Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I think Guild Wars's skill system is terrific but it does make it harder to  get back into the game after a break.You have to select a working build from hundreds of available skills and remembering what they all do and how they interact is not easy. To make matters worse Arena net continually tweak and modify skill functions. I think they do this deliberately to keep the meta game interesting to prevent "flavour of the month" builds from becoming too dominant. I haven't played Guild Wars since April 2009 so I am completely befuddled. I have a vague notion of trying out the Eye of the North Expansion which I added to my account some time ago but never played. There is also something called the Hall of Monuments which I have heard ties in to Guild Wars 2 but about which I know little else. I have two high end characters who are probably good enough for eye of the North: a Mesmer and a Paragon. The Paragon ( a heavily armoured buffer / support class) is easier to p...

If you are currently on a break from Guild Wars you may not have paid too much attention to the 4th Birthday hullabaloo but you should still avail of this once off chance to get a free storage upgrade. Free storage is always good but the offer runs out this week so hurry. Details of how to get free storage here . The site is a bit slow but the gist is that you log into your NCsoft account and go to buy an extra storage slot, normal cost €8.99. When prompted you enter the promo coupon FREESTORAGE and voila the price drops to €0.00. While you are at it go have a look at the other game enhancements . Who knows you may be tempted back into the game.

I deserve it. After wasting about 8 hours in a futile attempt at farming some decent daggers I decided to follow Melf's suggestion and just buy them. But there was a problem .... The trade channel which had always been so lively when I played Guild Wars a couple of years ago had gone deathly quiet. I went to the spots I remembered being busy before: Lion's Arch, Kamadan and Kaineng Centre. I made sure I was on the English-1 sever that was always the busiest one accessible to European players when I was playing before. Still nothing. I almost gave up trying to buy anything. It seemed that the trade channels were dead. I guessed that a lot of players had moved on from the game. Then I noticed that the drop down box to select your server (why doesn't every mmo have one?) now allows me to select American servers. No longer are European players restricted to European servers. I tried America-1 and sure enough the trade channel started hopping. Within minutes I had bought ceremo...

Nightflower Blossom, my pretty but deadly Guild Wars assassin has reached level 17 and is ready for her first serious set of daggers. There are many ways to get decent weapons in Guild wars but some of them seem to be a lot more painful than others. I guess the easiest route is collectors because the items they trade for are fairly common drops. Sadly Nightflower hasn't progressed far enough through the factions storyline to be able to access any high end collectors so I decided to look for another route. I was pleased to see that some "rare" green daggers can be got as boss drops in Nightfall even though assassins don't really feature in that game. Having finished Nightfall with my Paragon I can pretty much go anywhere in Elona so I assembled a team of henchmen and heroes and set off to farm some daggers. Now after several hours of slavishly killing the same mobs over and over with no sign of the desired green drop I can feel myself slipping into the grip of an obs...

Nice to see that Arena net are still adding new content to Guild Wars. Their fourth anniversary will see the release of new PVE and PVP content under the Zaishen Challenge label. From what I can make out there will be some form of daily quests involved. The new Zaishen menagerie seems to be a way to store and swap combat pets. I have never been into pets so I could be reading that wrong. A couple of new rmt items also announced - pet unlocks and storage upgrades. I see rmt items in Guild Wars in a fairly positive light. The no subscription business model gives a huge amount of gaming for a small investment but if NCsoft have no way of getting additional revenues they are bound to lose interest in maintaining the game. Having a steady stream of income from people buying new characters slots and storage upgrades will hopefully entice them to keep the servers up and running smoothly. My only gripe about NCsofts implementation of micropayments is that they aren't really micro at all....

April fool is long gone so I can finally introduce you to the real Nightflower Blossom, now a level 15 Assassin working her way through Factions. I am enjoying the assassin role so far , even with the starter skills you seem to be able to lay down a tonne of damage on single opponent. It is a much more focussed role than either the paragon or the mesmer I have played before. The assasin's role is to pick a target and kill them, everything in the assasins skillbook seems to be geared towards getting in, making the kill and getting away again afterwards (if possible). Things get messy though against more than one opponent. Those same skills that can take someone out so quickly can drain your energy and leave you helpless against your victims buddies. This is not a character to try and get a survivor title methinks. I have already accumulated 28 deaths in 15 levels (most of them on a particularly difficult quest called " Quimangs Last Stand "). The skill bar I am showing ab...

I would like to introduce you to Nighflower Blossom, level 10 assassin and general deliverer of painful death. Does she not look the very image of cold hearted ruthlessness. Guild Wars April Fools day FTW!

Many thanks due to Van Hemlock and co. for inviting me to their Tuesday Noob club for a bit of Guild Wars sparring. Sadly real life intervened to prevent me from contributing to more than a single match but it was fun to indulge in a bit of pvp for my first time in GW. I was lucky enough to be on the winning team for the only match I actually got to play (a 100% pvp record - perhaps I should retire now!). In hindsight it was a fairly imbalanced match because our team had a warrior a paragon (me) and a healing monk while our opponents had a more eclectic mix of Mesmer / Ele and Ranger. I think the combination of heavy armour and healing was always going to give us the win. Our opponents were spamming blindness skills (Signet of Midnight from the VanH's Mesmer and Blinding falsh from the Ele if I recall ) but both warrior and myself had fast recharging condition removal signets so it didn't avail them much. From my very limited experience it would appear that getting the team b...

... comes an unexpurgated stream of excrementally puerile drivel, at least it would so appear in games. My Guild Wars appetite has not been sated by completion of the Nightfall campaign but I don't really feel like going over the same missions again in hard mode or in pursuit of skills or titles. Therefore I have instead started a brand new assassin character in Factions. After a brief tutorial I was set loose in the starter town of Shing Jea Monastery. Having spent the last few weeks in the sparsely populated end game regions of the Nighfall campaign it was at first heartening to see a lively stream of banter in the local chat channel. Heartening at least until I made the mistake of trying to read some of that lively banter and discovered just how nauseatingly puerile that banter was. The general timbre of the conversation may be judged from the topics covered in a the few brief minutes that I observed. The most commonly applied epithet was to call someone or something "gay...

I have just finished the main pve campaign of Nightfall for the first time. Viewed simply as a single player RPG I found it very entertaining with a good story line and challenging quests. I did get bored in the middle of the Kourna section of the game and and put it aside for two years but once I restarted and got over that bit the game went from strength to strength. The big bad fellow in the picture about is an evil god you must slay to complete the campaign. The difficulty certainly ramps up a bit in the last few missions set in the netherworld known as the Realm of Torment but I never found it as challenging as the latter missions of the original Guild Wars Prophecies Campaign. I suspect this had much to do with the availability of heroes in Nightfall plus the fact that the Paragon is a rather more robust character than the Mesmer I took through Prophecies. Where to next for my gaming? I don't feel the need to repeat any of the Nightfall content in Hard mod but I do still have...

Guild Wars Nightfall remains my main gaming habit at the moment and I am delighted to report that the game gets better and better. I have just completed the Gates of Desolation mission which lets you ride inside one of these brutes. They are called Junundu and you can not only ride them you can direct them into battle. As might be expected they are ridiculously powerful. Too powerful in fact. Every worm has a skill called Junundu Wail which resurrects all fallen colleagues with full health and energy. It's a kind of I win button. In the screenshot above my worms (greenie black fellows) are being attacked by a wild worm (brown guy). He loses. There is one elite skill on the worms bar I haven't unlocked yet. I can't imagine what would qualify as elite for a worm given how powerful the normal skills are.

My poor blog has been neglected this week. Not much to report. My gaming time has mostly been split between Guild Wars and Left 4 Dead. I am surprised how easily I have slipped back into Guild Wars. I am strictly in single player mode and haven't even applied to rejoin my old guild but playing solo suits my current mood. Previously I found parts of Nightfall a bit drab. It think that is partly why I quit. But now working my way through Vabbi I am constantly struck by how beautiful everything is. Just tonight I did a quest in a hidden city buried underground and protected by powerful Djinns. Right in the heart of this underground metropolis I came across this treasure trove: I am even beginning to like my Paragon character. After playing around with his skill bar I have more or less settled on an adrenaline focussed set-up using Focused Anger and For Great Justice to give me constant double rate adrenaline generation. I use the adrenaline for some nasty spear attacks and since I do...

Without really planning it I appear to be taking a break from Lotro. I am sure I will return soon, I have already been tempted by the goodies coming up in soon to be released book seven. In the meantime I have been shying away from heavy mmorpging - sticking to single player games and a bit of online fragging. Guild Wars is a game I have always intended to return to and this sojourn has hopefully provided an opportunity to do so. Previously I did pretty much everything there is to do in Tyria (original Prophecies campaign) with my Mesmer but I lost interest about half way through bringing a Paragon through Nighfall. Getting back into an mmo like game is always intimidating. There is just so much to do and to learn. Inevitably lots of new features will have been added. Although Guild Wars does not have the rich imersive world of a full blown mmo the meta game is very complex, more so than any game that I have played outside of EVE. You could spend years collecting skillls and refining ...

or Lotro or other "full featured" mmorpgs. I don't mean limited pets I mean full blown henchmen with capabilities equivalent to those of a player character, something along the lines of Guld Wars Heroes. Henchmen open up a lot of new gameplay possibilties and they solve an awful lot of Looking for Group problems. Henchmen make a game much more solo / small group friendly. I know a lot of old-timers shudder at the thought of playing an mmo solo but Wow and Guild Wars have shown that making a game solo friendly can lead to commercial success. Given this commercial reality I am amazed that more games have not implemented henchmen. If I were designing a game to dethrone WOW I would certainly try and include henchmen. Getting the AI right is always going to be tricky but I think Guild Wars has solved a lot of those issues and may offer a template that can be copied. When Guild wars was released its original hencmen were lower level characters with limted player control and ver...

I haven't played Guild Wars in a while but I often remember the game fondly. One of the things that always surprised me was how much time people spend in the PVE game gaining novelty titles and equipment that offer no game advantage. In other MMOs I have played such things are regarded as fluff and often looked down upon by serious players. Even people who do go for them (collecting rewards at festivals for example) quickly get bored and discard them once they are over but in Guild Wars the pursuit of novelty armour sets and novelty titles has become almost an obsession for many. Indeed in many ways these rewards are the "End Game" of PVE Guild Wars. Getting them is no trivial task either. Fancy armour sets (with no better stats than common armour) require many many runs of high level dungeons to acquire rare drops. The most coveted titles require many many hours of play to achieve. For example the explorer titles require a player to painstakingly walk their character ov...

...Lord of the Rings Online. Last Tuesdays patch to LOTRO has borked the game for me. I have been unable to connect to the game since. At first I thought it was extended server downtime after the patch but then I realised that everyone else is up and running again. A very helpful support person on the LOTRO Europe forums is helping me work through the problem. I am amazed to find a customer support person who responds instantly to emails at 10PM at night! Under their direction I have done a complete re-install, I have played around with firewalls, antivirus, Microsoft.Net and my ADSL modem /router configuration but sadly nothing works so far. Perhaps this is poetic justice for my rant about MMORPG timesinks . Despite my complaints in that post I really feel the need for a bout of multiplayer gaming and the heady excitement of Gladiatus doesn't quite cut it (notwithstanding my gratitude to those of you who responded to my request for challenges from real human players - thank you o...

Logging into Guild Wars again was interesting. Beautiful crisp graphics with no lag. Fabulous responsive combat. I have to admit I was tempted to put lotro aside for a while and jump back in. I won't though but I had to think for a bit to understand why. First off I must explain that Guild Wars is one of the best PVP games out there but I amn't really into PVP. Nevertheless Guild Wars also has a truly terrific story based PVE game. If you haven't played the game recently you would be truly amazed at how the game has developed to make life convenient for players. You can fast travel anywhere for free. Total respecs are free. You can change to a new secondary class at will (for free). Missions can typically be completed in about an hour and if you can't get human companions you can bring npc henchmen and heroes instead. Why then is the game not as immersive and compelling as a traditional full blown MMORPG? One reason is that the world does not have as many frills as a ...

I logged into Guild Wars last night to see what had happened to the website. My suspiscions were confirmed - it was the work of a disgruntled former member who happened to be admin of the alliance website. I am happy to report that it is business as ususal for the old fogies. They have even got the old forum back up and running. There was a bit of good natured banter about the incident but everyone has clearly moved on.

I haven't played Guild Wars in a while but I still peep in on my old alliance's Website every so often to catch up. It was a pretty good website too. It had news, a forum, polls, competitions and a shout box. Not any more I am afraid. The link for the website now leads to an abusive message about the alliance. This is not really my business any more but natural curiosity has prompted me to try to figure out what happened. Of course the whole thing could be the work of disgruntled pvp opponent who posesses leet haxxor skillz but I think not. I am pretty sure this is the unfortunate outcome of a genuine case of Guild Wars guild drama. Let us start with some history. This particular group is one of the largest communities in Guild wars with over 800 active members last time I looked. Since this number exceeds the individual guild limit they formed an alliance of guilds who for all intensive purposes act as a single guild. The reason for the large membership is simple enough - the ...

According to MMORPG.com one of the most highly anticipated forthcoming MMORPGs is Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning . The general impression I get is that a lot of emphasis will be put on PVP. I haven't done much pvp myself and I never got into the whole Warhammer scene so I guess I am not exactly waiting with baited breath. One point does interest me though and that is the fact that Warhammer will implement collision detection. Collision detection isn't exactly new, Guild Wars implements it very well and in my opinion it is one of the features that elevates Guild Wars combat model head and shoulders above most MMORPGS. If collision detection is properly implemented then it brings a whole new fluidity to combat. Suddenly position and movement are everything. Enemies can be blocked from moving to advantageous positions. Support characters can be protected by standing in front of them. In Guild Wars it helps unify pvp and pve play. There is no taunting mechanic in Guild Wars. ...