Kill Ten Rats

My longtime group of gaming buddies includes a bunch of casual GW2 players. Pretty much everyone bought the game, and the lack of subscription fee allows people to hop in and out at a whim. One of them noticed that I had more than 8000 achievement points, which seemed bafflingly high to him, and you can only imagine his reaction to my explanation that people are 5000 points and more ahead of me, like my guildmate who was competing for the achievement point leaderboards and used to consistently do every daily every day.

When I am into a game, I am a bit more hardcore than average, but I am not always in hardcore GW2 mode. Let me lay out how I keep advancement rolling in Guild Wars 2 on less than an hour a day with no serious investment of time, effort, or attention. (If you want to invest one of those three, you can do a lot more.)
Continue reading [GW2] Getting Ahead in Guild Wars 2 (Without Really Trying)

I was getting a little squeamish with my Christmas gift for Mrs. Ravious because she was fast approaching enough gold to buy the Leaf of Kudzu legendary precursor, and she was hellbent. I embellished some rumors I saw about ArenaNet adding precursor crafting as a Guild Wars 2 holiday gift (rumors which I did not make up), which made her cautious enough for me to jump in and buy the precursor (516 gold).

Thank you so much to those that donated. I told Mrs. Ravious about your help and she was extremely grateful and thought it was the coolest thing that it was a communal effort. It was also a communal effort in my household as my girls were in charge of making the “card” for her gift. My 7 year old drew the picture on her own (we are still amazed at her drawing ability), and my 4 year old made up the story. I edited the story because otherwise there would be a three page tangent on the astronaut’s adventures. I did my best to keep her focused on “mommy” and “the flower bow” during her telling.

Happy Holidays To All!

–Ravious

In a moment of clarity, the obviousness of the connection apparent for years to most, I saw that Guild Wars 2 vistas must have been a nod to Assassin’s Creed’s viewpoints. In both games there is a player-initiated cutscene to showcase the environment. Cue panoramic music. Cue widescreen format. Except… there’s a difference, and it actually took me until Assassin’s Creed 3 to notice.

In Assassin’s Creed 3 the viewpoint scene gets a little more dramatic with a quick-pan/slow-pan combo angling around Connor (the player) who is standing dramatically above the earth, defiantly against the landscape. In Guild Wars 2, I was lucky to find my player in most of the vistas. I remember one of my favorites that I did a doubletake on to get a proper screenshot was where my character was clearly in small view on a fort in Fields of Ruin. Looking back, I am surprised to find that this was such a rare occurrence.

In 2014, I want Guild Wars 2 to have a little more player-oriented focus. I want my characters to have more screen time, and I want other players to have more screen time. Continue reading [GW2] 2014 Focus Wish – Eye’s On Me

I admit that I don’t have much of a competitive bone, so I need someone else to help me understand the meaning of this elusive term, “good fights.” Exactly what would be defined as one?
—Jeromai

I characterize “a good fight” as one with roughly balanced forces, where “balance” mixes quality and quantity. This applies to the two levels at which WvW takes place.

WvW competition happens at two levels: individual fights and overall score (“PPT,” points per turn). Individual players are rewarded according to individual fights, where you get points for kills and captures. (There are rewards for defending, but the system is weighted towards rewarding offense over defense. More on the virtues of defending below.) Servers are rewarded according to how many objectives they control over time (plus points for stomps). This post addresses the server level (“a good matchup”), and tomorrow we discuss the individual fights (“a good fight”).
Continue reading [GW2] “A Good Fight” Part 1

This week, the dice came down differently, and Isle of Janthir is the top seed in NA Bronze. This still leads to poor WvW, this time with us as the big guy. It is not as horrid a mismatch as Season One intentionally created, but IoJ took an early 20,000 point lead and has the second-highest score in NA. It is not “hold almost every keep on every map” unbalanced, but it is “flee before the larger zerg or die” unbalanced.

I had not seen a WvW queue on IoJ for over a month, so this week we get the bandwagon. This is a major factor in degrading the WvW experience. The winning team grows while the losing team shrinks as fairweather warriors follow the wind. The players in that swollen zerg have less experience, which nullifies the lone benefit we saw in the Season: developing a skilled core who could strategically fight against larger numbers. The average player is shaky on how to deal with opposing siege, and my limited time in WvW this weekend has not brought me into contact with our better commanders. Perhaps the ones who are on now are better militia coordinators and therefore better for the population we have on now, as opposed to precise folks who will not put up with ill-disciplined rabble.

Because the weight classes are closer, I did find good fights. In the Saturday night queue, guild members reported a stirring zerg vs. zerg vs. zerg fight on the order of 40-60 people from each server. Thumbs up! In off-hours fights, I had trouble finding relatively even numbers. We found some enemy zergs, but it was easier to tell we had more people once the bodies started falling. It wasn’t the instant faceroll 80 vs. 20 fights we have been the “20” of recently, but 50 vs. 30 is still a roll unless the 30 are much better. You cannot be just a bit better when zergbusting, because one person killed on your side can rally a half-dozen downed on their side, so it is hard to chip away at that 50.

I expected Crystal Desert to be carrying its matchup away, but they’re only about 10,000 points up as I type this. It is looking like our WvW weight class would be best suited by IoJ, North Shiverpeaks, and Henge of Denravi, but that is an unlikely trio given that tiers are trios. The dividing points round some servers up and others down in a way that is unfortunate given a spread that does not quite work out to trios.

: Zubon

Props to Fort Aspenwood for rocking tier 2.