Guild Wars 2

I love the idea behind the Living Story. The idea that players’ actions would introduce lasting changes into the world is an interesting one, to be sure. However, I’ve been discouraged by the lack of major change that I, personally, have seen throughout. Yes, something happens, and then two weeks later, it’s all happy happy joy joy again, and unless you were online playing constantly, chances are that you got very little reward for it. I can certainly understand the rationale behind rewarding the frequent players with more goodies, but such tactics can also make people that can’t devote quite so much time to a game feel like there’s not a lot of point to logging on, since each latest bit of content will be gone in 2-4 weeks anyway. It can discourage a player that’s on the edge between dedicated and ho-hum. I know speaking for myself, personally, I am less inclined to go through the MUST PLAY EVERY FACET OF EVERY LIVING STORY UPDATE thing than I was at first. The first few episodes were enough to convince me that while the temporary content could, at times, be amusing, it has largely seemed to have no lasting impact on the world at large.

Note that although my personal opinions are not entirely positive regarding the Living Story concept, I don’t hate it, by any means. I just feel personally discouraged from playing a whole lot since nothing I do during each two week spate will matter one whit in the long run. That said, there are certainly pieces of Living Story related content with which I have been vastly amused. The Tequatl changes and Jungle Wurm fights are great fun, and the Marionette was fantastic. I’m enough of an old-school MMO player to appreciate things that take a fair amount of coordination to achieve successfully. But then again, taking a step back from this, Tequatl and the Wurms are permanent content. The whole idea of “must log on and put in time right now or you’ll miss any chance at the content” is discouraging to me.

Just the two cents of a somewhat disappointed player. I feel the promise I understood to be inherent in the Living Story’s origins—the idea of a world that changed and was impacted on a lasting scale by the choices and actions of the player base—had a lot of good things going for it. Perhaps I misunderstood things. Perhaps not. The Guild Wars universe has so much of a story to tell. I do look forward to seeing more of it, though of late, my seeing more has been largely through watching my boyfriend play. He has more patience than I for repetitiveness.

If you’re very concerned about the waypoint price, bring a low level character. He or she will get scaled to 80 anyway, and the cost for splattering is much reduced that way. I don’t feel it’s a big deal either way, personally. :P

Sorry if this has already been gone over a hundred times; I didn’t see it on the front page, at least. When I talk to the Sanctum Sprint NPC and ask to join, I’m being sent to various sPVP maps. I’ve tried it on three different characters and have restarted my client to ascertain that I’ve not missed a mini-patch somewhere.

What am I doing wrong?

There’s not a lot of formalized grouping often, no. However, since everyone that participates effectively in a kill is rewarded for that kill, actually being partied isn’t strictly necessary. It’s rather like you’re in a party with everyone you happen to be near while you’re doing that heart, or participating in that event. Dungeons, on the other hand, do require groups, which is why you’ll mostly run into them in that setting.

Personally, I’ve only ever grouped with friends to facilitate either talking or running through zones together. It can work well, but it’s not entirely necessary either. I’ve also picked up a few random people in zones for a while where we would just run together for as long as we all had the same agenda. Even though we wouldn’t group up, that worked just as well. It’s a very different style than many MMOs, for sure, but I find I kinda like how it works.

I run the game in Windowed mode, which lets me see my taskbar while in game. This can be done by hitting escape while you’re in Guild Wars 2, click on options, click on the Graphic Options tab (which is the second tab down), and then changing the resolution to either Window or Windowed Fullscreen. I personally have mine set to Window and then have resized the window to fill my screen save for the taskbar. This way, you’d be able to just click on the Show Desktop icon on your taskbar to return to the desktop. Alternately, if you prefer to run in fullscreen mode, you can hold down alt and tap the tab key to switch which window is active at the moment, enabling you to cycle between the game and another program, such as your web browser.

You can communicate with other players on the same map as you by prefacing what you want to say with /map, such as ‘/map Hello! Hope everyone is having a good time with the game!’ The quotation marks aren’t necessary. This also works with /party for players with whom you are partied at the moment and /guild for guild mates.

As far as communicating with a guild, you need to be representing that guild first. To make sure that you’re representing one, hit G, click on the name of the guild that you’d like to talk to, and then click the Represent button at the bottom of the Guild window. After that, you should be able to use /guild to talk to your guild members.

Hope this helps!

As a long-time Thief player, I enjoyed this heart immensely, prowling my way straight to almost the end of the course. When I finally got discovered, I was both proud of myself for getting so far and chagrined to discover that I’d not made one iota of progress toward the heart. My boyfriend was quick to tell me that he’d almost finished the heart during the time it took me to sneak rings around the area just by running to the first flag ad nauseum. I was all “Flags? I was supposed to do something with those?”

So yes, if the sneaking aspect gets irritating, just run to the first flag and hit F til complete!

Huntsman will allow you to make bows and guns, however, the problem in taking most crafting skills in pairs is that they’ll both use the same fine crafting materials—vials of weak blood, tiny claws, tiny venom sacs and the like—to advance both crafts. You can get around this by working on one of them first and putting in a little extra farming time to advance the other, or choose jeweler or chef as your second craft, neither of which uses the same blue materials as the armor and weapon crafting skills use for their insignias.

Also, I’d advise salvaging all the white drops you get, be they light, medium or heavy armor and any weapons, vendoring the blues and trading the greens that you don’t equip in groups of four to the Mystic Forge in the middle of Lion’s Arch. That will ensure that you have a decent supply of materials and keep you in coin as you level up. It’ll also give you (hopefully) a few useful green upgrades or maybe even an occasional yellow, as well as typically a little extra coinage to purchase some of the insignia crafting materials if you choose to take leatherworking and huntsman.

I’m not sure the “Heart of Corruption” referenced on the wiki is a renown heart, but rather a point of interest. As far as finding which renown heart you’re missing, one good resource for locating that last piece of a map that you need is guildhead.com. If outside links are discouraged, I’m sorry for posting one! That site is run by the ZAM network people and has been quite reliable for guildies.

I’m fairly sure from experience that it’s a threshold of damage that you need to do to a mob in order to get exp and loot from it. It can be one big hit or a couple smaller ones, but if you don’t do X percentage—and what that percentage may be, I’ve no idea!—then you’re not credited with the kill. I’d imagine that would be to cut down on people hitting something once and then tabbing to the next without killing it, which could be fairly bad in a situation where less players were involved. That’s just my opinion, of course!