What Happened During the Great Guild Wars 2 Ectoplasm Bug of 2013?

via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

MMO Anthropology Livestream After Action Report, 2013 August 9-10

This week the team wandered into Guild Wars 2 for events portrayed by that publisher into their virtual world. During the “Queen’s Jubilee,” which seems to have a lot of tiny events coordinated as well as some civil unrest occurring. It seems to be popular enough with many players running about to capture the achievements. Finally, on Saturday, Minecraft led the players with a special rule-based building and creativity session.

Guild Wars 2, Friday 2013 August 9th After Action Report

Guild Wars 2 has been a common mainstay of the group since it came out and since there’s a summer event and a few new elements to show off, it seemed like a good time to jump into the game. Once again  joined by Amerist (playing a human engineer named Helvetica), Nelson (playing a sylvari necromancer named Cherry Skinless), and Arienne Keith (playing an asura necromancer named Euclidia.)

First the game suggested visiting the Queen’s Jubilee which appeared to be taking place in Divinity’s Reach--the human city in the Guild Wars 2 virtual world. As the capital city, it’s a huge wheel-like construction, with battlements shattered during earthquakes and wars, and further overgrown with cheek-and-jowl residential buildings and the odd constructions. However, attention was drawn to a section of the city that used to be known as the “Great Collapse.”

Or better known to Amerist as “the skinkhole.”

That same hole has been replaced with a strange glass-and-iron bird covering the extent of the collapse, its wings spread in a predatory circle--closing up over a region below.

The team couldn’t quite figure out how to get in, except by leaping from the birds head, into the hole below, which interestingly didn’t kill them, but left them in the newly formed entertainment zone. The area beneath the bird (and open to the sky) housed a four-quartered region of different environments containing many different monsters from centaur, destroyers, bandits, and ogres. Achievements had been added to the game to encourage players to attack the various creatures and spawned boss monsters.

A few commanders had appeared to lead zergs around the region--large puddles of players all engaged in fights.

In the outside game, hot air balloons appeared with a few dynamic events tied to them. The trio sallyed forth across the countryside to encounter them, each with a treasure chest atop. However, the balloons themselves only stayed open for a short while and closed for dynamic events such as Aether pirate attacks, missing VIP passengers, and challenges from the Queen’s champions.

Minecraft, Saturday 2013 August 10th After Action Report

A large group gathered this time to take part in a build theme. Ordinarily four hours long, the community has found need to direct the activity that takes place and this time it was set to take over a chasm far away from the previous with one rule: all construction needed to take advantage of the walls, nothing could extend out and mar the countryside surrounding. Participants were asked to build only with the chasm in mind and try not to change the landscape elsewhere.

The game was briefly interrupted when Amerist broke a glass of Coke and the resulting glass shards (and spill) needed to be cleaned up.

However, during the play, numerous participants did an excellent job of clearing out constructions along the sides of the chasm. TheKingOfAllPie built a wooden room near one end, containing a resultant pattern of different types of wood along the floor, and decked walls. Near there Omnicynic (Nelson Williams) carved out a lengthy series of narrow corridors that slowly descended towards bedrock. ArienneKeith built a farm into one side that penetrated into yet-another-chasm (that did not break the surface.) And Rkou1 (TJ) opened up a “Golden Strippler” around a zombie spawner that he named “Frank the Zombie Strippler,” with its own farm in the background.

As the night wore on, more constructions appeared, but for the most part the rule was maintained.

Next week the group is expected to return to the same location and continue to expand.

Guild Wars 2: The road to a legendary (or two)

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 for a while now and talking to several guilds about their gaming experience. Aside from the stunningly visual nature of the game and the interesting stories that can be sussed out of NPCs, ambient conversation, or just from general exploration there’s also a great deal of gamification. I mention the stories because many of my guildmates come from Guild Wars and they sometimes to back because of the story.

I would love to delve further into that to see how people from GW tend to view and interact with GW2, especially those who took their guilds out of GW into GW2 and now interact and run the game with members who only know GW2.

One of the things that GW2 does to keep people playing and focus on not just story but also the gamification is the construction of legendary weapons—a truly hardcore experience.

As a result, I’m going to try to get one (or two.)

Part 1: The Gift of Battle

Guild Wars 2 has two particularly annoying elements to it that I strongly dislike: open PvP and jumping puzzle. These two elements are tired directly together with an important component of crafting a legendary called “The Gift of Battle.” This gift requires 500 Badges of Honor—earned only from a jumping puzzle in the open PvP area (aka World vs. World vs. World, or WvWvW, or WvW) or from killing people there. Of course, the drop rate of badges from kills is absurdly low, and it’s possible to receive no badges from a kill.

It will require 500 badges for me to make a Gift of Battle for one legendary weapon.

Now, since WvW fighting can be extremely slow for earning badges and I have no time to do this, I find myself needing to bow my head and do the jumping puzzles through which I can earn 3-6 badges for each run. A run can last between 10-30 minutes each.

The normal solution to this is that people run it with all of their alts, daily, gaining 3-6 badges per alt per day. I have about eight alts (could be nine if I felt like it) but I don’t know that I want to suffer through this nine times a day.

There’s also another, more treacherous, jumping puzzle in the middle of the WvW instances (called the Eternal Battlegrounds) that gives on average 15 badges a day per account.

This is going to be a very slow, frustrating process that will involve something that I don’t like about this game. So far, it has caused me to seriously hate jumping puzzles; and worse, trying to get badges has taken all the joy I had about WvW out of the process entirely.

I already have 100 badges from this week alone.

I’ll update everyone as this continues to unfold.