Guild Wars 2

I’ll be playing the beta, and I’m sorely tempted to play the new content. But I’m seriously considering avoiding it all, and testing the characters in the current “live” content.

Why? Because I want to relish the experience of experiencing the new content first hand. I’ve already played around with the first entry point of the map, and I don’t want to spoil any more.

Which brings me to my second item: I see people talking about taking vacation, and I started thinking of doing the same thing. But then I realized, I’m not sure how much content is actually going to be here. I’m not one of those naysayers that thinks its going to suck, but whatever, I want to relish the experience and not bum rush through it.

So, seriously thinking of staying away from the new map during beta, and just playing at my regular pace when HoT releases. Extend the time that I’ll be able to relish the first-time experience of this new content.

That’s a very valid plan. It means your focus will be more on the mechanics and feel of the elites and less on helping find broken things in the HoT areas so they can be fixed, but all of it needs testing.

I’ll say, though, that I’m someone who loathes spoilers. I don’t have to have all my entertainment sight unseen but woe to he who gives away story elements to me before I have a chance to get to them myself! Yet they’ve restricted what’s available so much — they even disabled a whole branching story line in the little bit of story that we have — that I feel more like I’ve seen the first paragraph of a novel, not had the plot wrecked.

Individual spoiler tolerance varies substantially and you might well enjoy it more if the first you see of the entry to Verdant Brink is on your main LS or RP character. But don’t worry too much that you’ll see much more than a sliver of what’s coming if you do go to VB. (Except they did say we’ll be in a different section of the map and, well, be meeting some people you might not want spoiled at all. Hopefully you can avoid Map Chat in any map for a bit as I bet there will be comments therein).