Bring Out Your Dead

A couple of hours ago ArenaNet announced that the February Beta Event is going to take place starting early in the morning (PST) on February 18th. The move is being made to accomodate the changes they’re making to the Ascalon area – showing it as it was before the Charr invasion, complete with a large set of quests that tie in to the later quests from last month’s beta.

Also, the skill lists that are pointed to in the right-hand side bar for each of the six professions have been updated to reflect the latest changes that have been made in the game. Of particular note is a number of enhancements to the Ranger skills.

There’s no official word at the moment about whether there’s going to be another character wipe for this event, although Gaile has stated that she’s going to be getting an answer to that question to the community soon. Given the scale of the changes they have planned, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to be starting over at level 1.

Thinking about different character builds? Wondering how attribute point distributions affect certain skills? Want to lay out a team of up to 8 characters? Troy Bronzan has put together a program that lets you do all that, and save and print the results as well. You can find the Guild Wars Team Builder on the download page of the Spirits of War guild site.

If you haven’t already seen the post-beta weekend Fansite Friday, it’s well worth the read.

Given that they’ve announced a February beta, we’re not going to be seeing a release in early February. The new dynamic quest system has added a whole new dimension to the game. The down side is that now they have to populate the rest of the world like they did the area around Ascalon – a great deal of work on top of everything else they need to do. Unless they’ve got a lot of content already done that they’re just not showing us, I can easily see them missing their early-2005 release – a thought that gets more painful with each month’s beta.

One of the major changes to the game this beta weekend is the addition of the dynamic quest system for the games explorable areas (just the areas around Ascalon at the moment). IGN has an interview with Jeff Strain about how it all works and whats their goals were in setting it up.

I’m happy to announce that our Guild is back. The run from Ascalon to Lion’s Arch yielded just enough rewards to afford the price of the new Sigil.

I took advantage of the opportunity to do some redesign of the cape as well – I hope everyone likes it. 🙂

Check out the number 10 spot on the Guild Ladder – from a screen shot I took just after creating the Guild!

Our Guild (and all the others) has been deleted, and they’ve got a somewhat different process for creating it again. It used to be that it just took 50 gold and you were done, but now there’s an item (the Sigil) that you need to give the Guild Creator NPC. You can get the Sigil either by winning it in the Tombs, or by buying it from another NPC trader. Since I don’t have a Tombs team at the moment, I’ve been collecting the gold needed (the price has been hovering a little over 200 gold). I’m probably half way there at the moment – any donations would be gladly accepted. 🙂

ArenaNet has published a Beta Weekend Event Special Edition Fansite Friday that covers some of the changes they’ve made to the game for this weekend, as well as explaining the character wipe.

With less than 24 hours to go, the reports are starting to come in that:

1. Accounts that weren’t used in the November and December betas have been deleted, along with all the characters they contained
2. The remaining characters have all been reset to level 1 and stripped of all their items
3. The one-time use keys that have already been used have all been deactivated

The guild ladder page on the Guild Wars site currently shows only 55 guilds, probably corresponding to the Alpha testers, and all their scores have been reset. If our guild has indeed been deleted, I’m making it a priority to get it back. 🙂 Send a message to Alara Batelle in-game and I’ll get you re-added.

All this would seem to point to ArenaNet getting ready to release the game, and at the end of a just-published article at FileFront they have a note that says that Guild Wars is slated for a February 1st release!

Also, if there’s anyone that you know that needs a key for this weekend’s event, FilePlanet has a promotion going on where you can pick up a key for free by registering with them.

Hopefully everyone is having a good New Year so far! Thanks to Light of Vega for the happy New Year wishes (yes, the comments do get read). 🙂

The Alpha testers have hinted at a fairly large number of changes that have been made to the game lately, but have also said that ArenaNet has been strongly encouraging them to not say anything in the public forums. The one addition that has leaked out is the new /sit emote, which lasts until you do something else – so you can leave your character sitting in town (or elsewhere) while you take a break.

In the spirit of preparing for the weekend, there’s an excellent thread of do’s and don’ts on the GWOnline forums here.

Also, note that the January beta will be starting just after Midnight Pacific Time (GMT-8) on Friday – so the total playing time is going to he 72 hours, not 48.