Queen’s Jubilee is the first release for the August content release in Guild Wars 2. The Queen’s Jubilee is a festival centered on the human capital city of Divinity’s Reach. This guide is written for those just buying Guild Wars 2 now or returning after a long break. Any level character may participate in the activities below, unless otherwise noted. Continue reading [GW2] New Player’s Guide to Queen’s Jubilee
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.[GW2] Come Together for the Queen’s Jubilee
ArenaNet did a few things differently this time around with the press preview for the upcoming Queen’s Jubilee. Instead of being granted full access, which allows some to write full guides and spoilers, ArenaNet prepared a private Twitch stream. The main reason seems to be that this next update is chock full of story happenings, and the team did not want anything spoiled. So my first impressions are going to be narrower than previous ones.
Anyway, the human queen decided that a hole in her capital city was not a good symbol of human resilience and triumph, and so she decided to make it in to a fierce battleground, the Crown Pavilion. The Crown Pavilion is a new sub-zone in Divinity’s Reach split up in to a 6-piece pie shape. All around the Pavilion are the mechanical representations of humanity’s enemies (the new Watchknights with a layer of mesmer magic).
Continue reading [GW2] Come Together for the Queen’s Jubilee
Tinker Metal Dice
Back in June, we mentioned that our friend Tesh had a Tinker Dice Kickstarter going. That did not go, but there were several comments expressing interest in his metal and gearpunk designs. His new Kickstarter is for the metal dice, and he has already reached the stretch goal to start introducing gearpunk dice as options.
So good for our buddy in the MMO blogger collective. :) Feel free to add more money and support more dice options.
: Zubon
[GW2] Ride Guide
I approve of the way the Guild Wars 2 Living Story achievements incentivize experiencing content. While a few of the mini-game achievements reward aberrant behavior, on the whole the achievements do a good job of directing people towards content, rewarding multiple styles of play, using new content to feature old content rather than making it superfluous, rewarding both exploration and completionism, and not encouraging unhealthy completionism.
Continue reading [GW2] Ride Guide
This Needs to Stop
The recent talk of the internet is a series of reminders that humans are still social primates, a species known for pack behavior and escalating aggression against outsiders. The internet gives you a broader range of outsiders to reach and the digital equivalents of poo and punches to throw.
If you follow the links in some recent collections of stories about incidents, you will find an indie developer driven from the market, death threats for changing reload times in FPSes or advocating cosmetic changes to currency, and add rape threats if the target in question is female. Okay, that last one is slightly unfair: add immediate rape threats if the target in question is female, add rape threats against the men too if it goes on long enough. (“Long enough” can have very short values online.) Continue reading This Needs to Stop
[GW2] The Orrian Interview
The Guild Wars 2 Living World has been giving us a world tour throughout Tyria. There have been amalgamated armies in the Shiverpeaks, ancient amphibious creatures claiming island territory, sky pirates, and now a celebration of human resilience complete with hot air balloons is coming our way. And there sits Orr, where the personal story ended. I asked ArenaNet if they would be interested in discussing their thoughts on Orr nearly a year after launch. I got one of the best when Colin Johanson, one of the Guild Wars 2 leads, decided to jump on this plague carrier of an interview and discuss this region.
[GW2] Freshman Year Storytime
“It’s like a teenager figuring out who they are.â€
“Yeah, but that’s every [MMO] their freshman year.â€
-Chris and Celeste, Guild Wars Reporter Episode 70
A month from now Guild Wars 2 will be one year old. I’m sure I, and everybody else, will have memoirs of journeys, troubles, and a look back when that time comes. For another month, though, we’re still in the freshman year. Except, it would be like if the freshman’s big sister went to high school in a conventional way, and then the freshman (and school) changed everything. There is no convention to follow. ArenaNet is trail blazing the entire way, good or bad, for the rest of the industry to follow (or not), and for a cohesive story in the Living World, it’s been a rocky path.
In the fantastic GW2Hub interview with Bobby Stein, Stein remarks that they don’t yet have a mechanism to log what’s past and what’s to come for the Living World story. It’s slated to come later this year. ArenaNet understands that it’s hard for an average player to make sense of it all with the two-week increments. I agree that the road the past couple months has been jarring. Conventionally, MMO players are used to festivals as being… breakaways. For Guild Wars 2 (post Flame & Frost) it feels like each month is a new breakaway. Continue reading [GW2] Freshman Year Storytime
[GW2] Three Cutthroat Activities
With my tongue-in-cheek rage dissipating, I wanted to talk in a more rounded way about the three new activities that came with the latest Guild Wars 2 update, Cutthroat Politics. The official site lists these as “activitiesâ€, and they are all repeatable mini-games of a sort. Two are of a PvP nature, and one is PvE.
Last night I spent way too much time playing Southsun Survival. Of the three new activities that came with the Cutthroat Politics update, Southsun Survival is the only one that appears to be a permanent fixture as part of a rotating daily activity. Southsun Survival is best explained as Hunger Games on Southsun Cove. It is one of the best PvP experiences I’ve had in a while, and each round lasting almost 6 minutes on the nose each time (out of possible 15 minutes) feels different. In one sense it feels very rogue-like, which is something I am not sure I would ever apply to an MMO. Continue reading [GW2] Three Cutthroat Activities
Responding to Incentives
There’s a problem with MMOs not valuing adaptability in general – WoW’s raids tend to be designed around characters that are optimised to do one thing well, and the whole ethos of the game and its competitors/imitators has been to push players towards making characters that are one trick ponies that perform that one trick very well. These players feel somewhat cheated if the game then throws them a curveball and that trick that has served them so well up until now doesn’t work. You would need a game where every fight is different right from level 1 to train players into expecting to have to vary their tactics. WoW doesn’t EVER do that – high level dungeons and raids tend to have a gimmick or a dance, but nothing that fundamentally requires players to vary how they play.
This is a good insight. You are trained to play a genre in a specific way. If the vast majority of North American MMO players have been trained to have deeply specialized characters, they will assume that this is just how you play MMOs and wonder what is wrong with you. And you know, I could be in the wrong here, and I certainly would be if I went into a WoW raid and expected each character to be well-rounded; Continue reading Responding to Incentives
[GW2] Achievement-Colored Content
I was having a lot of fun in Aspect Arena, which is one of the three new activities in this bi-weekly Guild Wars 2 update, Cutthroat Politics. It’s more or less capture-the-flag with three classes (wind, sun, and lightning). I was also working on the Kiel Supporter meta-achievement, which can be filled, in part, by playing Aspect Arena.
The baseline achievement for Aspect Arena is simple and does not color gameplay. Aspect Arena Frequenter just requires 15 games to be played, but time flies when you are having fun and trying new tricks and strategies. Crystal Capper is also pretty simple because it requires that the player capture 10 crystals. In a sense it focuses gameplay, but capturing crystals is really the focus of this PvP activity anyway. Crystal Breaker was where I started seeing the achievement taint gameplay.
On paper, Crystal Breaker looks fine; kill 15 players that are holding crystals. Players do want to stop the other team from scoring. After playing 15 games, every player with reasonable skill should have a few crystal bearer kills. Yet, I saw on Tuesday night that Crystal Breaker was affecting gameplay because many people were focusing on killing crystal bearers. In some games it was laughable at how neither side wanted to pick up a crystal because the players wanted crystal bearer kills. A few times a teammate and I would stand at the base of one of the side towers waiting for some poor schmuck to get up and grab the crystal. Without that achievement, the focus would have reverted to a more natural gameplay state.
In olden times, there would be two content guides in order of focus: quests and achievements. The quest line for the content update would direct people to the content, where they could check that content off for completing the quest. An achievement would increase the content’s playable time or skill become a content guide for an additional challenge. Players then could have the feeling of pure completion (“I did all the quests!â€) without bashing their heads against really difficult achievements. The casuals and hardcore each had their cake. Continue reading [GW2] Achievement-Colored Content