I have repeatedly said that Guild Wars expects you to play with the wiki open. I have bowed to that and done what I should have a long time ago: set up a second monitor. Now I don’t need to alt-tab nearly as much. I am thinking about getting a USB video adapter for my wife’s laptop so that she can have Hulu on one screen and internet/documents on the other. She seems to listen to shows half the time.
: Zubon
That’s more like coersion. :\
The alternative is to set it up to launch though Steam, so you get the Steam Overlay and its webbrowser on shift-tab, which is much better supported in most games than either alt-click or clicking outside a “full screen” app.
As someone who has been rocking dual monitors for years now, welcome to the club. The downside, of course, is that going back to a single monitor will feel like you’re living with one eye closed.
I’d also recommend you look into a program called “DualMonitor”, which does nothing except extend your toolbar across both screens and ensures the windows on one monitor are displayed on the appropriate toolbar. Very useful.
Perhaps it’s because I play at my own pace and don’t worry about the “right” way to do things, but I find I very rarely need the wiki. If I tank a mission a few times I might take a look at the appropriate entry, but I’ve never felt the wiki was something that needed to be open all the time.
Then again, I suppose I have been playing for quite a few years now, and I’ve never felt like there was a deadline looming. I think for newer players it’s different. There’s so much to see before GW2 hits!
Yeah, I probably react more strongly to reaching the end of a mission, full bonus intact, and effectively getting the message, “There is no way you can beat this boss this with the heroes/henchmen you brought along. Better luck next time!”
Once you go dual, you don’t go back.
Welcome to the dual monitor club. I made the switch a couple of years back on my home gamign machine and loved it so much I cajoled my way into a two monitor setup in work. To date three of my work colleagues have been so impressed that went off and got dual monitors themselves.
Most of my workplace uses dual monitors. It’s records management, so there is a lot of data entry and record modification. Dual monitors are enormously useful.
Having played Guildwars since the day it was released, I have to say that the wiki is a nice addition, but definitely NOT a requirement for most things in the game. Look at it this way, the builds for farming (solo and/or with heroes). Before someone comes up with a build, it’s not in a wiki. Sure once they’ve got it working it gets put into a wiki but the initial build was a lot of trial and error and depending on where they were farming, possibly a bit of in-game expense too. The wiki is a convenience, but not a requirement.
Echoing the others, welcome to the dual monitor club. Also, *insert Peter Parker’s with greater power quote here*.
The downsides of having two monitors is that I get more distracted in groups. I’d be reading something on my second screen, or perhaps watching a movie, and my personal performance takes a hit. I take a few milliseconds longer to respond to “don’t stand in the fire” situations, or curing dots. I’ve unintentionally wiped groups on that.
On the plus side, being able to keep a parser running on the second monitor along with ventrilo to see whose talking are huge pluses.