Month: November 2012

Need a break after the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event? Too bad. ArenaNet had other teams ready to lay up content right after the Mad King’s exit. Martin Kerstein stated that hints from the November content update would start with the same patch that takes out Halloween.

So what did the update bring? Continue reading [GW2] Lost Shores, Beached Whales

Next year we hope that the Mad King turns them all into skritt.
— Jonathan

Beyond eliminating the primary problem with the Clock Tower, this also creates justification for implementing strange and pro-social mechanics. The skritt are a hive-mind species, so skritt content should be nigh-impossible solo and potentially trivial in a zerg.

Imagine a path with occasional shinies. They draw skritt or their attention, turning the camera or attracting the character like gravity. Reduce that effect based on the number of nearby skritt, so that one skritt would be be forced to look at the shiny (and maybe zooming in) while a group would be mildly distracted. Imagine if having other skritt around made platforming easier, with platforms treated as wider and inclines less steep on the basis that the skritt are clambering over each other like fire ant rafts. How about “as long as another skritt within a meter of you is within a meter of … a skritt within a meter of a surface, none of the skritt involved can fall”? I don’t know how well any of these would play out in practice, but as opposed to the content where you want everyone else to fail within the first 30 seconds, the skritt are the perfect race for developing mechanics that encourage or require helping your friends to the finish line.

: Zubon

I had a blast for Halloween in Guild Wars 2! It was one of the best holiday events I can remember. I sadly did not get to participate in the new meta-events in Kessex Hills, Queensdale, and Gendarran Fields, but I made sure to try every other new thing at least once. One whole night was dedicated to the Mad King’s Tower, which was the most  controversial addition to the Shadow of the Mad King.

The lead designer for the Mad King’s Tower, Josh Foreman, has taken the brunt of feedback head on. This amazes me. Not only is ArenaNet’s policy to let their employees have a voice, but Josh is stepping directly in to the line of fire. I believe that this humanizes the relationship between player and game. It reinforces Guild Wars 2 as a service for a community. Continue reading [GW2] On the Sleeve, On the Mad King’s Tower

Cooking is the only GW2 crafting skill with legitimate discovery rather than following obvious formulas (although Artificing potions can be non-obvious). On many puzzles, people are looking for tips rather than spoilers, so let me give you a few pointers on the skill advancement side.

• You can use the skill advancement spoilers without spoiling the fun. An optimized list of cooking recipes will use the discovery window perhaps a dozen times. At 400 skill, you still have almost all the discovery fun available to you, and all of it is unlocked instead of having red ingredients you cannot use yet. Your Explorer tendencies will help your Achiever reward, but getting the full Achiever reward will not undermine your Explorer discovery. If you want to play an improved version of Doodle God, it is even better at 400 skill.
• You will not have access to everything without leveling. Some ingredients are available only after completing hearts. If your main character is not your cook, however, s/he can buy 10 bags of ingredients from any heart vendor, and now you have a full stack in your storage for your cook.
• In most skills, you advance through discovery instead of grinding. In cooking, you advance quickly and cheaply by discovering a cheap recipe and grinding until it is no longer orange. Bake a dozen cookies, not just one. Consumables stack, so this is also how you avoid filling your inventory. (This also helps for some portion of the weapon-crafting skills, since you can make a stacks of maintenance oils, sharpening stones, and ogre-slaying potions.)
• Dessert is good. Desserts do follow a pattern, so you can learn quickly through pies, tarts, and cookies. Pies are especially rewarding because you make the filling and the pie in separate steps. Sugar, flour, and water are cheap and endlessly available, butter and chocolate are the same at the trading post, and many karma merchants will sell you fruit in bulk.
• There is a farm just north of Lion’s Arch. Finish that heart for cheap, readily available produce.
• Peaches are available in bulk in west Fireheart Rise. Peach recipes give you the difficult points cheaply, and you get the second-best +Magic Find foods in the process.

The discovery aspect of cooking also makes it very different from other crafts in that learning makes it easier and cheaper. The learning curve for the other seven skills is exactly the same curve, so one you know the basic discovery pattern, you know all the recipes for all the skills (+/- 2%). But you still need to farm all those materials, and knowing more does not help that. For cooking, now that you have found hundreds of recipes on your main cook, you can train anyone else 1-400 at a quarter of the cost in 5% of the time. You can get better.

: Zubon