Author: Ravious
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Guild Wars – Shining Blade Camp
The ongoing Guild Wars viral campaign has reached a culmination, but likely not the culmination. The community was able to come up with two more hidden websites (/neeuqsiamlas/ and /stnarytothtaed/) each showing one word in the Tyrian alphabet. When combined it gave “Blade Camp” which lead to a site showing an in-game screenshot of the Shining Blade’s supposed camp after the Henge of Denravi fell to the White Mantle.
The camp turned out to be Dakutu Village in the Talmark Wilderness explorable area, which I believe is currently unoccupied. The Blade Camp image also contained another hidden link sending people to an extremely blurry War in Kryta link. What this means is anybody’s guess, but the viral campaign is marching on both in-game and out. Big thanks to everyone working very hard to crack all the codes.
–Ravious
the poetry of war
EDIT: Also be sure to check out the on-going courtship between Gwen and Thackeray.
Developer Gifts
We here at Kill Ten Rats aim to kiss up to developers in any way possible to get free subs, dusted off loot, and star treatment. Still, we have to appear as journalists-of-some-quality or we would be yelling at a cold corner on the internet. Thankfully, the brilliant Think Tank division of Kill Ten Rats came up with a way we can make money, please developers, and get more quality articles to you!
For a limited time, when you register for the Looking For Group Expo we will send 10 dead rats to your favorite developer! If you register a group of four or more people we will include a hand-drawn letter from the dead rats’ family. It only gets better! If Activision is your favorite developer we will make sure to include a handful of work-friendly Hantavirus rat droppings for free!
But, wait! There’s more! Mention Kill Ten Rats to the people at Looking For Group Expo, and in the developer’s gift package we will include a flea circus complete with Yersinia pestis diving pool. Hours of fun will be had as developers reinvigorate their creative juices watching fleas dance about on rat corpses.
Your recipient developers will be sent this wonderful gift package immediately. The contents provide hours of nerfball-like office fun, and the day can be ended with with a grilling cookout with freshly tenderized meat!  There is no better way to show the developers that you truly appreciate all the hard work they do. Act now before limited supplies run out!
–Ravious
void everywhere
Guild Wars – Bad, Bad Mr. Mantle
The Guild Wars viral campaign leading up to… something is creating a playful rift in the community. Playful, so far, I should say. As soon as the links to the White Mantle and the Shining Blade, two NPC organizations in Guild Wars, people started using hashtags to proclaim allegiance to a certain side. I bet ArenaNet was absolutely gleeful at the response considering all they did at that point was put up a poster for each adversarial organization. It was pretty fun, but what is most amazing to me is that people are actually siding with the White Mantle.
Let me put this into perspective. You go to a Super Bowl or World Cup party. There are too many available members of the opposite sex to really watch the game (even though you want to) so you flirt, eat, and talk while the game runs in the background. You leave to go home, without having watched much of the game at all, but you do catch the final score. Your team gets pummeled. So what do you do? You go home to where you recorded the game, sit down with a fresh pint and some nachos, and start cheering for your team like some madman who believes that by yelling at the TV you are actually giving your team energy. This is what it’s like to be proclaiming allegiance to the White Mantle right now.
Guild Transcendent
One of my favorite MMO related quotes from the sage Raph Koster discussing online tribalization where he says that people have a moment of clarity where they see they are part of things. They say in that moment “Oh, here’s my real community.â€Â For most of us social homo sapiens (and the few papio hamadryas that pop in here occasionally) a community is a necessary thing. Yet, as the internet, the MMO genre, and even gaming platforms like Steam evolve the sense of community as a finite thing gives way to a mass of thoughts and people that ebb and flow with tides of activity. The most basic of these units comprising the mass of community is of course the small, focused social club we call a guild.
Tamagotchi Craze
KTReuters – Teh Internet 1996
Today Bandai of Japan has released their flagship digital pet they call the Tamagotchi. A spokesperson for the company said that they believe that most schoolchildren will be playing with the small handheld game by Christmas. The game itself allows the player to interact with a virtual pet that the player can grow, feed, and teach. The controls and game are simple, but can allow for hours of fun according to the creator Akihiro Yokoi. Bandai stocks went through the roof with the projection that 70,000,000 Tamagotchi products will be sold in just over ten years.
This caused somber news throughout the handheld game industry. Nintendo, the company known for its popular Gameboy system declined official statement. However, a businessman speaking on condition of anonymity said that if the Gameboy could sell even a fraction of the amount of Tamagotchi’s sales it would make money hand over fist. The businessman refused to discuss whether the rumors of Nintendo planning on ditching its Gameboy line for a Tamagotchi-esque product were true.
This reporter, during the time traveling session, noted that in the reporter’s classroom of 26 students nearly two thirds of the students owned a Tamagotchi game or a similar knockoff. Only 4 students owned Gameboys. With reports like these coming from the children who will shape the future, it is clear that the future of handheld gaming is Tamagotchi. Now back to your regularly scheduled time.
–Ravious
plutonium is available in every corner drug store
Guild Wars Meme Virus
–Ravious
and doesn’t afraid of anyone
Guild Wars 2 Alliance Necessity
There is a lot of talk regarding the mechanics leap between Guild Wars 1 and its successor. We already know that Guild Wars 2 is changing the series in a big way with the inclusion of large persistent zones and the lack of exclamation point-type quests. There are so many other mechanics questions remaining unanswered. Will our skill bar be as limited as it was in the original Guild Wars? How will professions work across all the races? How will we find events, which seem to replace quests? Ad infinitum.  These questions are all important to the enjoyability of the game and the feeling of Guild Wars. I feel there is another far more consequential mechanic that should be duplicated to Guild Wars 2. That mechanic is alliances.  Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Alliance Necessity
Guild Wars 2 Stuff (3/22)
It’s been awhile since my last Guild Wars news post, but I think that ArenaNet slowed down quite a bit for the explosion of awesome we are expecting on Guild Wars 5th Anniversary (April 28). Hopefully the engines will begin to pick up more speed in the coming weeks.
ArenaNet’s Daniel Dociu gave a presentation at GDC. Unlike the many bullet-pointed presentations at the con, Docui’s presentation was filled with tons of concept art from the Guild Wars series. It even had a few 2.5d animations like the kind shown in the first Guild Wars 2 video (my favorite parts). Fans kindly asked – as kindly as any rabid, starving weasel can – for the presentation to be uploaded. The Community Managers pushed to get the presentation out to fans, which I believe was not originally planned. The presentation was slowed down with a few sounds and Guild Wars 1 music added so that all could see in high quality. The first two parts of four have been released so far, and I expect the last two parts to be released by the 5th Anniversary.
At GDC and ECCC (another small con), the Community Managers handed out some interesting flyers. The flyers had a picture of either a White Mantle guy with the word “Obey” or a hand holding the Shining Blade-iconic sword with the word “Dismantle.” Each picture also had a 2d bar code, which gave the URL to a site showing the flyers pictures. Here is the link to the White Mantle flyer and the link to the Shining Blade flyer.Â
Blizzard: Not One Of Us
There is no question that the strong majority of North American MMO players play World of Warcraft. Even assuming a paltry 3 million players are still playing in the twilight of the latest expansion, that is still a magnitude more active players than the next similar MMO in line. Other MMOs like FreeRealms and Runescape muddy the waters as to what is an active or subscribing player or even similar game. But, defining MMO is irrelevant. What is relevant is World of Warcraft is the god-king of MMOs, and like a good god-king, it views itself as above the rest to the degree that they might as well not exist.