Author: Ravious

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The Vanishing Mini Market (Guild Wars)

It seems the Hall of Monuments craziness is affecting even people that did not really hit it off with Guild Wars. Somehow I made it to 35 points even though I am years of grind away from the ultimate Guild Wars title. I think I am going to try for 45 points, but it’s really all fun and games now. I like the 30 point title “Closer to the Stars” better than “Ghostly Hero” (35) and “Flameseeker” (40) anyway.

There are five prongs to the Hall of Monuments: gaming achievements, player armor, companion armor, weapons, and miniatures. The first four are all based on player activity. Need companion armor? Play some challenge missions. Need weapons? Grind out some precious stones or Krytan trophies. Need miniatures? Fill out the available character slots and wait a couple years.

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Kind of Not a Big Deal (Guild Wars)

This last weekend, the Guild Wars servers had to be hopping with the Friday bomb of the Hall of Monuments information. People were filling holes in on their point sheet, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the miniature pet market so lively (and expensive). Overall, the community has reacted pretty positively to the reward scheme. I have also opened my Help-An-Old-Blogger-Out Armbrace Donation Drive if anybody is interested.  One armbrace is all it takes to feed a Ravious until Guild Wars 2.

Before I get in to the meat of this post, I did want to comment on how, if any, speculations for a Guild Wars 2 release date have clarified. Before the Guild Wars 2 FAQ changed, the old FAQ said that Hall of Monuments information would “when we’re closer to the launch of [Guild Wars 2].” Now, in a recent mmorpg.com interview ArenaNet said “I think we felt the sooner we could get that information to the players, the better, so that they could know what to expect, and understand, and have a lot of time to play Guild Wars 1 before Guild Wars 2 comes out, to check all that stuff out, to try and fill up their Hall of Monuments.” Interesting to try and puzzle that one out, but it is irrelevant with regard to the Hall of Monuments rewards, as players can gain new Guild Wars Hall of Monument tiers well after Guild Wars 2 launches.

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Hall of Monumental Rewards Calculator

Amazingly enough, ArenaNet dropped one of the most sought after Guild Wars 2 bits on a Friday. The Hall of Monuments Reward Calculator is now available for Guild Wars players to peruse the goals and rewards. Simply head to the Calculator and put your character’s name in, and the Calculator will do the rest.

There are 50 available points, and each accomplishment will give various amounts of points. For example, putting any statue in to the Monument of Honor gives 2 points, 5 statues gives 3 points, but then 10, 15, 20, etc. statues only nets 1 point each tier. Therefore, the point curve is weighted towards easy to get started, but hard to complete.

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A Bit of Perspective

There is a reason Zubon’s seminal post “A Fable” is consistently the biggest draw to our humble little blog. It brings perspective. A perspective that a fellow gamer, significant other, or concerned friend might feel is missing. The big message underneath the three short paragraphs, for me at least, is to be mindful of my actions, especially with regard to time-consuming MMO games. Last week I received a huge dosage of perspective. My skinny, non-smoking 30-year old wife had a stroke.

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Monument of Many Valors (Guild Wars)

If you play Guild Wars, check out the Guild Wars War in Kryta survey. It seems that not only is ArenaNet listening to the over ten thousand responses, but they are already acting in response to the results. One question was “how happy were you with the rewards from the War in Kryta content.” Apparently the masses were not happy with the value of the Oppressor’s weapons, which take some considerable time to receive. In response, ArenaNet allowed the Oppressor’s weapon to be added to the Monument of Valor in the Hall of Monuments. This happened before fans received any Guild Wars 2 Hall of Monuments reward schemes, however ironically soon they may come.

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Of Sticks, Carrots, and Wallets (Guild Wars 2)

Last night the ArenaNet blog updated with a post by John Hargrove, Guild Wars 2 game designer, presenting an overview of some of the reward and upgrade schemes in Guild Wars 2. There are five main design points followed by a look into how they incorporated that point. These are some pretty cool concepts incorporated in to the game. For example, a player’s loot roll is personalized. If there is a dungeon boss chest, the player gets her own roll on the loot table to find out what that she earned.

This one concept is resounding, and can be a dual-edged sword. The loot distribution at the end of a dungeon was almost a kind of bittersweet celebration. It was exciting to see what we as a group had won, but then often times others would get some of the loot I wanted. Instead they use a system similar to Dungeons and Dragons Online where the group after-event is gone in place of a personal moment with the chest. Hopefully they can find some way of taking back a little of that group reward by perhaps allowing a person to donate an item in-chest (before it gets bound) to another player.

The blog post then leans heavily in to the most iconic rewards in the MMO genre, gear. With gear players become walking trophy cases of accomplishment, and coming off of the excellent dye post, we know ArenaNet wants players to look exactly how they want to. However, this luxury is not without cost anymore.

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Peek at Guild Wars 2 Dungeons

The November issue of the UK PC Gamer came with a handful of pages on Guild Wars 2. One of the posters at Guru went above and beyond in tracking down a copy of the newly released magazine to disseminate any exclusive info to the masses. Big thanks to Lyssa for taking that time, and then taking the time to do a “live”-posting of info as he read. I would expect a couple official dungeon articles from ArenaNet in October, but in the meantime, let’s look at this new information.

Dungeons are instanced content nodes in Guild Wars 2 that tie heavily in to a player’s personal story and then branch out into repeatable content. It seems that to attune to the dungeon, the player has to get to that point in their personal story. The dungeon’s first phase overlaps with the personal story, and the player is joined by a NPC’s (and any supporting players) to finish this phase. Once the personal story phase is completed, the dungeon opens up into an explorable mode with follow-up adventures that are designed to be repeatable. It is unclear now, but I would expect the explorable areas to mostly be group oriented and not part of the personal story.

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Guild Wars 2 Dye-atribe

The puns abound in the latest ArenaNet blog post. I love Kristen Perry’s enthusiasm though. I just can’t help but smile and be excited as well, even if the information is small or tangential. In blog post we get a pretty thorough review of the dye system along with a lot of new and confirmed information.

The biggest advancement, in my mind, is that dyes will no longer be physical items that are crafted or dropped by mobs and then sold on the auction block. Instead, each account gets an unlockable palette of colors. Automatically from the start of the game, when centaurs are attacking and you are supposed to be saving villagers and killing big earth elementals, you can stand there for ten minutes playing around with your unlocked starter area colors. There is a great video from GuildMag of some player “wasting” gamescom demo time doing just that (more colors, etc. were unlocked for demo purposes).

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World of Darkness and Disappointment

It was before GenCon that White Wolf (maker of table-top RPGs and upcoming MMOs, owned by EVE’s CCP) was alleged to have told a friend of a friend that some people would be happy and some people would be upset by a coming announcement. This was refuted by White Wolf, and GenCon passed with very little big news from White Wolf. Later at the Grand Masquerade, which is an officially sanctioned World of Darkness convention, White Wolf released their first teaser bit about the World of Darkness. Our blogger in arms, Ardwulf, posted some pretty breaking news and the video of the teaser over at his site. The news hit the floor, and I realized that the alleged statement rang pretty true for me.

The quick news run down is that it will be launched at the earliest in 2012, and it has been in production for about 3 years so far (with 1.5 years of design/planning prior to that). The game will be called World of Darkness Online (WoDO), and it’s first iteration will be based on Vampire: the Masquerade (Masquerade). Later on, it is hoped that the other splats like werewolves and changelings will become playable characters, but for now it will be vampires and possibly human characters, such as hunters (vampire killers) or ghouls (Blood-addicted humans).

CCP is also making “official” some playstyles, which WoDO will contain in an interconnected manner. They are coffee house (Second-Life chatroom), theme-park (World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online), and sandbox (EVE, A Tale in the Desert). However, the game is going to have a very mature slant with little room for immaturity, some sort of self-policing, and inclusiveness to the LGBT audience. There will be combat, but it won’t be the core of the game. So that’s what we know so far. My thoughts after the break.

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Undead Labs Ticking Along

There’s been some recent activity at Undead Labs.  You might recall they are the newest MMO hotshots in town going to create a console-based zombie MMO.  The best thing is that Jeff Strain and Co. are taking a page right from their alma mater ArenaNet and creating some brilliant concept art right off the bat.  You can check out their art director’s post here, but one of the scariest, most haunting zombie pieces ever I just had to include after the break.  I seriously can’t believe it’s just concept art.

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