Asya Mordina

GG Gaile
For those that took a nice spring break, let’s catch up on a few personnel changes at Arena.net. First Gaile Gray is moving from a Community Representative position and to a support role. Having actually been in a support role, the CR position must be harder than it looks. Andrew Patrick is also moving from a CR position to a QA position. I wish both of them all the best in their future jobs.

GL HF Regina Buenaobra
Replacing Gaile as CR at Anet is Regina Buenaobra. Regina, originally from Virginia, worked as a CR for X-Fire before joining Arena.net. She also has her own gamer blog, Acid for Blood.

Farewell Party
Anet gave Gaile a good going away party by having an ingame event where players could collect party materials used towards the Party Animal title. During the appearances by the Frog and the Rabbit in the major towns, players could earn double party points. Not a bad deal, considering players could earn 132 points every 3 hours. There was a downside to the event, as Arena.net couldn’t seem to get the times right and accidently started the event early and almost prematurely ended the event.

Buh-Bye to More of Asia
Taiwan, Macao, and Hong Kong will soon be isolated from the rest of the Guild Wars community. Apparently there is some disagreement between NCSoft and the Asian representatives for Guild Wars. It may have something to do with gold farming.

Update: NCSoft has reversed the decision and an April 11th, the above region’s valid accounts will be migrated to the American region, allowing players in the effected regions to resume play.

GvG Weekend Event
This weekend will be double Balthazar faction and Double Champ points starting at noon Friday PT and ending midnight Sunday PT.

HA Weekend Event
This weekend enjoy double Fame, double, Balthazar Faction, and double chest drops in Heroes Ascent. The event starts Friday at noon PT and ends midnight Sunday PT. Find a gimmick build and have some fame! I’ll probably be running an SB/RI variant. 

Minor Skill Update
On March 21st, Arena.net took quick action to stop a broken build getting out of hand. The fix came almost as rapid as the Signet of Might fix a while back. The skills updated include Shadow Walk and Dark Aura. The combination of the two skills before the fix resulted in hundrends of points of AOE damage per second.

World of Warcraft PvP Tournament
It appears that WoW is getting into the PvP business by having a PvP tournament where players can purchase a PvP pack for $20 that includes access to all gear. It also allows players to create max level characters for the PvP tournament. The grand prize for 3v3 tournament is $75,000. This is very similar to the GW tournaments. The drawback is that the PvP characters are only available through the 6 week tournament.

Linux and Mac Support for GW
CrossOver Games has annouced new Windows virtualization software to allow Guild Wars to run on the Mac and Linux platform. The software is priced at $40 and available from CodeWeavers.

Either Bunny! Boing! Boing!
No suprises here. Sweet Treat Weekend from noon Friday PT to Midnight Sunday PT. Players will be able to get Chocolate Bunnies and Golden Eggs. Looks like more time to spend outside Nolani.

China Looses Guild Wars
On March 18th, The9, the distributor for Guild Wars in China, announced that on March 31st they will cease operating Guild Wars in China. No specific reason provided.

IP Address Blocking
In an effort to combat gold sellers, Arena.net is now blocking gold sellers IP addresses from connecting to the game. Apparently banning thousands of accounts is detering gold selling. As a result, Arena.net will now monitor the IP addresses of the banned accounts, and once a threshold of banned accounts is reached, the IP address will also be blocked.

Arena.nerf Skill Updates
This weeks skill updates continue to make the ranger a less viable character to play. Sundering and Penetrating attacks have decreased damage to 3..10; decreased armor penetration to 10%; increased recharge to 4 seconds. Power Shot’s damage has been reduced to 5..20. Good thing expertise still works on touch skills.

Angorodon’s Gaze now only cost 5 energy; but, the health stolen is decreased to 10..40. Energy gained decreased to 1..9. The decrease in health stolen should stop the Gaze gimmick in GvG, but by getting back 5 energy every 5 seconds makes this a very good skill for a necro to carry.

GvG
On the heels of last weeks flavor of the week, We Quit Our Day Jobs [Band] rolled You Just Got Rick [Rold] with a dual Dervish/Assassin Shadow Step spike. It was good to see that Build Wars is in full force. This weeks flavor is the Balthazar D/A Shadow Steppers, as several top 100 guilds are running the build. It will be interesting to see how the new updates effect the build.

Double Weekend
This weekend celebrates double tournament reward points in GvG and HvH tournament play. According to the schedule, there are 9 possible times for this to take place. Seriously A.net, this is about as appealing as a double blue-drop weekend.

Game Update
New game updates today. GvG received a few changes. Victory or Death received a reduced damage increased to 10%; this skill now reduces healing by 10%. Victory is Ours now causes both teams get this bonus at Victory or Death, regardless of how many NPCs either team has; increased damage to 20%.

Elementalists may want to check the updates as Mind Blast, Rodgort’s Invocation, and Ward Against Melee all took hits. On the Mesmer side, Cry of Frustration’s energy cost was decreased to 10e. This was much desired.

Design A Weapon
The new weapons from the Design a weapon contest have been added to the game. Now’s the time to find them, farm them, and sell them.

As of this week, “The Player’s Voice” is changing to ”The Guild Wars Minute”. The refocused purpose of the blog is to give a preview of the upcoming events in Guild Wars and a rundown of the current hot topics in a concise format with links to more extensive information.

Double EotN Reputation Points
This weekend earn double Asura, Deldrimor, Ebon Vanguard, and Norn reputation points for completing quests defeating foes while under the effects of a shrine bonus. Points for completed books are uneffected.

5 Million Copies Sold
The Guild Wars franchise has sold over 5 million units across all chapters and expansions. Included in the count are Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North. Congratulations to the Arena.net team. Not sure how the 5 million translates into users, but I personally own 6 of the franchise units.

GvG Weekly Gimmick
Happened to catch You Just Got Rick [Rold] climbing the ladder to top 400 (39-9) in 2 days using a Necromancer spike consisting of 6 x Angorodon’s Gaze. Used correctly, the spike only costs 3 energy and can be repeated every 5 seconds.

Game Updates
Thursday Feb 21st, Arena.net closed an exploit that allowed players with a modified client to travel directly to explorable areas. This seems to be a recurring problem of late, allowing players with modified clients to travel anywhere. They also fixed a big that caused blank text to appear when skills were called out. I noticed a similar problem in which called targets were not being announced. That seems to have been corrected as well. (More Updates)

RAWR Cup
The next round of the RAWR Cup is scheduled to begin Saturday April 5th. The RAWR Cup Challenge is open to all guild and winners receive a sweet prize package. Support this player organized tournament by registering at Guild Cafe.

This weekend was the Guild Wars: Eye of the North (GWEN) preview event. The event allowed players to have a sneak peak at some the goodies in store in this first and last expansion for Guild Wars. The preview event was available only to players that had pre-ordered GWEN.

 The storyline starts when tremors are felt in the major cities. A quests takes the adventurer to a crevas leading to the dwarves. After a few cinematics and extreamely long downloads, players eventually end up in the major city, the Eye of the North.

Apparently the storyline is divided down 3 paths: Norn, Dwarf, and Ebon. The preview event allowed the exploration of some of the Norn storyline. The other storylines were restriced for the preview. A player doing only the primary quest could complete the preview in under 8 hours. Significantly less than the Nightfall preview.

Aside from the primary quests there were plenty of secondary quests to fill out the weekend. Such quests included dungeon exploring, dwarf boxing, and Norn fighting tournaments. Heroes could also be unlocked, including Gwen, whose fate every adventurer wondered about. Players could also start working on the Hall of Monuments where symbols of high level accomplishments could be viewed.

Preview Hits

• See new heroes
• Introduction to the dungeon system works
• View the Hall of Monuments
• Getting a nice drop at the end of each dungeon run from a giant chest
• PvE only skills
• Dwarf boxing
• Norn Fighting Tournament
• New pets including eagle and polar bear
• Dynamic music

Preview Misses 

• Extensive rehash of existing modes/skins. The expansion relies too heavily on existing ArenaNet assets. Examples: Djinn, polar bears, avalanches, and map tiles.
• Out of place monsters. Dredges from the Faction’s forest are in the dungeons. This gives the appearance of a slapped together level editing.
• Quests without a locator arrow. Running around with no idea where to go. Not fun. Examples include Krak’s Cavalry and Anything You Can Do. I don’t like Jack-in-the-Boss monsters that are not on radar either.
• Dude! Where’s my mission! Breaking from the mission metaphore and all task becoming a quest, gives GWEN a chaotic characteristic which this player does not like.
• Repeatable quests with no idea if they are repeats. Hey, this seems familiar. Why not call them groundhog day quests.
• Hall of Monuments. What a total failure. Customized pets. PvP rewards?
• Crazy Korean like chests that fall from the sky at the end of dungeons. This breaks the RPG aspect. It should be like chests in DoA where they open upon completion.
• All the chests use lockpicks. ANY chest that requires a lockpick should ALWAYS spit out a gold — NOT GRAPES! Spend 1,500 gold for a lockpick that breaks when you use it, and produces a 54g item. gg anet.
• Dungeons need adjacent outposts to facilitate party play. Anet is doing a wonderful job of turning a good co-operative RPG into an online single player game with built in instant messaging.
• Any type of PvE balance is gone. With the new skills and consumables it becomes a I win/You loose button.
• No sense of failure. Guess it is to boost self estime that even if the entire party is at -60DP the quest can still be accomplished. I even started one quest by intentionally getting to -60 DP just to see if it could be done. Yep.
• Ungodly long downloads. 20+ minutes. What happened to streaming updates at the login screen?
• Chirping NPCs get annoying.

Personally, I found the event failed to showcase GWEN. The Nightfall team should have worked on it. GWEN appears to have been infected by the NCSoft Dungeon Runner team.

Was listening to Guild Cast the other day, and Lady Sinaea spoke about how she was giving up on Nightfall PvE. I thought, hmmm, how interesting how were her views and mine so different. Then I found out. All my characters had been just running the missions and not really doing any skill capping or questing. The mission system offers some unique gameplay; however, the quest system is unoriginal and seems much more like grind than anything else.

Some of the quests like Hold the Line are just rediculously difficult. Having 30+ level 28’s patrol an area forcing the player to do nothing more than die, spawn, almost kill one monster, die, spawn, finish the kill, die, spawn, almost kill one monster, etc. is a complete grind fest. There is absolutely no originality in this endevor. It is a game, and as such should be entertaining and enjoyable. Attempting, let alone completing, these types of quests are neither.

Another issue is monster rez chaining. There was a quest in the desert where 2 monk monsters and 2 paragon monsters constantly resurrect each other. This forces the players into using gimmics like Frozen Soil in order to complete the quest. Yet another example is minion master monsters camping the resurrection shrine, constantly making new minions from the bodies of the dead players.

In Prophecies there were a few high level quests like the Last Day Dawns quests where this pattern can be found; however, they were endgame quests and relatively few of them. In Nightfall this seems to be the norm. It takes the fun out of the game.

Hope everyone had a good holiday and am looking forward when GvG picks up after the holiday.

Sorry for the absence, it can be attributed to how wonderful Nighfall is. Nightfall really offers unique missions that cannot be offered in a persistant MMORPG world. The epic Consolate Dock mission provides a rush of adrenaline with all the capture points, seige weapons, and plenty of enemies. Each Nightfall mission is unique and is unlike the original Prophecies campaign where the mission goal seemed to be kill everything until the end.

Heroes have turned out to be the boom and bust of Nightfall. The ability to have decked out heroes in the party really make teaming with real people unncessary. Three of my characters have been able to complete the game with just the useage of heroes and henchies, aka hencheroes. All the heroes in my party have elites and templated skill bars that are tailored for the specific area/mission.

Templates are an exciting addition to the game. They allow a player to save and load a skill bar and attributes for a character. Players can now set-up a Minion Master build, save it to disk and apply it to to different characters as needed. The templates are 24 character text files that can be shared with other players in offline ways such as IM, email, or Vent comments. They are very effective for PvP guesting. For example, roll a necro using: A0MQxG3zMFOqAN8QLETgRQjA. This is much quicker than saying roll a necromancer/monk with blah blah, and attributes set to DM 16, SR 12, healing prayers 3.

Graphics have been improved, utilizing DirectX 9 capabilities. Nightfall is much more beautiful than the its two predicessors. The updated graphics, however, result in a reduced framerate which causes some eyestrain after 5 or 6 hours of continuous play.

The storyline incorporates portions of the other campaigns giving them a sumwhat unified feel, but it is the humorous quest text that makes the storyline enjoyable. The quest texts are filled with popular iconic references including Snakes on a Plane, Star Wars, and wft!. The campain also pokes fun of Propehcies with an interesting play. Stacie Magelssen’s team did an exceptional job. Something about Guild Wars is its inability to draw a player into the story like Final Fantasy XII does. Maybe in subsequent chapters the Anet team can improve on this.

Oh yea, there are two new professions in the game! The Dervish and Paragon have been added. The Dervish is a two-handed scythe wielding character that makes used of enchantments and enchantment removal. The Paragon is a spear throwing, shield using character that buffs party members through the use of shouts. My Paragon has finished all the missions and is the only character for which I’ve purchased the 15k armor. She is pretty hot looking. I won’t be rolling a Dervish as all those skills have been unlocked on my account, and really 5 characters through the storyline will be enough.

Overall this game deserves a ‘buy’ rating. The unique missions and heroes allow casual players to complete the game at their own pace. For PvP players, except for the new skills, Nightfall doesn’t offer very much.

On a personal note, I’m back in LOV since its reformation. Karl is off to work in the real world and I wish him all my best. We’re averaging 4 GvGs a night Monday through Thursday and are currently in the middle of the ladder.

For the Labor Day weekend, Arena.net is giving PvP players a special event. Starting on Friday September 1st at noon Pacific time and ending on Tuesday September 5th at noon Pacific time, the party size in Hero’s Ascent will be reduced from 8 players to 6, and players can earn double fame.

This comes as welcome news. When 8 guildmates are online, the preference is to GvG. This change provides a nice option between team arena (4v4) and GvG (8v8). It will be interesting to see how the metagame changes in HA with the change. I’m thinking about running 4 SB/RI with 2 monks. It won’t win halls, but it should gain some fame.

On a side note, I switched guilds from Legion of Valhalla to Dark Wing Cadre to increase GvG activity. After Karl and Miriel left LoV, GvG just went down the tubes. Miriel left for Peace Machine (Sling is over there now), and Karl left for IRL. DWC GvG’s like mad. Usually averaging 5 matches in a night.

Valor from IQ guested with DWC last night. It was good to start making some contacts in high rated guilds.

We’ve all seen the rants before, “Who didn’t skip the cut scene?!” But what is the origination of this rage and how can it be cured.

Unlike Prophecies, many Faction mission bonuses are time based. I have not done a scientific investigation to see if the cut scenes are added to the mission time. What I have noticed is that minions die during the cut scenes.

Some missions have cinematic midway through, as well as the final cinematic. Proper etiquette for the early cinematic is to examine the party formation. If there are minions alive, then skip the cinematic. This applies even if this is your first time through the mission and you are interested in watching the cinematic. The solution is to come back by yourself with henchies and watch the cinematic on your own time when mission completion is optional. Successful mission completion is the main objective, not viewer entertainment.

This becomes extremely apparent in the Arborstone mission. In this mission after the midway cut scene, the cathedral ceiling falls every so often making it difficult to raise minions, as the falling ceiling knocks down and interrupts players. Prior to the cut scene it is easy to get a full brood of 10 minions. Loosing those minions due to death by cinematic reduces a party’s chance of mission success and definitely reduces the chances for a master completion score.

Arena net could fix this issue by suspending player health during the cinematic. Until that day comes, reduce the rage and be courteous to your fellow party members by skipping the interim cut scenes if there are minions.