Bring Out Your Dead

After seeing all the activity that was going on in other alliances during the Canthan New Year event, and noting the complete lack of activity in our old alliance guilds over the past couple of months, the thought arose that it might be a good idea to disband the alliance and join another one.

I have been playing with some people in The Master Cartographers [Maps] alliance, and thought that they might be a good fit for us. A couple of inquiries and a couple of conversations later, we decided to give a new alliance a shot. We are now one of 8 guilds in the alliance – most of them are fairly small, they all have a PvE focus and a mature membership.

The central forum for the alliance is on the Guild Wars Realm fan site, with the alliance sub-forum. Many of the member guilds have histories and information posted there, and I’d encourage you to take a little time to find out about them. Anybody who wants to post something there is more than welcome to, I’ve already posted a bit about us in the welcome thread created for us. The members of [REAL] are also gathered on Crossing Tyria.

Gaile posted a developer update today outlining how they’re going to make Razah easier to obtain. Briefly, they’re going to be removing the gem requirements, and offering a quest to get a gem refund for those people who have already completed the existing quest.

Jeff talks a bit more about GW:EN and GW2 – how they decided to do GW2, a bit more about how the persistent features of GW2 might work with a couple of examples, and some about how GW:EN connects GW to GW2:

Jeff Strain Interview

They also have some screenshots and concept art from GW:EN at the bottom of the interview.

The promised information on Hard Mode finally got posted to the fansites this morning:

Gaile’s Hard Mode post on GW Guru

I’m really happy to see they went with revamped and improved skillbars and AI instead of making it a DoA style environmental effect and massive damage fest.

The May issue of PC Gamer also arrived in at least a few subscriber’s mailboxes today:

PC Gamer summary on GW Guru

The article confirmed that pretty much all of the information from the Inquirer article from a couple of weeks ago was true. The next release is indeed going to be an expansion, with all level-20 content and no new classes, and is going to be the last of the Guild Wars line, followed by a stream of smaller free updates. Beta testing for Guild Wars 2 is scheduled to start next year.

Characters won’t directly transfer between the games, but there will be a Hall of Monuments in Guild Wars 2 where the Guild Wars characters will be memorialized. In addition, it sounds like you will be able to have a mini-pet version of your Guild Wars characters for your characters in Guild Wars 2.

One of the things that’s kept me from posting here for the last few months has been an unwillingness to vent about Factions while it was still the current game, so indulge me for a couple of paragraphs while I take care of that.

With the Nightfall preview weekend behind us, and a month left until the release date, I’m happy to be waving goodbye to Factions. Goodbye to the poorly-implemented Luxon/Kurzick war, useless town control, inaccessable Elite missions, timers for almost all the mission bonuses, miles of ugly city and waste water, and ugly exploding enemies. That’s not to say that I personnally didn’t have fun with it (11 characters with the Protector of Cantha title), but that many other people didn’t – to the point that most of the end mission areas were mostly empty a lot of the time, and a surprising (to me) number of people in the guild that haven’t even finished the main story line with one character. There are some beautiful areas in Factions, especially in the Jade Sea, but unfortunately, it seems that few people had the stamina to get there.

Alliances, which could have been very helpful, turned out to also be poorly thought out – with no way to see who, if anyone, is online in any of the other guilds, you’re left with the only recourse being spamming the Alliance channel with “Is anyone there?” messages – which isn’t exactly inspiring, especially if there’s no answer. My response to ArenaNet’s question of “Do you really want to see a list of potentially 1000 members?” is an absolute Yes, Please – and I’d happily settle for just a list of those that are online.

OK, that’s better.

The Nightfall PvE preview weekend left me very hopeful and excited about what is to come. The Hero system means saying goodbye to the often-agonizing process of putting together a full team, while at the same time dispensing with many of the shortcomings of playing the game with the existing Henchmen. Have two people that want to do a mission together that’s designed of 8? No problem! Just take 3 heroes each, work out which heroes and which skill setup (also helped along by being able to save builds), and you’re good to go. As an extra bonus, you get to act as two squads, each player’s heroes following their respective player.

The storyline, voice acting, and map design also seem to have received a major upgrade from what we have seen before. A community divided by the Luxon/Kurzick war is reunited as all being Sunspears. The maps are largely open and unrestricted, with the exceptions actually making sense and fitting in with the rest of the game. The scenery has a theme, but isn’t repetitive. If they manage to carry on what was presented on the starter island into the rest of the game, Nightfall will be a huge improvement over Factions, and possibly even Prophecies. Imagine that.

Catching up with guild news, the cape redesign happened as a result of noticing that everyone (including me) had turned off their capes on a permanent basis. The black background both serves as a neutal separator and a way to keep the cape from being the main focus of attention when it’s on. The red/brown colors were chosen as being the most widely used in the base colors of the armors, and the organic theme of the background and foreground images was a nice change from the hard lines of the previous design.

I’ve pruned the unused trial accounts from the guild roster to give a somewhat more accurate view of the current state of our membership. I’m also seriously considering the removal of a couple of the long-inactive accounts, with the exception of our oldest inactive member – that one serves as a nice reminder of how long we’ve been here (and when the next round of birthday presents starts).

After a bit of discussion over in the forum on this thread, I set up an event calendar on the site to help manage getting people together in the game.

Anyone can post a new event, but it won’t show up on the calendar for everyone until one of our coordinators sees it and approves it. As I mentioned in the forum thread, the calendar is set up for Pacific Time. If you want to be able to set the time to your local time, you’ll need to be registered as a user of the calendar – get in touch with me if this applies to you. 🙂

Lots of things to celebrate today!

ArenaNet updated the game to include an impressive decoration of Lion’s Arch, Droknar’s Forge, and Tomb of the Primeval Kings for Halloween. Gaile (and the Frog) were hanging out in the International districts of Lion’s Arch talking to people and organizing conga lines and dance parties, and making movies that should appear later for everyone to see. Gaile also dropped some hints that this is just the start, and that more will be coming for the holiday over the weekend with the finale on Monday.

As part of the update, they included the long-overdue ability to turn off the capes everywhere except during PvP matches. The control is located in the Inventory window in the upper left corner. I finally got to see the back of my 15K Pyromancer armor for the first time.

ArenaNet also announced the winners for the Halloween contest, and our very own Seven Seas of Rhye got an Honorable Mention (see near the bottom, on the left). Congratulations Rhye!

Making pretty pages isn’t my strong suit, but manipulating and organizing data is. I’ve put together a completely up-to-date listing of skills, which you can find starting at https://www.boyd.dreamhosters.com/skills. The icon list is a great resource for when you see a screenshot and wonder what that icon is in the skill bar. The full list includes skill availability information right in the list (T indicates Trainer, Q for Quest, and C for Capture location), as well as a graphical respresentation of the skill costs and recharge times. The skill costs and stats are based on the 0-15 attribute range that ArenaNet uses for its listings (and internally, from what I understand – don’t ask me why). If you find any mistakes, please let me know.

I’m going to leave the skill links to GWOnline on the right for now because they have much more detailed information on the skill quests, if the location given in the new list isn’t enough.

Since screenshots have always been popular around here, I’ve added the ability for everyone to upload an album of their own that everyone else can then look at. Guild Wars saves its screen shots in bitmap format, which is painfully large (especially for people on slower connections). In order to share them, please convert them to JPEG images before you upload. If you don’t already have software that can do the conversion, you can pick up Irfanview for free – then all you have to do is open the screenshot you’d like to upload with Irfanview and Save As… and select JPEG as the new file type. If anyone needs more detailed instructions, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help.

You can find the new picture gallery here (and I’m also adding a link to the right for future reference). When you register as a new user, you should see a new album with your user name that you can upload pictures to.

For anybody who missed it, our forum is up and running. I encourage everyone who hasn’t signed up and/or posted in the Introductions thread to do so.