This week in Guild Wars 2

Written by  //  October 12, 2012  //  Community  //  1 Comment

While I’ve been enjoying the occasional trip to WvW, the contrast from one match to the next can be quite stark. Darkhaven’s last match-up was fiercely contested and highly volatile. For example, right at the end of the match I took part in a long, long, long field battle. Unlike your typical fight over a fortification, this was just an open field with little cover but lots of combat opportunities. It was great fun, even if we eventually yielded the field after the front line had surged back and forth from one end of the field to the other several times. Contrast that experience with our current match-up: Darkhaven owns pretty much everything in sight. By the end of the second day of the match, neither of the opposing servers could muster more than a couple of raiding parties and were desperately clinging to their respective bases. It’s the first time I can honestly say that WvW became boring (although it’s fine for map completion).

I logged an amusing bug on Tuesday: after putting on a Risen disguise to try and provoke a battle between the Krait and the Risen in the waters of Mount Maelstrom, my body disappeared. That is, after completing the renown heart and getting the reward, the disguise was removed, but only my character’s head, shoulder armour, gloves, and weapon were visible. Also on Tuesday, the impossible happened: I actually was able to help someone else with a mini-jumping puzzle on the way to a Vista.

For the first time in GW2, I missed having a guild hall: we wanted to have a guild meeting and ended up taking over the high diving platform in Lion’s Arch for half an hour so we could gather in a commonly accessible spot. In addition to being a great site for a meeting, it also allowed us to recruit a few players who were just passing through. But we really should have met in our own guild hall.

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).]
  • On the official Guild Wars 2 forums, Habib Loew posted on the topic World Rankings as of 10/5: “Here are the world rankings as of the end of the 9/29 00:00 UTC to 10/6 00:00 UTC matchup.”
  • GuildWars2.com — Update Notes – October 7th 2012.
  • GuildWars2.com — Structured Player vs. Player: The Iceberg. “Here at ArenaNet we’re passionate about our game. Like… sickly passionate. We want Guild Wars 2 to be good, and we want our players to enjoy it. Even if true perfection is an unreachable idea, we still want to strive for it, dammit! Due to that desire to make the best game possible, we iterate. A lot. We take an idea, we build it, we test it, we make changes, we test it again, we add to it, we test some more, we take something away, we test again…. you get the idea.”
  • MMORPG.com — Game On – S2E15 – Guild Wars 2 Interview with Lead Writer Bobby Stein of ArenaNet. “Guild Wars 2 has been going strong since launch, and this week, Som Pourfarzaneh talks with Bobby Stein, Lead Writer at ArenaNet, all about writing for GW2, dialogue, VO, storytelling, in-game text, and much more!”
  • GuildWars2.com — Guild Wars 2 Halloween Diorama Contest. “Halloween is around the corner! Help us celebrate the season by entering the Guild Wars 2 Halloween Diorama Contest. Put your imagination and craft skills to work by creating a Halloween diorama with a Guild Wars 2 theme. What is a diorama? A diorama is a three-dimensional miniature model that depicts an event or scene. Objects such as miniature figures and props are placed in a diorama to help depict that scene”
  • GuildWars2.com — Beta Feature: Mobile Two-Factor Authentication. “As part of our ongoing commitment to security in Guild Wars 2, I am pleased to announce that we are making a mobile two-factor authentication solution available for beta testing, effective immediately.”
  • GuildWars2.com — Update Notes – October 11, 2012.
  • Added MMORPG.com — Guild Wars 2 Interviews: Colin Johanson on the Live Teams & the Future. “Last week, ArenaNet announced that there would not be just one Guild Wars 2 Live Team to keep the world fresh and functioning. We were told that there would be SIX (or more as needed)! We caught up with Colin Johanssen to talk about the Live Teams and how they will function and what they will bring to Guild Wars 2.”

Fan articles and blog posts

  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Black Lion Underground – 05 October 2012. “Well that didn’t take long to make money. Here I was only several days ago back on the path to poverty after taking an amulet gamble, only to find myself relatively rich, having leapt from around 60s to 17 gold. It’s also nice knowing that I’ve products worth 5 gold wrapped up in the Trading Post that I can draw down at any moment.”
  • Gamebreaker.tv — Live Game Development Details Emerge For Guild Wars 2. “Many gamers have expressed concern as to how much post-launch attention ArenaNet would give Guild Wars 2 considering there is no subscription fee. Colin Johanson put up a blog post yesterday that should more than assuage any lingering doubts. He kicked off by stating, “Our goal is to continue to raise the bar by keeping the game constantly updated with more high-quality content than any other game has offered before.” That’s a pretty bold expectation to set, but he backed it up by saying they’ve already split their live support staff — which is ten times the size of the original Guild Wars live team — into more than seven different teams, each with a specific focus”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — Stop Buying So Much. “Seriously, you need to stop buying so much from the trading post. Use karma for your initial level 80 gear. While leveling, mix your unused gear to produce higher quality stuff that you can actually use. I can’t tell you how many times I combined a handful of junk blues and came up with an awesome leveling piece of armor or weapon that was just a few levels ahead of where I was playing at the time. It happened all the way up to level 80. If you use mystic forge stones you can get even better gear and weapons with these trade ins.”
  • GW2Guru — Dismal Science | Necroeconomics. “I feel like this is the sort of thing that I’ve been doing far too often for my own sanity over the past few months. Introductions. Can I just skip this and start meandering inconsequentially about how aesthetically pleasing it is to watch a warrior being eaten by a shark in sPvP? (I’ll hold that for the conclusion. Best for last and whatnot.)”
  • GW2Guru — PvMesmer: Mesmerize the World. “The mesmer is one of the most feared duelists in Tyria and the Mists; her myriad illusions confuse and distract enemies, allowing the mesmer to dance and flit about a flailing foe, and to hew into him at her choosing. But the massive battles of World vs World are a far cry from the intimate, controlled killings of structured pvp. No amount of illusions will be can distract an onrushing zerg or confuse an incoming trebuchet shot.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — The Pirate’s Guide to Magic Find Gear. “If there’s one thing Guild Wars 2 has no shortage of, it’s pirates. Whether living or undead, they have a strong presence in the game on numerous maps. And while player characters won’t be sailing the high seas in search of lost treasure, we do regularly draw some heavy influence from our pirateering brethren.”
  • TalkTyria.net — Guild Wars 2 Community Projects Update – Episode 4 – Tools of the Trade! “Well then! You’d think after such a recent Guild Wars 2 community projects update it’d be some time before our next installment, but alas! This is one fandom that doesn’t rest. Over the course of the past few weeks I’ve been keeping an eye out and bookmarking any and every site of interest I’ve come across.”
  • GW2Guru — Unbeatable’s Legendary Guide. “Okay so you’ve decided to start on the coveted legendary weapons. The question is, where do we begin? The first thing that you should do is to garner yourself a set of magic find gear from the TP. Or if you have the crafting skills, simply craft them.”
  • Massively — Flameseeker Chronicles: Environmental weapons in Guild Wars 2. “Environmental weapons were one of the early aspects of Guild Wars 2 that ArenaNet could talk up and players could get excited about. They were kind of the poster child for the interactive world that ArenaNet has been building, so we as fans heard about picking up rocks, boulders, and buckets of water many times.”
  • GW2Guru — Personal Story Flowchart. “In Guild Wars 2, the personal story is a series of instanced zones that reflect the choices made by the player. Every character is required to answer a series of personal story questions during character creation, such as an asura’s first invention or a human’s god of choice. These decisions are an important part of your specific character’s personal storyline, especially in the first 30 levels, and present different story missions for each choice. As you can imagine, the number of combinations possible can be difficult to keep track of. Luckily, zwei2stein has been brave enough to compile a flowchart to help players choose exactly what path they want to pursue for their characters.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Trading Post — Trading Post Fee Calculator. “Download my Trading Post Fee Calculator that I use. I have the luxury of two screens, but if you don’t, then please use your cell phone or calculator. The formulas are custom built by me and I have thoroughly tested them. All you have to do is enter the gold, silver, and copper price, then watch as the spreadsheet instantly calculates how much money you will make once trading post fees are taken out”
  • MMOQuests.com — It’s Fixed, It’s Really Fixed! “Malchor’s Leap. The broken zone that caused the completionist in me to scream in pain every time I thought about Guild Wars 2. See, there was this single skillpoint that I just couldn’t get. Actually, very few people could. The NPC would move slightly each time you defeated it (it’s not really an NPC so much as it is a bow laying on the ground) and after a time or two it would vanish completely into the geometry of the zone. There it would stay, stuck, until the server restarted and it would rest in the proper place.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Comparing DAoC to GW2. “Guild Wars 2‘s World vs. World is very similar to Dark Age of Camelot‘s Realm vs. Realm. Both are persistent open world battlegrounds that pits three factions of players against each other in medieval keep sieging. We take a look at how the two games compare and take a look at the history of DAoC for GW2 players confused by the constant references within the community.”
  • Flame Throwing &mdash Dress to Kill. “So GW2 Armor is getting a lot of buzz. It’s a great site and it makes it really easy to pick out exotic armor based on how it looks. But I’m more of the player that picks on stats first, looks second. So to make it easy, I’ve made this spreadsheet of all the Exotic Armor, how to get it, and what the stats are. Not just Primary stat: Power, Secondary: Precisions. But the actual stat numbers.”
  • Malefic Incantations — Opt Out. “In general, I hate forums. I’ve always found them to be a place where people with lost perspectives go to argue, except “argue” means “state one’s position without backing it up with reasons or evidence, call out the devs for not listening to you personally, and insult everyone who disagrees.” Good discussion goes to forums to die – either by trolls or by being buried underneath a sea of unreasonable, negative bile.”
  • Guild Wars Insider — GW2Boss Spawner. “Recently a new site popped up with the goal of tracking when these bosses will spawn so that you can participate in these amazing events.”
  • Kill Ten Rats — Some Nights. “My favorite thing about Guild Wars 2 so far is the diversity of gameplay. This last weekend I was running all over the place. I feel the tugs and pulls of various reward mechanisms, and sometimes I wish some were a little stronger. Still, I have not felt like any of my activities were a waste of time. I’ve been pretty happy taking small bites all over the place.”
  • Attached to Keyboard — Attributes and Equipment in Guild Wars 2. “This guide came about because, after hitting level 80, I wanted to know what set of armor I should be aiming to get and was thoroughly confused by all the options and terminology. After finding out a few interesting bits and bobs, I was asked to make a guide for others in my guild and have decided to go one further and share it with everyone.”
  • Kotaku — Guild Wars Comes Alive with Fancy Outfits. “Guild Wars — especially Guild Wars 2 — is beautiful. The world is lush and lovely. And the gear? The gear looks great. The lack of subscription fee might pull players in, but the gameplay and general pizazz keeps them around to save Tyria. And of the more dedicated players, some show their fandom by dressing up. That’s what we are looking at today—who pulled off the best cosplay from the Guild Wars world.” [Raphia: Posted last week: hat tip to Guild Wars Insider for the link.]
  • MMORPG Center — Guild Wars 2 – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. “Yeah, this is the best the gazillion MMO developers can deliver these days. Should you buy it? Well for 50 $ / € it can generate enough fun and without subscription, ignoring the micro-transactions it delivers. But it’s definitely not what they faked in their PR talks, like the next gen, dynamic events! (Ha Ha!), otherwise if you an experienced MMO gamer and care about your money, I think you should wait for something better. I kind of regret buying it, now that I’m done with it!”
  • Kill Ten Rats — The Single Point. “I think I’ve played Guild Wars 2 long enough to review it with pretty good depth. I don’t feel that is necessary. The blogosphere and real journalist reviews seem to resoundingly agree that for $60 and no subscription fee Guild Wars 2 is a great buy. People unused to Guild Wars 1 festivals are going to be in for a treat this Halloween, which only adds to the value.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Black Lion Underground – 10 October 2012. “If you’ve been following my Black Lion Underground series, you might have noticed my tip several weeks ago about Giant Eyes. These rare items didn’t yet have a known recipe and I suggested purchasing them on the basis that they one day would. Sure enough, the latest patch notes didn’t disappoint.”
  • Divinity’s Reach — Annoyances and Other Bothers. “Tyria hasn’t been all suns and roses. My praise of ArenaNet has been pretty evident in the past, but as I’ve played the game, I definitely have a laundry list of complaints. After finishing writing this, I’m definitely frustrated with the state of the game when it was released, as well as some of the fundamental design decisions.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Bloodtide Coast Skill Challenge Guide. “Our skill challenge guide series continues today with the mid-level map, Bloodtide Coast. This map features the entrance to the Chantry of Secrets, oodles of bandits, and more underwater content than you can shake a trident at. It also plays home to six unique skill challenges, with most being fairly straight forward, and one or two offering a true challenge for most players.”
  • Guild Wars 2 Hub — Free Tournaments vs. Hot-Join PvP. “Earlier this week, Jonathan Sharp outlined some of the features that will be added to structured PvP in the near future in an article titled Structured Player vs. Player: The Iceberg. His post largely focused on the current free tournament system, and how paid tournaments will differ once implemented. Rented arenas were also mentioned, and will hopefully offer a great tool for players who enjoy the structure of tournaments, but want the ability to test out builds or various tactics in a more controlled environment before spending tickets to enter the paid tournaments.”
  • Chronicles of Tyria — GW2 Meme: Silver medalist.
  • Kill Ten Rats — Uptown Views (Double Down I). “With certainty, ArenaNet is working on more content and updates. Halloween is sure to have lots of holiday fun, but it isn’t clear what permanent offerings ArenaNet is considering. There are two clear routes to take: (1) create wholly new content such dungeons or zones, or (2) double down with the content already in place.”
  • GW2 Spidy — Crafting features v0.1 added!. “With special thanks to www.gw2db.com for their tooltips and recipe data you can now enjoy the first version of the crafting tools added to GW2Spidy! There’s a lot of work to be done still, but getting this initial version out opens up room for feedback and collaboration to improve the features. The only main issue currently is the fact that I’m using TP prices for vendor sold items, which are slightly above the vendor price – I hope to have a solution for this soon!”
  • Guild Wars 2 Riches — Look Good and Save Money In Guild Wars 2. “First of all, this game is all about looks. Stats mean very little. This is really interesting – it’s something that you could only really compare to something like the real life fashion market. Other MMO’s build value based largely on an item’s function, GW2 builds value based largely on an item’s looks. “
  • Forbes — 5 Things ArenaNet Should Add To The First Guild Wars 2 Expansion Pack. “I’ve grown increasingly fond of ArenaNet’s new MMORPG Guild Wars 2. It’s become quite an addicting pastime, actually, with all of the myriad ways you can approach the game. Still, there are some things I’d like to see added to the game, which has gotten me thinking about the inevitable expansion pack. Here are five things I’d like to see added to Guild Wars 2 if and when we see that expansion.”

Videos and podcasts

Fanfic

  • GWOnline.net — Chronicals of the House of Azure: Lyssa. “Faren has been getting on my nerves again. A new woman nearly every day and he inevitably looses them to his own faults. He’s as blind as Kormir with none of the sight. I wasn’t going to go visit the statue today but Faren drove me out of Salma with his incessant womanising. It’s unfortunate that the plaza is next to the district, I would have loved to have put some distance between me and there but Divinity’s Reach is a haven and I should not question the founders.”
  • Kormir’s High Road — Shattered (Pt 2). “Archaes bolted awake, his eyes opened wide. Nightmares were not a rare occurrence for the soldiers of the Ebon Vanguard especially when their enemies, the charr, a race of large, feline-like beasts, had been at war with humanity for over a thousand years, a bloody legacy that had scarred generations after generations of humans and charr alike.”
  • Foundation — Ayroh : Chapter 18 ~ Desperation. “‘Identify yourself.’ These infernal golems are maddening. Identify yourself. What’s in those vials? Is that explosive? Have you exceeded your regular allowance of apprentice deaths this cycle? Please disclose any Category 7 catastrophe singularities on your luggage. Bah. Details.”
  • Chronicles of Tyria — Chapter 1: Part 4. “Traveling on a crippled foot did indeed prove to be tedious. If I applied too much weight then I would most likely fall flat on my face. Fortunately, the pace of the journey did not slow down.”
  • Chronicles of Tyria — Describing Descriptions Descriptively. “So, with the plan laid out last week, action, dialogue and description are on the cards. This week the focus is on descriptions and describing things and a detailed deliberation of details. With less alliteration going forward, probably.”
  • Foundation — Ayroh : Chapter 19 ~ Red Sky in the Morning. “There was a brief moment when the sheer absurdity of my situation hit me, all at once. My arms were filled with bags, Irah’s as well, while we walked behind Potts through the noisy, crowded marketplace just outside Rata Sum.”
  • Foundation — Ayroh : Chapter 20 ~ Gravity. “The room was wide and bare, tall windows graced the far wall of the rectangular meeting hall. We had barely returned to the Citadel, and already we were preparing to leave it once again. I was certain this would be our last trip through. There wasn’t any way we were going to survive what was coming.”
  • Foundation — Ayroh : Chapter 21 ~ Recalcitrant Sinner. “The warband shrunk back from the wall, terrified. Akant and I had heard whispers of the battle south of Hoelbrak, where Shadowsoul and Javikarth made their names, floating away from Srin and Matis on quiet nights.”
  • Foundation — Ayroh ~ Chapter 22 ~ The Blade of the Gods. “This is the love letter I never wrote. This is what I should have said that night. This is what I should have been.”

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!”
  • Gaming World Entertainment Network — Paint The Game Pink! “Calling all digital fashionistas, artists, creative types and gamers. We have a challenge for you! As you can see Gamers Giving Back has gone pink in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. We’ve picked our finest shades and we are now strutting our stuff on the digital runway like a majestic flamingo. Yes, we have just claimed a website can strut and be a flamingo simultaneously because that’s just how we do it.”

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).