My phone was on shuffle as I got dresed and in between the Kate Bush & SoM tracks the theme for Divinity’s Reach started and I had a gut-deep longing to return to the city one more as my mind replayed the sights & sounds of my long-ago wanderings there. Most peculiar.
Tag Archives: GW2
The state of things…
Over the last month or so the final nail in the gaming PC’s coffin was driven home by the good lady. She bought Minecraft Pocket Edition for The Boy and in my attempt to know more about it to help him I have become addicted to the damn thing to the total exclusion of everything else. I haven’t logged into Guild Wars 2 since the start of December – I even missed the whole of the Winterfest and although it sounded fun I can honestly say I don’t mind.
You see, Xmas was a great break from a very busy & highly pressured workplace and I wanted to spend add much time with the kids as possible so I didn’t want to lock myself away in my tiny computer room. Therefore to find a game I could play on my tablet with the family was perfect and it’s become increasingly obvious I’m in a gaming phase where I can share my time with the brood.
So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, the answer is in a mine somewhere on my tablet. That and zipping all over the county for work. Hell, I’ve stopped listening to gaming podcasts (except the always wonderful Contains Moderate Peril) and have little energy to blog or tweet. I’m sure this will change at some point, but until then I’m not pushing it 
The Ever Busy Burro (and the fun of Guild Wars 2)
They seek him here… they seek him there… all a bit daft really because he’s at work! Ah work, such an evil mistress… my work is super busy right now and that has left me little time to play anything and next to no time to blog, which is lucky because I’ve had nothing to blog about because I’ve not been playing… The Circle of Liiiife!
Still, little time play is not no time to play and I have been dipping in and out of Tyria when I can and I can confirm that I’m as in love with this game today and I was the first day I played it. God Almighty it’s good! I mean, really, really good. Just fun and more fun stuck together and decorated with fun! So much to tell you though, where do I start?
First off I’m now at level cap (80) and still haven’t finished the personal story with my main (I’m still only playing him) and it’s still bloody good fun! Halloween has come and gone and was a total blast (the first holiday event I’ve actually enjoyed and got good gear out of!) and now The Lost Shores expansion is upon us – it’s a good time to start playing if you haven’t yet
I’ll say one thing for insomnia…
… it makes completing a daily in Guild Wars 2 a sinch. I had a great time in the wee small hours of this morning just idly wandering from Lion’s Arch (where I had upgraded my armour, weapons and runes the night before) back into Timberline Falls. There are so many fun events in that area such as the Norn moot where you have to protect the ale from thieving skirtt (don’t let anyone tell you the Norn are tough – they get the crapola kicked out of them by a handful of pissed rats!). Or how about the drunken skritt. Or how about the amazing Assurans who fear the local skritt are becoming too clever and they drag you into a schlomp across the valley and into the skritt caves to stop them – I won’t spoil the story, but trust me it’s brilliant!
Now I’m knackered and seemed to have the inherited the face of a corpse, but by god if I can’t sleep again tonight I know where I’ll be – Tyria
A funny thing about Guild Wars 2…
…is that playing it seems to swallow up all the time I have planned for writing about it. Fair enough, I’m as busy as hell at work (soon to have added trips to London – boo!) but I know I could spare the odd hour in an evening to pop out even a small post about some gorgeous location or amazing dynamic event but when I start to plan it I find my fingers mysteriously clicking on the GW2 button and not the Google Docs link… spooky!
Seriously, I have *never* had as more fun in a game . The initial days of LOTRO, my fondest memories of SL and just about any time in L4D(1&2), Max Payne (all of them), Portal (both) & Half Life (just the first – the second was like watching the film Children of Men, amazing but ultimately bloody depressing) have all grabbed me in the same way, but something about Guild Wars 2 feels different. Something about the non-competitive nature of the play combined with the sheer repeatability of the world just makes me want to log in and play again and again and again… Damn you Arenanet, you’ve made me a junkie!
See you sometime in 2013. Maybe.
And then they added a dragon…
Gathering for fun and profit…
After work yesterday my head was mashed & by the time I had got home, had my tea, seen the nippers off to bed and had a brew with the good lady I was in no fit state to play GW2 to any degree other than collecting a few mats and learning a little more about buy & sell orders. Both DropDeadGuides and Markco are keen on using buy & sell orders smartly – playing the long game rather than buying & selling immediately.
To begin with I’m starting with sell orders and rather than just choosing an immediate sale, I’m looking at how many items are on order and if there aren’t too many I’m placing mine further in the queue by giving them a slightly higher price. If it takes a week, it takes a week but they will sell at some point and I’ll make a few more copper (or several more silver in some cases) than just selling them for the basic price.
In the latest DDG video the host explains something I have been trying out in a very small way in the last day or two – refining basic materials and selling the results for a higher overall profit. Where DDG differs is the scale of his efforts and this is where I need to expand my use of buy orders. I’ll be sure to try this when I get home tonight as I figure even if this gains me 20 to 50 silver every day or two then if I can keep that up I’ll be laughing in a week or two.
So far, using the ‘sell everything I have collected’ method, I have made and now banked 4 gold pieces and this morning I logged in to see I had 20 silver waiting for collection after I placed last night’s sell orders. Baby steps, but steps all the same
Another day, another copper piece…
I tell you something for nothing, making money in Guild Wars 2 is hard. This is down to the simple fact that if you make a stack of gold pieces you can trade these for gems and use those to buy things from the cash shop such as character slots, storage upgrades and cosmetic items – the very same character slots, storage upgrades and cosmetic items you can buy with real money and not make-believe coins which is quite obviously the preferred option for Arenanet. Still, it *is* possible to make enough gold in game to buy things from the cash shop and that’s what I’ve set to trying this week.
I now have the bruises to prove it.
Ye gods! I’ve never been much good with money so to find out that the trading post really is not an auction house like the one in LOTRO but much more like our real world stock market has fried my brain a little. Add to that the fact that Arenanet have been very good at closing off any market opportunities such as wide spreads or over-valued demand spikes and you quickly get to the place that this fella got to – GW2 really is not an easy game to make money in and probably always will be.
Still, by eschewing crafting I had managed to save up a lot of mats and I found some of them were going for a few silver on the TP so in a mad splurge I made about 5 gold pieces which I have been hoarding jealously. I have looked for spreads but there are none (at least none I can see – I think you’d have to have a lot of time and money to either observe them happening or create them artificially). I have tried salvage and only ever broken even. My only money making scheme that works is mat farming, and only then for a very select few items (sesame seeds for instance).
Sigh. I hope you have better luck than me. And if you do, send a tip this way won’t you? 
Where Dolyaks Go To Die…
Where is the Burro? In the middle of BusyTown, that’s where! Ye gods, work is insanely busy and on top of that all my brain can cope with in an evening is playing Guild Wars 2 as opposed to blogging about it. Once again I find myself glad I don’t write this thing for a living 
Ahhh, Guild Wars 2. The tales I’ve wanted to tell you, the blog posts I’ve started in my head and never taken any further in favour of playing “just a little bit more”. I don’t know where to begin with telling you just how amazing GW2 is and just how much fun I’m having playing it, so instead I’ll leave you with a small scene that I witnessed last night.
Whilst running through Centaur contested lands I found a small hollow in which several Dolyak corpses lay. For those not playing GW2, Dolyaks are large, shaggy, loveable beasts of burden who easily fit names like Daisy & Wooly so to see several of them dead was a shock. Not as much of a shock as I got next when a live one wandered past me into the hollow. It circled a patch of ground a few times as I noticed it seemed slow, grey & old before it lay down with a sigh. Suddenly a flock of crows appeared and I thought for one horrible minute they were going to attack it, but instead they circled it, silent as if they were waiting for something. The huge beast took one last juddering breath and died right there in front of me – at the same time the crows let out a cry and took to the air again as the ghostly form of the Doylak rose from its now lifeless body and walked ponderously off along an age old path to a hidden cave. I followed it in and saw the spirit walk up to, and then vanish at, a beautiful pool in the cave’s depths. As this was happening a small boy watched with his granddad who explained to the child how this was something that had gone on since time before memory.
Now come on, how bloody lovely is that?
Between the hooves and the boots…
There is a wonderfully de-forested plain in Guild Wars 2′s Kessex Hills where the Seraph and the Centaurs are locked in an ongoing tug-of-war struggle for dominance. As a player you get to beat off waves of invading Centaurs and should you fail then the Serpah are pushed back until they lose control of the area, a state that not only means travel there is more dangerous but the Seraph settlements have less to offer you in terms on vendors. The shot below is of Jurak (my main, a human engineer and at the time of typing this a proud Level 20) stood on the walls of the Seraph fort looking across to the Centaur encampment and I think you’ll agree it’s a bloody impressive looking place!
Whilst I was there, the Centaurs had been beaten back and the Seraph patrolled the camp (camp seems too small – this was a fort really) and I was checking out the vendors that had entered the fort with the Seraph when a dynamic event kicked off that saw the Centaurs try and retake their fort en masse. Boy that was a fun fight but in the end the combined might of the Seraph and the players saw them off and all was once more calm. And that’s when I heard something that piqued my interest. An NPC shouted to her commander (another NPC) that she had salvaged enough supplies to build an arrow cart that could protect the nearby mine… Mine? Arrow cart? This, I thought, must be one of the cues that Arenanet had said we must look for at the end of an event that would herald in another event, and boy did it ever!
Now I seemed to have been the only one to notice the NPCs because a few moments later I was alone and escorting the soldier with the supplies along the road. Thankfully by the time the Centaurs attacked (as you knew they must) a few other players had joined me and we had a long series of fun raiding attacks to deal with until we got to the mine settlement at which point the soldier built a working arrow cart (I used it, it was working alright) and left for the fort. Again the players began to vanish but I stuck around. Something about this cart, this working cart, struck me as odd. No one would put a working cart here if it wasn’t supposed to be used, would they?
Hell no! Although there seemed to be no NPC signal this time, the event chain moved on again and the Centaurs now attacked the village & mine! I leapt on the arrow cart and fired away like it was grouse season but I seemed to be the only one who knew the cart was there & could be used and soon I was overrun by Centaurs and the cart destroyed. By now a sizeable group of players had been attracted by the fight and the village was in chaos! There were Centaurs everywhere and the whole place was going off like Blackpool Illuminations (google it). I fought like a demon but their numbers were too many and I went down! And then a lucky kill rallied me and I was back in the action! I jumped back in with renewed vigour until, at long last, the Centaurs were, for the third time in that event chain, driven back. Boots had triumphed over hoofs, for a little while at least. Ahhh, good times
And people wonder why I love dynamic events so much
Take that, you strangely sexy hoofy, horny lady with a tail, you… Boy, now I think about it, I could quite easily fancy a Centaur…
