1) Make sure you’re all in the same region (North America or Europe) and you’ll be able to play everything except World vs World (WvW) together. WvW is large-scale PvP – 3 servers fighting over castles, towers and other areas on a map with points awarded based on how much of the map you control. Since your server doesn’t matter outside of that you could always tell your friends to make sure they join the same one you’re on, but if they don’t it doesn’t matter.
If you want to meet up with a friend the first step is simply to go to the same location in the game world. This might be all you need to do (especially if you’re in the same guild or they’re on your friends list, because that means the game will try to put you together). If you can’t see them invite them to your party and then one of you should right-click the other persons picture in the party menu and select ‘join in [map name]’. This option will only move you to different copies of the same map, it will not move you across the world to their location, which is why you have to be in the same place first. But if you’re in different instances it’s a quick way to get into the same one.
You can also transfer servers by paying a fee in gems (which can be bought with gold or real-life cash) or if you delete all your characters you can transfer for free. So the option is there if you or a friend does decide to change servers later on.
2) Commanders are other players who have paid 300g to be able to display the tag. It’s intended use (which most people do use it for) is to enable them to coordinate large groups of players. For example when guilds are doing missions together they’ll often have one or more commanders, usually the guild leader and officers, who will switch on their commander tags and have everyone join their squad. This means everyone can see where everyone else is on the map and a bit of info about them, they get a dedicated chat channel and the commander can place markers to direct people.
You don’t need to worry about them while you’re levelling, but later on they can be useful for some activities such as playing WvW and doing big events.
3) All currencies go into your wallet (3 coins icon at the bottom of the inventory) so if something is in your inventory it’s not a currency. I’d recommend holding onto the actual currencies (spend them if you find something you want, but don’t spend them just to get rid of them) because you can hold an infinite amount of them and they will be useful later on.
Any item in your inventory with grey text is junk and can be sold to a merchant because they have no other purpose. You will occasionally come across very similar items, marked ‘trophy’ with white text which won’t disappear when you press the ‘sell junk’ button on a merchant’s menu. These are usually from heart quests and if you’ve completed the heart you can just delete them.
Anything marked as a crafting material can be deposited into a dedicated section of your bank automatically by clicking the cog icon at the top of the inventory and selecting ‘deposit all materials’. This area (if you open your bank it’s the second tab down, with the little squares icon) can hold up to 250 of each material. I’d recommend holding onto them unless you are absolutely certain you don’t want to do any crafting (which is required to get some items). But if you ever have more than 250 or you’re sure you don’t want the ones you have you can sell them on the Trading Post.
Weapons and armour you can’t use (either because it’s not right for your character or because you’ve already got something better) can be sold on the Trading Post (low level ones are often surprisingly valuable so it’s worth doing) or salvaged into crafting materials using a salvage kit. You will occasionally come across ones that can’t be salvaged, sold on the TP or sold to a merchant. These can be deleted. (They’re usually from level-up rewards.)
Low level weapons and armour are widely available so I don’t think you need to worry about selling or salvaging something you’ll regret not having later, but later on you’ll start getting level 80 exotics (orange text) and ascended (pink text) items. These are harder to come by and more valuable so they may be worth holding on to.
4) In PvP everyone is scaled up to level 80 and automatically has level 80 exotic quality weapons and armour so there’s no need to wait until you’ve leveled up to do it. But there’s also no harm in putting it off until later, or ignoring it completely if you’re just not interested (I’ve been playing since the game was released and I think I’ve done about 15 matches). Maybe try it out sometime and see what you think, but you’re not missing anything except a few cosmetic items (mainly armour skins) if you don’t do it.
5) Dungeons start at level 30 – you’ll get a mail telling you about the first one (Ascalon Catacombs) when you reach that level. Then you unlock additional paths with better rewards at level 35, the next dungeon at level 40, additional paths for that one at level 45 and so on until level 80.
Like most of the game world anyone above the recommended level for the dungeon is scaled down so you don’t have to do them at that level, you can wait and do them later (for example you’ll see a lot of level 80 players doing the first dungeon) and you’ll still get XP and useful rewards.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
