Guild Wars 2

77 entries. 49,763 words.

2012-08

  • Guild Wars 2 Head Stop. 2012-08-25. Well I thought it would be a nice Saturday. I’d get up, log into the Guild Wars 2 Head Start along with the rest of the entire Internet, and have a nice morning of adventure. But nooooooo. It’s been down for two hours now. Not just intermittent connectivity issues; we’re talking 100% dead. And the information coming out of ArenaNet is somewhat lacking. About once an hour we get something like, “We’re looking into connectivity issues.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    80 words
  • Guild Wars 2 Head Start Weekend. 2012-08-27. The hype is finally over and Guild Wars 2 is out (if you pre-purchased it, that is). After being down Saturday morning, GW2 worked flawlessly for the rest of the weekend. Usually the hype far overshadows the actual game. But in this one rare case, it’s possible that the hype was justified. Let’s talk about Guild Wars 1 for a second. I never got into it. Certain things just bugged me.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    • Status
    410 words
  • Necromancer Daggers. 2012-08-28. Whoa.. I knew that Necromancer had melee-ish capability when you equip daggers, but I didn’t realize until last night just how much raw damage it puts out. I’ve been using a Staff or Axe/Dagger combo, but last night I decided to try out Dagger/Dagger again, and holy crap I was suddenly killing stuff super fast. I’m still not really happy with the Necro’s AoE capabilities. I haven’t found any decent AoE damage spells (compared to the Elementalist at least); it’s mainly AoE debuffs, which are not terribly useful in PvE events.
    • Classes
    • MMORPG
    • Theory
    170 words

2012-09

  • Pointers in Games. 2012-09-17. Guild Wars 2 is an awesome game. But there is one thing about it that drives me insane. In fact, I have the same problem with almost every game that has a pointer. You can’t see the pointer! This is a major problem in GW2 because many of your abilities are ground-targeted spells, so you need to be able to point to the spot where you want to cast it. (I use the option that automatically casts wherever you are pointing.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Opinion
    214 words
  • Greens and Blues. 2012-09-17. Am I crazy or did GW2 make green items better than blue items, which is 100% the opposite of every other MMO in history? Did they just arbitrarily pick the colors or is there some logic to it? Somebody “on the Internet” said blue < green < yellow makes more sense because it follows the color wheel. But, like, green < blue < purple follows the color spectrum (ROYGBIV).
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    69 words

2013-10

  • Tequatl’s On The Juice. 2013-10-20. I usually stick to one MMORPG at a time, play it until I get bored, then move to the next one. This week though I’ve been firing up a different one every night. The latest one was Guild Wars 2. I got sucked into this session right away. I had last logged out in Sparkfly Fen on the beach where Tequatl attacks. I went there to see the new-and-improved Tequatl event I keep hearing so much about, but it wasn’t running when I got there, so I just logged out.
    • MMORPG
    309 words
  • WvW Season In GW2. 2013-10-28. I saw an announcement recently about the start of the Guild Wars 2 World versus World “season.” I personally have never gotten into the WvW thing in GW2, so I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care about a new season. Conceptually I like the idea of jumping in there, zerging around for a while, and leaving, but it never seems to work out that way. First of all, I’ve never been a fan of PvP in any MMO, because it’s inherently random.
    • MMORPG
    369 words

2013-11

  • Tower of Nightmares. 2013-11-01. I stopped by GW2 and discovered a big ol’ patch had happened, and when I logged in to see if there was any chance of defeating Tequatl, I had mail telling me to go to Kessex Hills to save the world again. I could describe it, but Inventory Full did a nice summary already: http://bhagpuss.blogspot.com/2013/10/next-stop-kessex-hills-all-change-here.html I haven’t played GW2 seriously in a long time but I was able to get through the initial Tower of Nightmares instance.
    • MMORPG
    354 words
  • GW2 Tower of Nightmares and Story in MMOs. 2013-11-07. I saw a lot of negative reactions around the blogosphere to the GW2 Tower of Nightmares update. Surprisingly, the main criticism seems to be that people aren’t interested in the new story. It isn’t engaging enough. This is puzzling to me for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t even realize there was a story in the new GW2 update, and second, I didn’t realize people judged new MMO content on the new storylines brought into the world.
    • MMORPG
    715 words
  • GW2 Thank God I’m Not An Achiever. 2013-11-08. I was reading a post on Why I Game which talked about lackluster enthusiasm for GW2, and I started to feel really bad for him. I cannot imagine what it’s like to feel such a compulsion to obtain achievements that you’re willing to log tons of game time doing things that aren’t fun. I certainly agree about the lack of enthusiasm for GW2. This Tower of Nightmares update is more of the same.
    • MMORPG
    485 words
  • MMO Pinball. 2013-11-13. Just so you know, I have been a veritable pinball of MMO playing lately. First FFXIV leveling an Archer/Bard to level 30. Then WoW leveling a Mage from around 17 to 50, and leveling some other characters. Then GW2 to check out the Tower of Nightmares. Then LoTRO leveling my hobbit Hunter from 38 to 45. Then Rift to check out the Song of Dreams patch. Even a little bit of Neverwinter and TERA and (gasp) Aion thrown in there between.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    106 words
  • GW2 Go Blackgate!. 2013-11-17. Oh hey, according to the mid-season WvW report, Blackgate is winning. Go Blackgate! When I randomly chose Blackgate to play on, I picked a winner! (Actually it wasn’t random. It was a choice between Blackgate which was the “coolest” sounding server, or Yak’s Bend which was the “funniest” sounding server, and in the end I went for coolness.) My only contribution to the war effort was capturing one empty Ruins and escorting one yak.
    • MMORPG
    289 words

2013-12

  • GW2 Winter Wonderland of Doom. 2013-12-24. I ducked into GW2 to check out the Christmas event. As usual, there is nothing to gain from doing the events except some cosmetic fluff, because god forbid you actually get to advance your GW2 character in any way. But I set aside my anti-horizontal-progression Scrooge-like sentiment for a bit and did the events anyway, and they’re kind of fun. Most of them, anyway. There’s a dungeon which I skipped because I didn’t want to deal with a group.
    • MMORPG
    866 words

2014-01

  • GW2 – They Had Personalities?. 2014-01-02. After reading over this article on Massively by Anatoli Ingram, I am stunned that the author can even remember the names of those four GW2 Living Story characters, let alone come up with a thousand words of an article analyzing their personalities and backstories. My experience of the last year of Living Story was something like this: Oh there’s this cool new Living Story! Oh there’s nothing to actually do, but I got some achievements.
    • MMORPG
    455 words
  • GW2 The Hidden Origins of Madness. 2014-01-24. Due to a devastating blizzard of perhaps a half an inch of fine powdery snow, I had 2 extra hours one morning to look at The Origins of Madness, the new Living Story content for Guild Wars 2. I patch up, log into my Necro, and I have mail telling me to go to Lornar’s Pass. Naturally it’s one of the places my Necro hasn’t been so I can’t fast-travel there, so I get out my Norn Ranger, who has been all through those wintry mountains.
    • MMORPG
    1,056 words

2014-02

  • GW2 – Escape from Lion's Arch. 2014-02-21. Still wanting to want to play GW2 more, but falling short. Here’s a summation of the new GW2 content: Same chaotic zerg fights, different location. I will give them credit for blowing up Lion’s Arch though. That’s cool. But the stuff you do in the blown up zone isn’t enough to pull me away from FFXIV. I still have no idea who Scarlet is. Or why Lion’s Arch got blown up.
    • MMORPG
    223 words
  • FFXIV FATEs Versus GW2 Zergs. 2014-02-28. This thought occurred to me one night while I was running around in a FATE group in FFXIV: Why am I enjoying this zerg but when I play in a GW2 zerg in Escape from Lion’s Arch I want to gouge my own eyes out? When I’m in a FFXIV zerg (or Rift, or most any other), I have a feeling of control. I’m filling a specific role, and when I execute my part of the plan, the whole group experience is better.
    • MMORPG
    280 words

2014-03

  • Landmark et al – Take My Money!. 2014-03-03. Here’s my feedback to SOE regarding Landmark’s proposed monetization plans: Hey can I just pay you and not get spammed with advertising for potions and costumes? That would be super. Oh, and by the way I already paid you. Maybe factor that into your plans, too. Also, are you ever planning to increase the percentage of your game that is finished? It’s been at 60% now for a month. (Okay, that probably wasn’t fair.
    • MMORPG
    209 words
  • GW2 – Loot Rains From The Sky. 2014-03-05. I’m a little annoyed with the loot in GW2. Loot basically rains from the sky in that game, filling your bags in mere seconds. I never thought I would say anything like this in an MMO, but: For the love of god, stop giving me so much loot! You can’t take a step without getting some kind of trophy bag. And when you open that bag, out spills two or three or six or ten more pieces of loot!
    • MMORPG
    500 words
  • GW2 – Feature Pack. 2014-03-28. My reaction to the upcoming GW2 Feature Pack: Why the heck did we have to wait until after the Living Story to get these things?? Most of what I’ve read falls into the category of “it probably should have been like that in the first place.” The Wardrobe and Dye changes sound awesome. I have occasionally tried to figure out what to do with all the various “skins” I’ve picked up, but I don’t have a clue.
    • MMORPG
    207 words

2014-04

  • GW2 – Dreading Logging In. 2014-04-17. I was interested in checking out the new GW2 Feature Pack until I read Zubon’s warning. Apparently you have to re-do and re-learn all your characters after you login. I suppose I should have expected it, given the complete restructuring of the trait-lines. But facing the cold, hard reality of having to re-learn your class from the ground up is pretty daunting. Especially when you haven’t thought about GW2 traits in ages.
    • MMORPG
    293 words
  • GW2 – Feature Pack Survived. 2014-04-23. I took the plunge and jumped into GW2, post-Feature Pack. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The meaning of the traits came back to me as I was looking over them, and I dumped points into things that sounded familiar. I haven’t done anything even remotely close to min-maxing in GW2 so it probably doesn’t matter. Also I don’t do dungeons or anything competitive, so my lack of optimization won’t affect anyone but me.
    • Classes
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    272 words

2014-05

  • On Hardcore Raiding. 2014-05-27. After I listened to Massively’s latest podcast featuring an interview with WildStar developers, I realized that I hadn’t said anything about Carbine’s hardcore raiding philosophy, which is a topic of some mild controversy. One of them raid thingys, blatantly stolen from the WildStar site. If you aren’t aware, WildStar raids are supposed to be really hard like the old school raids of yore. They are taking the stance that their raids are meant for hardcore guilds and players only, and they won’t be dumbing them down over time like most other games do.
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    • Discussion
    895 words

2014-06

  • Mid-June MMO Status Report. 2014-06-20. Not much to talk about, so here’s a non-WildStar MMO status report! ArcheAge. I’ve only logged in to pay the taxes on my measely 8×8 farm, and occasionally grow aspen trees. I don’t expect to play this any more until after it launches. The Secret World. I have logged in every few days to grind through a mission or two in the City of the Sun God zone. I’m attempting to collect AP and SP so I can fill out my skills better, which will better prepare me to go back to the Besieged Farmlands and continue the main story quest, which will then eventually allow me to get to Tokyo perhaps sometime in 2018.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    421 words

2014-07

  • GW2 – Gates of Magoo Can Bite Me. 2014-07-14. Note: The following ragey invective was written after dying a number of times during the GW2 Living Story 2 instance Fallen Hopes which I had hoped would be a fun way to kill some time while waiting to go to a doctor’s appointment. It was not. However, I have since completed it and moved on with my life. There is not much room to maneuver in here, and Marjory and Kasmeer are NO HELP AT ALL.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    322 words

2014-12

  • ArcheAge – Post-Mortum. 2014-12-11. I’m determined to sit here and write a complete blog post. Inspired somewhat by j3w3l’s recent post, I’ve been thinking about ArcheAge. Thinking, that is, but not playing, because my work schedule has been ramping back up and ArcheAge is not a game you can play when you only have a little bit of time to play it. Not to mention the possibly-related fact that I’ve lost interest in it. I still log into ArcheAge once or twice a week to make sure my taxes are paid and to stockpile more tax certificates, but that’s about it.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Opinion
    808 words

2015-01

  • Arbitrary Mid-January Status Update. 2015-01-19. I’m in a “bouncing around between games” mode at the moment, now that I’m done with Elite: Dangerous. I’ve been logging into two or three or four different MMOs a day, looking for one to capture my imagination. Level 100! WoW. My WoW subscription runs out on the 20th, and I won’t be renewing. WoW is a fun game, but I always tire of it pretty quickly. I did manage to reach level 100 with my Hunter and upgrade my Garrison, though.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    1,043 words
  • Comparing Played Times. 2015-01-21. I found an old, old screenshot of my main Asheron’s Call character from near the end of my playing time: What MMORPGs looked like when they were more work than fun. There’s some interesting things to note there. First of all, my /played time was 17d 11h 26m 22s. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing that game… it seemed like my entire life was spent in that game for about a year.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    402 words

2015-02

  • What Does Buy-to-Play Really Say About An MMO?. 2015-02-03. ESO* is going Buy-to-Play. Yay! I’m looking forward to playing it again. (Holy jeez those guys make awesome cinematics. I wonder how much of a AAA studio’s game development budget goes into those.) But philosophically speaking, I wonder what the Buy-to-Play model says about an MMO. After having experienced it in GW2, B2P seems to imply something that’s not a very good thing. The game company seems to be saying, “Here’s our persistent world game, but there’s really only about a month or two of fresh gameplay for you to look at, and we’re probably not going to update it very much, so don’t make any long-term plans to stay in our game.
    • MMORPG
    • Opinion
    499 words
  • GW2 – Heart of Thorns Initial Reactions. 2015-02-06. I’m pretty sure I will buy the GW2 expansion Heart of Thorns, however I’m not sure it will hold my attention for very long since it appears there is not going to be anything new to do for existing endgame characters except collect more achievements. Masteries. “We’re reimagining progression with our new Mastery system.” I’ll need to see this before I can make a final judgment on it, but initially it sounds like more grinding, to be honest.
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    608 words
  • Progression Report – February. 2015-02-28. I think I’ll make this a “thing” and do a monthly progress report of all the MMOs I’m playing. I started running a time tracking program* called ManicTime so I can actually record precisely how much I’ve played every game now. FFXIV (22 hrs)**. I unlocked most of the new 2.5 dungeons and World of Darkness, however I haven’t actually gone into any of them yet. (To this day I’ve only done one level 50 dungeon-Amdapor Keep for the Relic quest.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • Status
    1,168 words

2015-03

  • On The Radar For 2015. 2015-03-30. Last time I did this. Note that some games aren’t on the following list because I have either a) forgotten about them, or b) never heard of them. MMORPGs I’m Looking Forward To These are games that I’m still anxiously awaiting the opportunity to play, because I haven’t yet seen or heard anything to wreck my enthusiasm. Black Desert. I keep seeing good things. Skyforge. I keep hearing good things.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Pre-Release
    • Predictions
    799 words

2015-04

  • Progression Report – March. 2015-04-01. March was definitely a low point in my 2015 MMORPG activity, but don’t panic. This is normal for me. There’s usually one or more months during the year when I end up watching television instead. Still, I accomplished a few things. In Rift, I continued to log in every few days to collect Minion rewards and send them out again. My bank and inventory is bursting with useless junk. In Final Fantasy XIV, I forgot to mention that I joined the cool blogger Free Company on Cactuar.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • Status
    639 words

2015-10

  • GW2HoT – Obey The Zerg. 2015-10-29. Somewhat to my own surprise, I bought and installed Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns on Saturday. The first thing I did on my Necromancer was spec the Reaper thingy and train the ability to use a greatsword. That was pretty cool. I enjoyed the greatsword on my Guardian so it’s nice to have it on the character that I actually play the most. The game was nice enough to give me an exotic Reaper’s Greatsword of Air to play with, too.
    • MMORPG
    894 words

2015-12

  • GW2HoT – That Was Fun. 2015-12-04. To follow up a bit on Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns, I played it a lot right up until the day that Fallout 4 came out, and I haven’t logged in a single time since. Which suggests that I was deluding myself for those few weeks I was playing it and having fun. Okay, that’s not true. I got my money’s worth. It felt like the good old days after GW2 launched when it seemed like this game had re-invented MMORPGs and changed everything.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    324 words

2016-03

  • Black Desert Cash Shop. 2016-03-10. On the subject of the Black Desert cash shop, I agree that it’s a little steep. Or perhaps I should say that you don’t get enough in-game value for the money you spend. I’ll get to the specifics later. First I want to highlight something I think is good about the BDO cash shop: They don’t shove it in your face in every window that comes up. There’s no popup window when you login that shows you all the sales and exhorts you to “Go buy stuff now!
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    1,136 words

2016-07

  • Moving Old PC, Building New PC. 2016-07-29. I drove back to the old house after work Wednesday to pick up some things to improve my camping experience in the new house, and while I was there I unplugged my PC and a monitor and threw it into the car. (Not literally. But close, because it’s still frickin’ hot as hell, and after less than a half hour of moving around in the old house, sweat was pouring off of me in rivers and I felt like I could barely stand up from the weight of all the humidity pressing down on me.
    • Status
    639 words

2016-09

  • The Vault, The Whale, and Some GW2. 2016-09-28. I’ve slowed down a bit, but I’m still making progress in Heavensward. I made it to level 57 and got through The Vault after putting it off for half a week. The last boss with all the chess pieces (or robot horse-men as I call them) was actually kind of fun. The post-dungeon cut scenes were less fun. Sad kitty is sad. After The Vault I was sent back to another part of the Sea of Clouds, and shortly thereafter I was asked to fight a big whale in The Limitless Blue.
    • MMORPG
    • Status
    508 words

2017-08

  • Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire Announced. 2017-08-01. Since I’m home this week (see tomorrow’s post :) I had a rare opportunity to actually watch the Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire expansion announcement live today. (Those things are usually timed so that only the unemployed can watch them.) Not only that, but I could write a post about it and publish it with a screenshot all in the same day! Path of Fire is scheduled to release September 22, 2017, less than two months from now.
    • MMORPG
    475 words
  • GW2 – Path of Fire Demo, The Rage-Quittening. 2017-08-11. I’m going to try really hard not to sound bitter, angry, and resentful as I write this. :) I’m home today so I logged into GW2 to try out this Path of Fire demo thing. At first I had no idea how to even participate. I logged into my Necro, who I had left in Orr outside of the Zhaitan dungeon. Last time I played, I tried to do that last personal story mission to kill Zhaitan.
    • MMORPG
    867 words
  • GW2 – Path Of Fire Demo, Take Two. 2017-08-12. This morning I tried the Path of Fire demo again, and it went much better. Thanks for the encouraging comments on my last whiny post. :) In fact, the second time through, I got all the way through the burning village and killed the two Veteran Forged Warhounds without dying. Then … the client disconnected. That was disappointing, to say the least. So I had to go through it a third time.
    • MMORPG
    397 words
  • GW2 – HoT Progress and Thoughts. 2017-08-14. Progress! I mentioned going through Heart of Thorns and the Living Story Season 3 in my last post, so I started working on that again. At least until I got to Heart of Thorns, Chapter 12, “The Way In.” This requires a Nuhoch Hunting Mastery before you can access it. Boo. And people complain about FFXIV locking content behind a Main Scenario Quest! I had previously completed up through Chapter 8, “City of Hope.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    1,413 words
  • GW2 – Rangering In HoT. 2017-08-15. I saw Bhagpuss mention an easy-mode “Bearbow” build in one of his recent posts, which made me wonder if I would have any better luck with my Ranger. By coincidence, Aywren was looking for feedback on the Ranger as well. I had a lot of fun playing the Ranger leveling from 1 to 80, but that was back in the months after GW2 launch. Since then, my Ranger has largely been parked, as most of my GW2 characters are when they hit 80.
    • MMORPG
    765 words
  • GW2 – HoT Chapters 12-14. 2017-08-16. Contrary to expectations, I was able to get my Nuhoch Mastery point and continue to chapter 12 in record time (one day). I got the Mastery point while I was running around on my Ranger, incidentally. My mastery level is now at the earth-shattering level of-you might want to sit down for this-10! I returned to my Necro for the story. He’s been my main guy for all these years and I have a decent feel for the class-as best as I’ll probably ever get in GW2, at least.
    • MMORPG
    603 words
  • GW2 – HoT Chapters 15-16. 2017-08-17. Just a brief GW2 update, mainly to keep up my streak of daily posts this month: I completed HoT chapter 15, which went okay, despite the AI bugs and random weirdness that always goes along with GW2 story instances. (My crew ran across an invisible bridge to join a fight on the other side of a chasm, so I glided over to follow them, but the fight was just for show and I couldn’t actually kill anything.
    • MMORPG
    373 words
  • Random Friday Tidbits. 2017-08-18. Another brief post just to post something today. GW2. I did in fact retry Chapter 16, “Hearts and Minds,” and beat it after two more attempts Thursday night, which took another hour. If you leave the instance for any reason, by the way, you have to start all over. So take my advice: Don’t rage quit if you die to the last boss. :) I’ll probably start Living Story Season 3 this weekend although I’m kind of burned out on GW2 already.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Progression Report
    298 words
  • Dimrill Dale and Eclipse Jealosy. 2017-08-20. One thing that happens when you make a conscious effort to post every day is that half of your blog posts turn into diary entries. “Dear diary: Here’s what I did today. Well, yesterday.” Yesterday I completed the Moria Epic Story and officially returned to the world under the sky in Dimrill Dale, attaining level 60 in the process. I got to revisit the Watcher in the Water deep in the bowels of Moria.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    596 words
  • Getting Lost In MMOs. 2017-08-23. A recent MassivelyOP Daily Grind asked the question: “Do you like being lost in MMOs?” My answer is generally no, I never want to my progress to be impeded by not knowing where to go. But it depends on the situation and/or the game. Here are two recent examples: When I think about my experience playing through the remainder of the GW2 Heart of Thorns story, I was lost a lot in the Maguuma Jungle, and it was aggravating.
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    350 words
  • Lockbox Expectations. 2017-08-30. While the rest of the world is probably posting about the Destiny 2 open beta today, I’m going to post about lockboxes, because I wrote this yesterday. I think it was Roger that said we bloggers could get a lot of good topics out of MassivelyOP’s Daily Grinds, so here’s another one: What Do You Actually Expect To Get Out Of MMORPG Lockboxes? This particular Grind was inspired by Bhagpuss boldly claiming to like lockboxes (in a way).
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    436 words

2017-09

  • GW2 – Season 3, Episode 1, Out of the Shadows. 2017-09-25. I bought the Path of Fire expansion on Friday morning, about four hours before launch time. Not that it matters, but I hope that my purchase was late enough that it doesn’t “count” in the video game industry’s pre-order shenanigans. It was early enough that I got the bonuses, though. (Not that I’ll ever use them.) When I logged in around 11:30, I realized that I had not yet started the Living Story Season 3, and I remembered that I had planned to finish that before going into Path of Fire.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    691 words

2017-10

  • GW2 – Season 3, Episode 2, Rising Flames. 2017-10-04. Bhagpuss recommended that I skip the Living World Season 3* and go right into Path of Fire, which by all accounts is far superior, but I’m stubbornly persisting in my efforts to complete the whole season first. Partly it’s because I’ve been recording this adventure, so I’ll have videos of it all. And partly it’s because I want to experience it “as it was intended.” I see a lot of people using their new mounts to get to places which seems like cheating.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    544 words
  • GW2 – Season 3, Episode 3, A Crack in the Ice. 2017-10-06. Episode 3 of the Living World Season 3 takes us to Bitterfrost Frontier, another new map north of Frostgorge Sound. The episode begins with some “challenges” in Tarir to train baby dragon Aurene how to be a good dragon. I cringed at first but it turned out the challenges were fairly benign, if somewhat tedious. It seemed like filler material to extend the length of the content, to be honest.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    311 words
  • GW2 – Season 3, Episode 5, Flashpoint. 2017-10-09. For the record, I’ve finished Living World Season 3 and started into Path of Fire. As of Monday morning, I’ve just gotten to the second map, Desert Highlands. It’s a far better expansion than Heart of Thorns already, although I just ran into a story gate that isn’t obvious how to open. Now back to the past… Living World Season 3, Episode 5, Flashpoint, starts off with a trip to Taimi’s lab, where we find Kasmeer chastising us for not inviting her to join Dragon’s Watch yet.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    1,038 words
  • GW2 – Season 3, Episode 6, One Path Ends. 2017-10-14. Apologies for the delay, but my SSD drive failed and caused all manner of random crashing issues for four days. PC problems have a way of pushing all other concerns to the background. Once I finally determined it was the SSD (not so easy, since all tests indicated it was perfectly fine), I installed an older, smaller SSD from an old laptop and reinstalled Windows, so I’ve now got a blank new machine for all intents and purposes.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    738 words
  • GW2 – Path of Fire Story Completed. 2017-10-17. Well, that didn’t take long. But before I talk about Path of Fire, in news that no blog reader cares about, I’ve uploaded the videos I recorded for Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns to my YouTube channel. (Cross-promotion!) I’m enjoying Path of Fire a lot. It’s very much like playing the original game again, which was the best part of Guild Wars 2. It almost feels like an “apology” for everything that’s been released since the original game.
    • MMORPG
    1,852 words
  • GW2 – Fun While It Lasted?. 2017-10-23. I hate to say this, but once I finished the GW2 Path of Fire story, I found that my drive to keep playing rapidly dwindled. I think I understand now why they didn’t put very much of the story on the final two maps. They are less fun to play on. Bhagpuss alluded to this early on in his first first impressions post. There is a very noticeable ramp up in difficulty from Elon Riverlands to The Desolation.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    702 words
  • GW2 – Doing Dailies. 2017-10-30. What's this then? A ley-line anomaly guy? Now that I know GW2 dailies give out gold, I started doing them. They aren’t very fun to do. :) Talk about mindless busy work. No wonder I’ve been ignoring them. I’ve never been a big fan of “doing dailies” in any MMORPG, and I usually leave a game for something else when I get to the point where that’s all there is to do.
    • MMORPG
    813 words

2017-11

  • GW2 – Story Over Time. 2017-11-10. Remember Checkhov's gun here? I didn't either. Still waiting for someone to use it. Guild Wars 2 posts do fairly well for some weird reason (but not as well as Dark Tower posts, go figure), so here’s another one. If you aren’t caught up with GW2 there might be some accidental spoilers below. I mentioned before that I’ve been re-playing the Living World Season 2. Eventually I’ll be uploading them to my YouTube channel, because hey, why not.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    679 words
  • GW2 – Living World Season 4 Announced. 2017-11-15. I’m in another “there is nothing to blog about”* mood so this is a brief update to tell you that I finished the GW2 Living World Season 2 again. It was more entertaining the second time. Except for every combat encounter, of course. But it felt considerably easier the second time through, and I only remember wanting to punch my monitor on two of the bosses. That’s an overall smaller monitor-punches-per-episode rate than Living World Season 3 was.
    • MMORPG
    • Pre-Release
    237 words

2017-12

  • GW2 – Living World Season 4, Daybreak. 2017-12-04. This seems like a decent non-spoilery picture for this post because I have no idea what it is or when I took it. I finished up the Living World Season 4 episode Daybreak over the weekend. This post is going to contain story spoilers, so if you haven’t finished it yet, look away! My thoughts are pretty similar to Bhagpuss’s. But I’m going to start with the things I liked about Daybreak.
    • MMORPG
    2,502 words

2018-03

  • MMO Roundup #8. 2018-03-09. Now I’m trying to work out why WordPress keeps using old images when it posts these things to Twitter. I think it’s because I was using a “Clone Post” plugin to make these posts. So I’m making this one from scratch. Seeing as how there is a game-breaking bug that prevents me from continuing to play it, I’ve abandoned Kingdom Come: Deliverance until whichever decade Warhorse decides to release the 1.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup
    415 words
  • MMO Roundup #9. 2018-03-16. A weekly diary of MMO news and observations. The Bane Bard 330 outfit, mostly. The boots don't match! It’s been a very unusual multi-game bonanza lately. Normally I stick with one game at a time, but I’ve been all over the place. This is not a good thing. It means that none of the games I’m currently playing are all that interesting to me, and I’m in that mood where I’m searching for The Next Big Thing.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup
    681 words
  • MMO Roundup #11. 2018-03-30. _These post titles are killing me. I hate titles that don’t mean anything. I don’t know about anyone else, but I almost never click through to read an article if the title doesn’t interest me (my feed reader also shows the first sentence, so that is also a factor). I assume everyone else is the same. But here I am, doing the exact thing I hate. “Generic Post #11.” I might as well call it, “Don’t bother reading this one.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup
    508 words

2018-04

  • GW2 – LW4, Ep 2, A Bug In The System (Spoilers). 2018-04-23. I finally finished Guild Wars 2’s Living World Season 4, Episode 2, “A Bug In The System” on Friday night. So here’s the quarterly post where I yell at Guild Wars 2 again for making me incredibly angry when I play it. This scenic overview looked better in the game than in this screenshot. It was the most disjointed episode I can remember, but I’ll concede it was probably because of the way I played it.
    • MMORPG
    1,365 words

2018-06

  • Week End – WHO Pitch Forks. 2018-06-23. Weekly summary of news and observations. I should really copy and paste a standard template for this opening because I have to type it from memory every time and I think it subtly changes every week. In The News There’s been some hubbub about the World Health Organization’s gaming disorder classification. The WHO added “gaming disorder” to the “International Classification of Diseases,” and every gamer who has been on the defensive about that kind of thing since the 90s got out their pitch forks and torches.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup
    712 words
  • Week End – Trion, GW2. 2018-06-30. Weekly news and observations. In The News In surprise news, Trion acquired Gazillion’s assets. It’s not all that surprising, actually. After their implosion, I would think Gazillion was selling everything at a deep discount, so why not pick up a whole library of a competitor’s source code? Trion also seems to be trying to turn themselves into something like SpatialOS, which, again, why not? It sounds like they’ll be renting out the technology they already use and maintain for their own games.
    • MMORPG
    672 words

2018-07

  • GW2 – Not Forewarned Enough. 2018-07-04. After finishing the first part of Living World Season 4, Episode 3, Seized, last week I said that everything had already been said about GW2’s Living World and nothing had changed. I muttered under my breath a lot about that first part-both the story and gameplay-but to be far it was far better than the first part of LW4 Episode 1, which was the video game equivalent of riding in a hot car with a screaming toddler.
    • MMORPG
    2,236 words
  • GW2 – Writers Fired. 2018-07-06. Given recent unexpected events at ArenaNet, I feel pretty awful about my last post on GW2. I’ve expressed displeasure over ArenaNet’s handling of story and gameplay plenty of times here which is exactly the kind of thing that led to the firing of two ArenaNet writers. So I wanted to say a couple of things. Oddly contrite-looking Commander screenshot seems appropriate here. First of all, I absolutely respect any game writer or developer’s right to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I don’t understand the challenges associated with writing for a game, etc.
    • Musings
    772 words
  • Week End – Defiance 2050 I guess?. 2018-07-07. In The News Of course the big controversy of the week was that whole thing with ArenaNet and the influencer and the two writers, which I won’t rehash here. I kind of wish I hadn’t said anything yesterday, because it was “too soon.” I only meant to say I felt kind of guilty about having just written a scathing post about the game. Maybe I’ll revisit it in a few weeks, because I do think there are a lot of different lessons to be learned from the entire catastrophe.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup
    502 words

2018-10

  • GW2 – A Star To Guide Us. 2018-10-06. I saw that Sypster posted about returning to Guild Wars 2, so in the absence of anything else to write about, I’ll relay my own experience with that very subject. Back in July, I went ahead and uninstalled Guild Wars 2. Partly because I’d grown to strongly dislike the gameplay (as opposed to the nominal experience of mildly disliking it), and partly because I didn’t think much of ArenaNet anymore.
    • MMORPG
    787 words

2018-11

  • Games Played – October 2018. 2018-11-05. Very old GW2 shot from my media library because my back hurts too much to sit at my PC to find a new one, and this post has been sitting here for a week waiting to post and I'm tired of waiting. October was a slow PC gaming month, partially due to back pain making it hard to sit at in the computer chair to play games, and partially due to a lack of games that interest me right now.
    • Consoles
    • MMORPG
    304 words

2019-01

  • GW2 – All or Nothing Completed. 2019-01-21. I’m pretty weary of writing about Guild Wars 2 so this is going to be a short post. Mostly it’s just to note that I did finish the new Episode 5, All or Nothing last night. I don’t say what happens here, but there is one big hint below (from ArenaNet) which is plenty to work out what happens, so beware. I hadn’t logged into Guild Wars 2 a single time since I finished episode 4.
    • MMORPG
    913 words

2019-02

  • ArenaNet Layoffs. 2019-02-23. ArenaNet is laying off an undetermined number of employees on the orders of NCSoft. Random Guild Wars 2 screenshot because thumbnail. I actually don’t have much to say about this, but I felt like it was big enough news to warrant a blog post to mark the occasion. To be perfectly blunt, I’m so numb to the game industry right now that this barely elicited a mild shrug. It’s a weekday, so of course another major MMO studio is suffering losses.
    • MMORPG
    521 words

2019-09

  • GW2 LW5 Prologue – Bound by Blood. 2019-09-26. I don’t know what we’re calling this Icebrood Saga thing. Is it Living World Season 5? Or is it something else entirely? I don’t know. I’ve seen people calling it Season 5 so that’s probably the label that will stick in the community. It’s a lot easier than “Icebrood Saga.” (I’m certainly not going to be abbreviating it “IS” because I don’t particularly want a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists showing up on my web site.
    • MMORPG
    1,594 words

2019-10

  • Four News Stories. 2019-10-09. For SEO purposes, I should probably break these into separate posts, but I just don’t feel like it. But I’ve identified four big gaming news stories of late that I figured I should at least make a note of for posterity. Raph Koster’s New Company. Don’t really care. It’s vaporware until proven otherwise. Mainly it makes me wonder about the future of Crowfall. Perhaps he’s only left because Crowfall is fully set on its course and there’s no more creative work to do.
    • MMORPG
    668 words

2020-01

  • Game Planning For 2020. 2020-01-14. I don’t really plan my gaming very much, I tend to just play whatever I feel like playing on any given day. But I decided to make a list of the games that are currently on my highest priority “to play” list at the start of 2020, along with a rough estimate of how long they’ll take to play, according to HowLongToBeat. The obligatory blog post picture requirement that vaguely relates to the text.
    • Musings
    • Roundup
    980 words

2021-08