Whoops.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — How to get 250 Mystic Salvage Kits. “Want to get the equivalent of 250 Master’s Salvage Kits at Half Price? Good, because you can do just that with the Mystic Salvage kits thanks to the Mystic Forge and a special Karma vendor.” [Raphia: This one may be legitimate, but it seems like an exploit: systematically getting a much higher return than normal methods of acquisition.]
  • Nerdy Bookahs — How to switch between the starter areas in Guild Wars 2. “If you have played Guild Wars 1, you may remember that it wasn’t possible to immediately switch between the different campaigns’ starter areas. It is not this complicated in Guild Wars 2, thankfully. However, we have seen people ask in-game and we have also found this question in our search terms. As it may not be immediately clear for new players, we have taken a few pictures and will guide you to the different starter areas now.”
  • Jar of Bees — Cues for Success. “Week 4 now and I can say that I’m getting a lot better at spvp lately. There are just things I can spot now that I wasn’t so sure about before. Things like… knowing which swing of the Hammer of Wisdom to dodge so that I’m not knocked down (3rd swing), when to use my stability/stunbreaker against a thief (just after they appear behind you for the first time), and so on. The visual cues are all there, it’s just a matter of having spent the time to process them.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — Placing Buy Orders: The Last Shall Be First. “Placing a buy order can be confusing, but today I want to go over a few misconceptions in order to set you on the right track.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Twilight Arbor Explorable Guide – ‘Let’s Go Up!’ “Twilight Arbor (TA) seems to have a reputation for being difficult and having ran the dungeon for the first time with guild members on Tuesday it was living up to its reputation, with the first route taking over 2 hours. What was most surprising to play it through for the second time yesterday, was just how easy it actually is. I’ve now completed all three routes with the second being much longer (about 1 hour) compared to 25-35 minutes for the first and third routes.”
  • Taugrim’s MMO Blog — Guide to Guild Wars 2 Mesmer “Legion” Build. “This guide discusses my “Legion” build for GW2 Mesmer. The build revolves around direct damage, boons, and buffs provided by phantasms and clones. For the Mesmer class, there are two ends of the spectrum in terms of how you leverage your illusions, i.e. your phantasms and clones. On one end of the spectrum, we have shatter-based builds, which consume illusions for damage, conditions, and distortion (evasion). On the other end, we have builds such as “Legion” which treat illusions and in particular phantasms as valued allies on the battlefield.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Riches — Ultimate Free Guild Wars 2 Gold Guide. “Since this site began I have had nearly a hundred gold making tips posted on this site, forums or various other mediums associated with all of my projects. Can you believe that!? I wanted to take today and look back at the best ways to make gold in Guild Wars 2. You could consider this the ultimate Free Guild Wars 2 Gold Guide.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — Skill Points to Gold : Miyani Mystic Forge Vendor. “I’ll show you today how to trade skill points for gold utilizing the Mystic Forge Vendor named Miyani.”
  • MMOQuests.com — Guilds, Legendary Weapons, and other Goodies. “I’ve been alternating with my guardian between doing Orr zones and lower level zones. I find Orr very bug-ridden lately, and actually a number of the regular zones are developing bugs that are quite frustrating in nature too. I was in the human starter with my mesmer alt when I happened upon a skillpoint that was broken – but it was only broken in the overflow, not on my actual server (Sanctum of Rall) so I left the overflow and was able to complete it.”
  • Guild Wars Insider — Dungeon Tokens to be Account Bound. “As of this posting, Dungeon Tokens are soulbound. And frankly, for the amount of time that goes into an explorable mode, I think the dungeons drop too few of the tokens. GW2 Forum goer Bis De Fioute posed a simple question to ArenaNet, “Why aren’t the tokens soulbound?” Queue the masses of people agreeing with the question, stating why they shouldn’t be soulbound, and we are well on our way to a constructive and warranted conversation with ANet.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Mesmer Guide To Phantasms. “There are a total of 8 Phantasm skills linked to mesmer weapons (Greatsword, Staff, Sword Offhand, Torch, Pistol, Focus, Trident and Spear) with a further two Phantasms available from utility skills (Phantasmal Defender and Phantasmal Disenchanter).”
  • Kill Ten Rats — Stories That Should Be Told. “There are interesting views about stories stemming from open world PvE in Guild Wars 2. Tobold disavows using “themepark” to prefer the slightly broader rendition of the term “guided gameplay”. Guild Wars 2 is guided gameplay, but I’ve always felt it edge much closer to a “sandbox” form because it always wasn’t clear what I would get in each play session. I liken Guild Wars 2 with events and very cooperative multiplayer PvE to more of a zoo. Never know what the animals are going to do.”
  • Twitter — Desbreko145: Hello #Firefly reference in my #GuildWars2
  • Randomosity by Tami Olsen — I Can’t Get No Resurrection. “Here is my latest parody. A little #GuildWars2 and a little #rollingstones enjoy!”
  • pendiongaming.com — Guild Wars 2 Dye-Matching Search. “Enter a color code and this calculator will find the closest matching GW2 dyes.”
  • Kill Ten Rats — This is not the Ferrari you thought it was. “Reaching the month mark is a pretty good time (as good as any, really) to start throwing down real solid opinions. Opinions that at least had have some time to stew and cook properly in the crock pot of your head. Keen has given his, and I find myself in agreement with most of his points.”
  • Hunter’s Insight — Dueling Ideas and Duel Armours. “People often talk about how game companies have skimpy armour for female characters. There is certainly a tendency to have a wide variety of armour for men, while women are clothed in skin tight, revealing g-strings and bustiers.”
  • GirlGuides.co.za — Guild Wars 2 – PC Game Review. “The hardest thing about writing this review is logging out of Guild Wars 2 to do it. I have been fully immersed in this release since the first Beta weekend and have loyally logged on to every stress test until, finally, on Saturday, I got full headstart access. Full access to a game unlike any other, a game where not only can you indulge in Massive Multiplayer Online (MM0) role playing, but you can compete against other guilds and, eventually, other worlds.”
  • GW2 GM — Farming Dungeon Tokens for Armor, Weapons, Runes and Sigils. “If you already have a level 80 character in Guild Wars 2 you might be interested in farming an explorable dungeon. People farm dungeons for one main reason, to accumulate enough tokens to trade for items from dungeon vendors. Each dungeon has it’s own vendor and they offer a variety of armor with all different stats for each profession.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Junkies — Shield of Absorption Range Clarification. “For players who play a Guardian character or go up against them frequently in PvP, here’s an interesting bit of info that you may have already realized – the visible range of the Shield of Absorption bubble (for shield offhand) varies based on the racial size of the character who’s casting the ability.”
  • Massively — Flameseeker Chronicles: Guild Wars 2 dungeons and dungeon talk. “I finally had enough time set aside to head into a dungeon this weekend. We made it through the Ascalonian Catacombs story mode with considerable grace, and I’m hoping to progress through each story mode before doubling back to start on explorable versions.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — Making Gold by Flipping Rings. “I’ve recently been making an absolute killing with level 50 to 70 rings, amulets, and trinkets. Rings in particular though, followed by trinkets, and finally by amulets in terms of profit. Why? Demand from players who need two of something versus those that need one.”
  • Prima Games — Guild Wars 2: Necromancer Class Preview. “Necromancy itself is a word oozing with ominous darkness and eerie dread. Taking the dark path of summoning horrifying creatures and performing dark rituals is certainly something that will appeal to many players out there In Guild Wars 2, the profession certainly ticks those boxes. Whether you’re a fearsome, hulking Charr or a short, playful-looking Asura the necromancer takes you on a journey full of pain and suffering. Both for your enemies and yourself if you’re not careful.”
  • Kill Ten Rats — Weekend Money. “I’ve been following The Guild Wars 2 Trading Post fan-blog, written by Markco, for awhile. The posts are not rocket science, but they are great ideas for entering the world of trade in Guild Wars 2. Anybody interested in toeing the markets, or those already swimming in the deep end, should take a look at this blog for some great thoughts and suggestions.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Riches — Insignia’s are worth their weight in silver. “Insignias are used as components in crafting. Trophies and standard materials are used to create these Insignias. When leveling your craft, check the prices of your Insignias. Sometimes it’s better to sell the Insignia on the Trading Post than it is to use the Insignia to craft an item.”
  • tl-dr — Censorship or protecting the community? “A good example of handling trolling and harassment without it becoming censorship (or personal) comes up with the GW2 bans. tl;dr of the reddit thread: Arena Net banned thousands of people for inappropriate names and chat, and then would publicly post why they were banned if they were specifically asked in the reddit thread. Complete transparency and following of their policies. /win“
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — The Waypoint – It Begins! “It was 65 years, 3 months, and 25 days ago today when Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. And exactly one month ago, many of us were logging into the Guild Wars 2 headstart weekend for the first time to embark on an epic journey with members of Tyria’s answer to the Beatles, Destiny’s Edge. It’s hard to believe that much time has already passed, yet it still seems somewhat surreal that Guild Wars 2 is finally a live game after so many years of anticipation.”
  • Name of the Game — NOTG Review: Guild Wars 2. “Just about a month has passed since the release of Guild Wars 2. We are bring you an in-depth review after completely reaching max level with a toon (80), as well as playing around with several alts.”
  • Demajen — The First Month: Greatswords and Grenades. “It’s truly hard to believe that Guild Wars 2 has now been out for an entire month. It’s even harder to digest the fact that, according to my Raptr profile, I’ve played over 360 hours of the game (minus the 80 hours I played in beta, I guess) — did you know, by the way, that if you type in /age ingame, it shows you how long you’ve played on that particular character, as well as your lifetime play hours?”
  • Hunter’s Insight — Tastes Like Hypocrisy. “Spirit here. Hunter posted yesterday about some discussion he and I had had about the duelist armor a couple days ago, and I wanted to weigh in and share my feelings on the subject.”
  • GWOnline.net — GWOnline’s Events and Competitions. “By now most of you have had a chance to get into Guild Wars 2 and play it and the general consensus is that you all like it! So what would make a great game even better? In-game events and competitions hosted by the staff here at GWOnline of course.”
  • Voo’s Review — A Brief Overview: Guild Wars 2. “I came a little late to the party in Tyria, I hadn’t had the impetus or the funds to pre-order, but it wasn’t all my fault. Digital sales were stopped everywhere due to demand and even physical copies were selling out here in the UK”
  • gw2BBCode “Gw2BBCode is javascript plugin, which extends capability of GW2DB Tooltip. It converts (on the fly) Guild Wars 2 skill’s names (traits, condition & boons) into icons. It can also show tooltip with description over the icon. All tooltips content comes from GW2DB.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — Make Gold with Tailoring Discipline. “As you may have figured out already, it’s hard to make gold with tailoring and that goes for any other discipline. That is of course, until you read this post.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Riches — With Both Feet: Trading Post Rage (Plus Profit Margins). “Hi, my name is Sam, and I’m enraged. Over the past few days, I have been growing more and more frustrated with ArenaNet’s apparent dislike of financiers in their marketplace. Coming from Guild Wars 1, I was assuming that Guild Wars 2 would have more support than most other games have for investors and savvy businessmen to make some money through methods that are not grinding daily events or farming trolls, however, this assumption could not be any further from the truth.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Wayfarer Foothills Vista Guide. “We’re big fans of the vistas in Guild Wars 2 and find them to be well worth the exploration time even if you’re not aiming for 100% map completion. Continuing our series of guides to the various maps in the game, today we’ve got a detailed guide to the 10 unique vistas found in Wayfarer Foothills.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Thief’s Guide to Initiative. “A thief is a dangerous entity in Guild Wars 2. They are proficient at dealing out lots of damage, being stealthy, and having the ability to steal. However, the lifeblood of the thief is Initiative, which powers their numerous and deadly attacks. In this guide we go over the basics of how the initiative system works, and offer tips on some of the key traits and utility skills you will want to consider working into your build with an eye on maximizing your initiative regen.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — The Waypoint #2 – Feeling Twitchy. “In today’s thrilling episode of The Waypoint, we provide a recap of the Combat Master Class presented by the ArenaNet team via their official Twitch.TV channel, announce our signed Guild Wars 2 soundtrack winner, and let Barlow back out of his cage to share his latest deep thoughts.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Riches — This site isn’t going anywhere and your information is perfectly safe. Shame on Markco yet again. “It was brought to my attention today that I was mentioned in a competitors post and that I am “selling” my site. It’s true. You can find it right on Flippa.COM if you want to see it. Do I expect the site to sell? Nope. Did I ever expect it to? Not really. The reason I did it was to determine the value of the site and how much money I wanted to stick into it. Ok — and part of it is because I knew Markco would do this. If you haven’t been able to tell by now he and I have a bit of a history. Maybe you didn’t know that. It is possible because I have made it a point to keep this site drama free since day one and up until today it has been.” [Raphia: This is the only post I'm linking to about the bunfight between these two bloggers. I'll continue to link to useful GW2 articles posted at these (or any other) sites.]
  • Guild Wars 2 Riches — Guild Wars 2 magic find guide. Increase your riches by understanding the +Magic Find stat. “Ever since Guild Wars 2 launched earning gold has proven to be quite difficult. Rather than platy auction house and make easy money most of us have had to resort to other strategies which involve taking less profits and repeating the task over and over again. While that sounds quite boring it does actually end up making us quite a bit of gold. Then there are other tips which exist where you can make gold for just playing the game. Today’s gold making tip actually piggybacks off of that a little bit and gets into the idea of making more gold while you farm just by utilizing the stat +Magic Find.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Junkies — ArenaNet Responds to Dungeon Reward Changes. “During Tuesday’s update, we saw some pretty significant changes to the dungeon reward system, and how reward tokens are affected by diminishing returns (DR) as well as offered at the very end of a complete run. The changes were done to discourage players from exploiting certain dungeon bosses and environments in order to skip certain fights, and run through areas as quickly as possible, multiple times, to farm tokens.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — Gold Guild to Flipping Copper Ore. “Copper ore is the most sought after and sold item on the Trading Post. To quote the game interface, copper ore is the top “supplied”, “demanded”, and “traded” item according to the Trading Post itself. Knowing this, you probably aren’t thinking that it’s possible to make any money with it. After all, if everyone knows to buy and sell it, then competition will dictate a break even or worse, a loss, for sellers. Right? Wrong.”
  • Reddit — How Sigils Work. “There has been a lot of confusion about sigils lately, and not without reason – the game really doesn’t give you much indication about how they work, especially when there’s more than one of them involved. The most important piece of advice to give here is that it’s easy enough to test all kinds of combinations for free by going to the Heart of the Mists and fighting Target Golems or Conquest NPCs.”
  • Distilled Willpower — It’s Big, sure, But I’ve seen Bigger. “A few days ago my brother, in one of his typically off-the-cuff ways, said to me – “it’s good, but there isn’t as much to do as Guild Wars 1 is there?”. I grunted, not necessarily in agreement, but not totally in disagreement either.”
  • Reddit — The Anti-bot loot DR has got to go, its just out of hand now. “I don’t know about everyone else, but one of the reasons (there are many) I love MMOS is I like to grind. I have played a lot of Korean mmos and it is something I enjoy. This anti-bot diminishing returns on loot has simply affected my play so much, its not even funny. I will grind on a group of mobs for maybe 20 minutes and BAM – no loot. So now I must relocate and attack other mobs for awhile so that I can get loot again? It is just asinine and ridiculous.”
  • Kill Ten Rats — Quiet Places. “I think more and more players are beginning to find rhythm with Guild Wars 2. This means that launch concurrency is dropping, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact it’s quite good.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Necromancer Skill and Trait Update Analysis. “The latest game update released earlier this week included a number of positive changes to necromancer skills and traits. Rather than simply rehashing a basic list of what’s been altered (you can find the original update notes on the official wiki) I spent some quality time on my necro in-game to test each of these changes out. We’ll also take a look at one skill (and trait) that didn’t make the cut for the latest update, but is in need of a number of fixes.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — The Waypoint #3 – The High Cost of Travel. “For the latest edition of The Waypoint, resident elementalist expert and contributing writer extraordinaire Xerin takes a look at the costs associated with waypoint travel in Guild Wars 2. We’ve also got links to a great new article on the quiet places in GW2, and Barlow’s deepest thought yet.”
  • GW2Guru — ArenaNet Tracker. [Raphia: This is a forum where all ArenaNet developer responses to gamer questions on the various Guru discussion threads are collected in one spot.]
  • Added Guild Wars Insider — Lock & Key: Looking Back and Looking Forward. “As we near the one month mark since we started our journey through Tyria, I think it is not only an appropriate time for reflection, but a convenient one. For me personally, as I’ve run through Spakrfly Den and the Ruins of Orr with Mrell, I’ve learned thing about this profession. Things I believed would be lacking are more powerful than I ever thought, and tactics I would have sworn would be my standbies are in a corner gathering dust. At the same time, I think there are still things that we can note that the Thief lacks.”
  • Added Kotaku.au — Guild Wars 2: The Kotaku Review. “The true heart and essence of Guild Wars 2 lies in its map. It took me three weeks of playing and a chat with my colleague Kirk to realise and articulate how much magic lies in that seemingly simple function. The map of Tyria isn’t just utilitarian; it’s beautiful. Even mired in the fog of war, the painterly brush strokes hint at all manner of terrain to explore underneath.”

Videos and podcasts

Fanfic

  • Kill Ten Rats — Dear Bookah. “I made my own little pilgrimage. My savant cave a small laboratory on the outskirts of Rata Sum. There, I met Zojja. We sparred intellects in the golem arena and tried to connect to one another. Although she knew I hadn’t come in search of any advice, she still spiralled in panic at the thought of Inquest being involved in any part of our progression through this province.”
  • Chronicles of Tyria — Chapter 3: Somewhere far from here. “I collapsed onto the bed. My body was exhausted and strained from the confrontation with Eilidh. The adrenaline, that only moments before had flooded my veins, was slowly subsiding, and my eyelids drooped heavily. Stalk whined, and rested his head on the bed.”
  • Chronicles of Tyria — Chapter 1: Part 3. “Daniel moved behind the trees and disappeared into the shadows. I could hear subtle noises against the trees; Daniels climbing skills were unmatched, especially if it came to tree climbing. It was my turn to act. I glanced over to the assassin that was holding my sword.”
  • Kill Ten Rats — Dear Bookah. “I threw my arms wide and the lab’s defenses deactivated before me, making this rough place for science. I transferred my belongings from the college at Rata Sum and tried to live here instead.”
  • Kormir’s High Road — Shattered (Guild Wars 2 Fan-Fiction). “This is the beginning of a short story I typed a year or so back in order to explore a powerful struggle in my now main Guild Wars 2 character’s backstory. In the first segment, we meet a adolescent Archaes, arriving with his father Lion’s Arch for the first time. The second, and much larger segment, takes place on the the day of the Branding, as an older, and less innocent Archaes, serves the Ebon Vanguard of Ebonhawke. I’ll release the story in fragments so I don’t bury readers alive.”

Community Events

  • Gaming World Entertainment Network (GWEN) — Pink Day in LA. “It’s time to save the date! Make a note on your calender, in your diary, set your phone reminders, put a note of the fridge, pin a note to your cat…actually don’t do that last one that would be bad! The point is Pink Day in LA is returning once again and this year it will be on October 20th 2012 along side the Extra Life charity event.”
  • GW2Guru — Pink Day in LA 2012. “Hello Everyone! It is that wonderful time of year again when we gather together ingame and get in touch with our Pink Sides! ( For a great cause!) Pink Day in La will not only be in Guild Wars 1 this year — but Guild Wars 2, Rift, League of Legends and Firefall as well! However — we can’t forget where Pink Day began and that is in the Guild Wars community.”
  • Gaming World Entertainment Network — Extra Life. “On October 20th 2012 gamers all over the globe will be playing their favourite games non stop for 24 hours! This might just sound like a hardcore gaming weekend for some of you but there is a bigger purpose to it this time!”

This section is intended to help you to publicize your guild or alliance event, and as long as your event is open to the whole Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 community, we’ll list it here. Send us the details at community@guildmag.com and we’ll get it out to the fan community (given that we only do a weekly wrap-up, try to send the information at least a week in advance).

One Response

  1. This week in Guild Wars 2 « Quotulatiousness
    This week in Guild Wars 2 « Quotulatiousness September 28, 2012 at 16:56 |

    [...] weekly community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. The game is now a month old, and the community is still posting game-related blog [...]

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