Today I am going to raise my suggestion for an alternative to gym at the high school level, or at least somebody do a good video series (more on that later). I think it is important to keep gym part of the daily routine in primary/elementary school and middle school, more on those later, but in high school where you should only need 2 years worth to graduate, I think it is time to add alternatives beyond the regular gym that everyone can take. You can take 2 years of regular gym, or 3 years of the coming suggested alternate classes, or split it, 1 year of regular gym and 2 of the alternates, so there is a bonus to taking regular gym in that it takes less time.

Now the primary class that is offered and highly suggested to everyone, even those going the regular gym route, is “Generalized Sports Education”. This class teaches the basics of most major televised sports. You learn the basics of the major US sports, (American Rules) Football, Baseball, Hockey, Golf, etc. You learn the basics of the positions and how the leagues are organized (more on that in a bit). You learn the basics of the major Olympic sports. Then you also learn the basics of major International sports such as Soccer (AKA Football to the rest of the world), Cricket, Rugby, perhaps Australian Rules Football and a few others here and there. You also learn the basics of how the leagues are structured, for example in American Football the team that has the worst season gets top draft pick, while in Soccer over in England, the three worst teams get relegated down a league while the three best in that lower tier league move up, which means more local teams. One could also briefly touch on the revenue sharing plans the leagues have, and why the NFL seems to work so well compared to MLB. At the very least you come away with the basic understanding of the rules, the positions, and what is going on when you see it played.

Figure an average class length of 50 minutes, at 5 days a week or about 180 days, that is a lot of time to learn the basics. I am not 100% certain what is tested or not. The class should be an easy B at the very least so long as you show up, participate, do any homework and at least attempt to pass the tests. So perhaps the tests count for less of the grade than the rest… anyhow… the idea is to get students familiar enough with the major sports in the US and around the world that they can watch the sports on the TV, even when traveling, and know what is going on. The goal isn’t to make them a sports geek or know the full history of the sport and the players, but to know when good/bad plays are made, to be able if in a sports bar, participate with the crowd that is in into it. It is also a goal to gain knowledge of international sports like Soccer, Rugby and the like to raise their level of understanding in the US. It may not do much to raise the popularity of smaller sports, but it may at least help people understand what is going on.

The class would likely start with American Football and Baseball, expand to Basketball and perhaps Hockey, then Soccer and on from there. While American rules Football may come from soccer to some degree, I think the fact that it is so prevalent in American culture makes it easier to start from there and explain the differences using Football as a base… same with Baseball and Cricket…

At the very least somebody should make a really good video series on YouTube about it. With a YouTube series of 10 to 20 minutes or so an episode, it isn’t going to go in as much detail, but something would be nice… already fans of the sports attempt to explain, but the goal of this series would be to have a single source to get one’s basics in. Some of the really big major sports (soccer, football, baskeball, baseball, etc) may take a couple or few episodes to explain, while others may just take up part of one (it may be ignorance on my part, but I am thinking the basics of Diving for example probably could fit in an episode about Swimming related sports all together)… actually I think I know who may be a good idea for this… I’ll tweet them this post… EDIT: Tweeted it to @realjohngreen & @hankgreen… darn tweet length made it hard to grab attention… anyhow… I suggested it they do it as part of their CrashCourse series… Just because I am a nerd/geek doesn’t mean I don’t want to understand the basics of sports, and I don’t think I am alone in that and wanting that understanding to come in a nice enjoyable way.

Anyhow, other classes would concentrate on more specific “recreational” sports like bowling, billiards (perhaps golf) and the like… not all 36 weeks of just one, but covering a few of them.

The editor is fairly basic and easy to use and I think it is capable of fairly nice maps on its own, though to get the full detail you need to use the Hammer editor, but for most of us I think the new editor is more than enough, especially as they add more textures and options to it.

Before going on, perhaps it would be helpful to see how most games and MMOs in particular work, for my non-game playing friends/family/visitors. Those familiar with the basics of quests can skip ahead. While walking around you may see a NPC (Non Playable Character) have an icon over their head letting you know they want you to do a quest (do something) for them. You talk to them and they will let you know what they want. More and more this tends to be voice acted rather than having a long text box to read, but either way you are normally given a chance to accept the quest or not. Normally if you don’t pick it up then you can at a later time. If you pick up the quest and fail completing it, you can normally abandon the quest and pick it back up again. After finishing the quest you will turn the quest back into the quest giver or somebody else, which could be across the game map.

Generally there will be several quest givers in a given area, these are called quest hubs. Sometimes, as noted, you will turn a quest in to somebody else at a new quest hub area and you can keep going forward with a new area. This can be frustrating if you have lots of quests yet to do or turn in at the old area, which is where strategy guilds can come into play giving you a better idea of the order to accept, do and turn in quests as to take the least amount of time walking all over the place. With World of Warcraft I used a free addon to the game called the WoW-Pro Leveling Addon to tell me that order in the game itself without having to refer to outside sources. Some of the older adventure and RPG games would only give you one quest at a time, and force you to take a specific path through the game, but most modern games allow a more open path allowing you take what quests you want or not and going where you want whenever you want… you may pay the penalty of not being a high enough level though if you journey into areas your character isn’t ready for yet.

Normally if you pick up a quest, the icon disappears from your view, but the quest giver will still be able to give the quest to other players who haven’t picked it up yet. There may be a limited number of mobs (enemy NPCs) to kill or items (sometimes called mats for materials or nodes) to pick up, so if lots of people are doing the quest it may take a while to complete as most MMOs have a limited number of nodes/mobs around and they take a while to respawn (that is, come back into the game).

Once you finish most quests they are done. But there are some quests that are repeatable. The MMO norm is that they can be repeated every 24 hours per the player’s clock.

In addition to these quests, some MMOs have story progression quests. Guild Wars 2 isn’t alone on this, Star Wars: The Old Republic does as well, as do many modern games. Then there are the group quests that require (or at least strongly suggest) a group of players engage in the quest. Trying to attempt such quests while playing solo can result in failure, though some of the early SWTOR group quests can be soloed if you are at the upper end of the suggested quest range for that quest. This is one of the ways that set MMOs apart from normal solo player games, the social aspect. The group quests usually come in a few varieties: small group quests in the world, dungeons and raids. Group quests in the world are not the norm. Dungeons may or may not have a quest giver asking you to complete them, in many cases the dungeon just becomes available in your dungeon finder, if the game offers one, once you reach a certain level and disappear if you don’t do it before reaching another level. Raids are like group dungeons but involve far more players and generally require far more strategy and have better drops (items, coins and the like that the mobs drop when they are killed). Almost all MMOs have the mobs drop just one pile of items that the players then share or in case of more rare drops, roll for. When you roll for an item you decide if you want to roll or not, and if you do if you need the item or just want it (greed). If only one person needs the item, they get it automatically, if more than one say they need it the game rolls a dice to see who gets it, otherwise it rolls the dice to see who among those who said greed, gets it. Saying you need an item if the character you are playing at the time can’t use the item is called being a ninja and is generally considered very bad form, especially if your only intention is to sell the item.

These dungeons and raids may or may not be started by a quest, and sometimes may have quests to do while in them. They can take half an hour to several hours to finish and once started you are expected to stay until the end.

Players often form Guilds to better be able to do dungeons and raids. Sometimes these are very serious players and serious guilds that are like a job. You are expected to show up to specific raids at specific times with penalties if you don’t show up or find a suitable replacement (that is a player as good as or better than you). Sometimes groups are formed on the fly, these are called pick-up groups (or PUGs), normally one player wants to do a dungeon and asks in the chat if anybody else wants to join, or people just join the dungeon finder when available and get in that way. Some guilds are just social guilds where people hang out and chat when they aren’t busy with quests or other functions in the game. There are roll playing guilds where you are expected to be in character at all times. There are family guilds which are basically social guilds but the chat is kept more kid safe. There are leveling guilds where people help other players do quests that they may find difficult, generally social and family guilds do this as well, but in a leveling guild you are more expected to help others level up, they also help gather materials/mats for leveling crafting professions… which again social guilds normally do, as do the hardcore raid guilds, the difference is the level of expectation and consequences for not helping. Local guilds are players from one geographic real world area, such as one city, state or part of a state. Some guild players form very strong in game friendships, and sometimes become friends in real life, sometimes even getting married.

Most MMOs have what is called the Holy Trinity. So called because there are three main type of roles in these group events.

• There is the Tank. These characters have strong armor, and ways of making the mobs focus on attacking them more than other players. They can do a mild amount of damage.
• There is the DPS (Damage Per Second). These people do the bulk of the damage in the group. They may have a mild degree of armor to nearly non at all. By causing the bulk of the damage the mob may want to turn to them, this is where the tank’s skills and abilities come into play by getting the mob turned back to them. Generally one tries to attack the mob the tank is aiming at. The number of DPS players far out number the number of people playing tank and healers, so dungeon finders often are full of DPS people waiting for a tank or healer to show up. The DPS comes in two varieties:
  • Melee – The player gets up close and attacks the mob with swords, knives and other up close and personal items. These normally will attack one mob at a time, but sometimes can affect a few.
  • Ranged – The player stands off at a distance and casts spells, shoots bullets/lasers or something along those lines to attack the mobs. These can be one mob at a time, but can also do Area of Effect damage, which generally causes less damage per mob, but hits several mobs at a time.
• The Healer. These people have very little armor and can do the least amount of damage. Their primary roll in groups is to make sure everyone, especially the tank, stays healthy. They normally do this from a distance, casting healing spells of some type to the characters who need it.

I’ll get to Dynamic Events in a bit, but first, Guild Wars 2 gets rid of several of those MMO conventions.

• Goodbye to Quest Hubs… Sort of anyhow. Rather than go from NPC to NPC gathering quests, you’ll find a scout that has a spyglass/telescope over their head, they will point the way to several people that need a hero like you. These are the heart quests. As you do these dynamic events might happen in the area which you can join in on, more on those later. Generally once a quest is done it is done, there is no turning it into any particular NPC unless you were gathering stuff for somebody.
• Nodes are client based, not server based. This means that if you see a gatherable node, it is yours. You don’t have to worry if somebody else is close by and might gather it before you get to it.
• No rolling for drops. There is no need to worry somebody might ninja a good drop as all drops are unique to each player. Now this doesn’t mean that the items will be needed by your profession, and somebody else might get something that you could use, for that you need to communicate and trade in the group.
• No Holy Trinity. Gone are the three primary roles. Everyone gains a heal early in their leveling process and this is normally for self heals, though some are group or area of effect heals. There is no tank specific role either, though some professions are better armored than others and will be at the front, and depending on how they build their character’s skills, they can be a sort of tank. Everyone does DPS.

However, it is the dynamic events that I wanted to focus on here. During the BWE last weekend the dynamic events were speed up (the time between them was much shorter than they will be at launch)some so that they could be tested out, and not all the dynamic events were in the test to keep some secret and to avoid event clutter since the other events were speed up. I am not sure, but it seemed the degree that the events change stuff in the world was turned down or off, perhaps due to how fast they were resetting and others being skipped that might have reset the world the way it was… that is we saw event A and if it failed, you might need event B to fix things, or if it passed, event C might happen to try to reset things the way they were before A, but only A was in the game… I don’t know, whatever was the case, many of the events I saw didn’t seem to change the game as much as they said they would. I am passing it off as this is beta and we aren’t seeing everything yet. Last weekend was more or less to give us a feel for the dynamic events and see what they are like. Perhaps next time we’ll see a better range of examples and more drastic changes to the world.

This is how I think it should be. If invaders are trying to destroy bear statues then and we fail, we’ll need those statues rebuilt in a dynamic event in the game before they can attack again, so event B happens where either players gather resources for them to be built and/or another event where NPCs build statues while defending them. If those fail they can loop until they are rebuilt. Then reloop back to the invaders which if passed then reloops to the invaders trying again. As it stands it seems to just reloop with the invaders attacking and the statues resetting if the event fails before the event loops again. Given how much work they put into the events as they are, I am sure that is how things will work on release (the prior step A, B C example, not the reloop A one).

Dynamic events also scale with the number of players and their levels. If you are by yourself it will cut it down from if there were 20 other players participating with you.

What is amazing is the degree of detail they put into the event NPCs. XPhiler over at MMOSite decided to follow NPCs before, during and after events to see what would happen (Guild Wars 2 – Dynamic Events). In most MMOs they would simply wonder off from the scene (if they left at all), and vanish after going from player view, so that if you followed them they would simply just vanish after a while, or walk into a mountain/wall and vanish. Not so with Guild Wars 2. The NPC actually does something with what you gave them, they deliver it to somebody and talk about the heroes. Be sure to check out his article and the video he posted about how this all works out. I think this shows the level of detail ArenaNet put into the game and I think they should be commended for their work. They didn’t take the lazy route, they made sure that the events have a reason to be done, and that the NPCs go on as if it failed/completed properly.

Buy yourself or your loved ones select items from this post:
Guild Wars 2… not sure if pre-orders from Amazon can get into Beta weekend events or not yet, last I heard ArenaNet was working with Amazon to be sure they would be able to, but the Amazon page doesn’t mention it yet, nor does it mention the three day head start but just one (pre-purchases will get to be in game 3 days sooner than the official launch day, which hasn’t been announced yet)… this is likely because Amazon doesn’t charge the full price, if they did you probably would get a code… One can also use https://buy.guildwars2.com/ if they need to… of course I don’t get anything off that, but it is a great game and you’ll want to be sure you can get in on the next BWE.

The original Guild Wars and the first two expansions for a really low price.

Star Wars: The Old Republic, perhaps my second favorite MMO game after Guild Wars 2 now. I am taking a short break from it, but if it didn’t have a monthly fee, I’ll probably still be a bit more active in it.

World of Warcraft (this edition has the main game and the first expansion for one really low price). WoW is still the grand daddy… not the first MMO, nor the first successful one, but it is the king of the hill and likely will be for a very long time for the solid fact that despite its age (and it shows it in many ways) it is still a fun game.

There are a few weeks to the next expected beta weekend event. Odds are it will be near the end of May, as ArenaNet has said they don’t have a date, but they should be about once a month. So what to do until then, and just as importantly what to do during that next weekend?

First thing is probably play some Guild Wars 1, get used to the lore and the like, after all it is MMO Gaming on the Cheap. I suspect this will fill a good bit of my gaming time… well that and building Portal 2 levels…

Small break from Guild Wars 2 talk for 2 really great Portal 2 videos…
The announcement video about the DLC pack that will let fans make Portal 2 test chambers quickly and easily.

And a video about how it is used. My 8 year old son, Ari, is already planning on some levels for the game.

Okay back to Guild Wars 2 related stuff…

Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, what I’ll be doing, so the three weeks or so until the next beta weekend event will be spent playing the original Guild Wars and making Portal 2 levels (probably badly… I’ll probably be playing Guild Wars badly too, but that has more to do with the fact that while I love gaming, I tend not to be very good at it). I really enjoy learning the lore of a game. I am never a lore master, but I do enjoy the lore that the developers put into the game, which is why I’ll be playing the first Guild Wars. I might… key word, might, pick up the two Guild Wars novels that are out right now that bridge the game all the more between the first game and the upcoming Guild Wars 2… but odds are I’ll only be a level 20 to 30 or so character on the first campaign, let alone through all 3 and needing more lore to absorb.

As to what I plan on doing in the game at the next weekend event.

• Play it more for one. I got very few hours in and only got to level 8, some of that may have been my fault as I am a bit of an altoholic and rolled two other toons that I each got to level 3 or 4, so I probably could have at least got my “main” up to level 10. Still I didn’t dedicate enough time to the game. Next time, I’ll leave the kids to others, and hopefully can get some time off work if we get the date nailed down soon enough… working the prime playing time was a big killer last weekend…
• Try WvW. I didn’t bother trying last time, but I really want to check it out. I am not a huge PvP fan, and I avoid PvP servers, but I do get into some PvP matches from time to time, and it sounds like this one is a lot of fun… though as I write this I can’t recall what made it different from say WoW’s PvP or TOR’s PvP.
• Explore the cities far more. The cities really wowed me last time. They were what I often thought game cities should be… well at least fantasy based cities… They were truly epic and detailed and they made me wish I could rent a room there for my character and let it serve as a base of operations rather than just hang out standing around somewhere. I really didn’t get to look around Lion’s Arch past the Lion statue and the portals there, and it seemed like it is likely more epic than the ones I had been to by that point.
• Take better notes. Take screenshots and some videos. As to better blog about it here, and to give better feedback to the developers regarding the beta to help them make the game better.
• Research more. Gain more insight on how to play my class/profession. Learn to gather and craft. Figure out how the economy works and how to use the trade market. In WoW I am lost without the Auctioneer addon. So game economics and trading can be hard for me for some reason. I guess I should be glad I don’t play Eve Online, which beyond having perhaps the most complex economy of any game, is also fairly ruthless as the whole thing is pretty much PvP, and I can’t see paying the monthly fee for it…

That is my general plan anyhow.

Get select items from this post:
Guild Wars 2… get it.

The original Guild Wars.

The first Guild Wars novel, Guild Wars : Ghosts of Ascalon.

The second Guild Wars novel, Guild Wars: Edge of Destiny.

The third Guild Wars novel, Guild Wars: Sea of Sorrows. The release date here says February 1, 2013 though some have said December 2012, either way odds are it will be out after the game itself.

Portal 2. The DLC patch to make levels for it comes out real soon… and it really is one of the best games ever…

The Passage, a really good vampire novel I am reading now and really should try to finish, but odds are I’ll get distracted with all the above, it is good though…

Like Guild Wars 2, the game doesn’t have a subscription fee. There is the original game, and three expansions, Guild Wars Factions, Guild Wars Night Fall and Guild Wars Eye of the North, which sort of bridges the game between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2… But you can get Guild Wars and the first two expansions for only $29.37 at Amazon (see link below). So for price of just one of the first two expansions you get all 3 and never have to pay a subscription fee. With the first game you get 4 character slots and two more for each expansion pack so that should be 8 character slots in the trilogy pack, add two more if you get the Eye of the North expansion.

Given how great Guild Wars 2 is, I wonder how many people who skipped the first Guild Wars went back and got it?

Best Deal:


Or buy separate at greater cost…
The main game:

(Now to be fair, that is Game of the Year Edition, and includes a bonus that would cost you $4 if you buy the trilogy above)

Factions:

Nightfall:

So basically for the cost of one expansion you get the main game and the first two expansions…

If you want to complete the collection there is of the newest expansion that connects the original to the upcoming game…

Of course at minimum the game you should get is Guild Wars 2… which is a bit different than the original.

They mentioned the confusion lots of players had, and how GW2 is very different than any other MMO. There is a mention of the overflow server issues and how some people had luck with one fix, and ArenaNet is looking into it, but do you want to be split and play or have everyone stuck looking at a counter until the map is ready… and it turns out the overflow isn’t for the world but for a specific area, which explains why I got sucked out of the city and into the foothills when playing, I was probably qued in the foothill overflow, crossed into the city, but the game never took me out of the que for foothills overflow. Unfortunately the bug reporting system is shut down as that still qualifies as a bug IMHO…

The lag was bad Friday but I was fine Saturday night and Sunday night… especially Sunday.

And the cities. I commented in one of my thoughts of the game that the cities were amazing… unbelievably amazing. They were proper massive cities, not just something you had to pretend was a city.

Anyhow, it is a pretty good article and makes many great points.

Get select items from this post:
Guild Wars 2…

- Asura portals. It wasn’t easy to tell where they went. WoW had this problem with their dirigibles as well, not even the NPCs at the end would tell you where one was going. The NPCs need to say which portal goes to where. If I spend a long time in Lion’s Arch I might forget which portal goes back to my area, or perhaps I just want to travel to another city and I am using Lion’s Arch as a gateway, I need to know which portal to run to. Beyond the NPC at the end telling me which gate, there should be a better visual clue. If you get close enough now it will say where it goes, but I want to tell from the bottom of the ramp.

- Patch Client. Should, like WoW, allow to play after certain point. On the plus side the initial download and client install went very well. However, the manually copying to initial client to a folder will have to be fixed before launch as too many people may be put off by that… and whatever issues they have with putting it in the Program Files (x86) in Vista and Windows 7 need fixed as that would be the normal default.

- Cinematic. They are fine, but I see the point that others have made that the characters are largely just standing there talking to each other and there needs to be more interaction with one another. Not a huge negative, but at least on the more emotional moments it would take you out of the game.

! Crafting and Gathering. They both need a better explanation in game to get people going, after that it should rock from what I’ve seen of how it works (the first post links to a video detailing it).

! Voice acting. I found it good. It isn’t SWTOR, but then that game highly depends on the voice acting, but GW2 does well with what I heard so far.

! Tutorials. I can see where people are coming from. There perhaps needs to be an option when creating a character, especially the first toon, to be asked what level of tutorials you want/need. This will be based on experience with MMOs and GW2 in particular since it works so different than other MMOs. Perhaps if you need lots of tutorials you’ll be put into a special area where you learn some basics of the game then it sends you on to the normal intro cinematic and the story quest… or better yet, rather than waste time modifying the game, simply add a tutorial section to the website and suggest people check it out… you’ll still have lots of people QQ over not understanding as they skip the option to head out of game to read stuff and watch a few videos. But a tutorial section on the website might still cut down on the QQ a bit.

I thought I was done last time with thoughts on this weekend’s beta event, but turns out I wasn’t. So no grantee I won’t post more thoughts later, but I think I’ll move onto other things to talk about in regards to the game next time.

EDIT: I thought perhaps I should point out I never really played Guild Wars 1. I got in it for less time than I did the beta, so I have no real Guild wars experience to come from.

Get select items from this post:
Guild Wars 2…

+ Huge areas, especially the cities. Stormwind in WoW should be like Divinity’s Reach here. The size of cities in WoW was a huge disappointment. SWTOR was better than WoW, but I really enjoyed Divinity’s Reach. Hoelbrak was cool as well (no pun intended).

+ Good server performance and little lag… well after the first day or so of issues they seemed to get things under control, that first day was tough… That said I see some people complaining about lag, so perhaps it was hit and miss for some. I think the key issue is picking the correct server, when the server list came up for me, the European ones were first though I live in the US. It should be local servers arranged by density then alpha, then out of country servers by the same arrangement. If they add Asian/Oceanic servers as well as US and European, then I am sure they could figure out which set to display after the local set.

+ Questing. I like the story mode quests, the heart quests and the dynamic events. The story mode quests aren’t as strong as SWTOR story mode is, but very strong none the less. No quest hubs is a general plus for me. It would perhaps be nice if there were a couple odd quests that could be picked up at odd points, but I liked the heart quests overall… of course one could argue that hearts and dynamic quests are just quest hubs without the normal quest givers…

+ Autocast. Once you target and fire, it autocasts, which is the norm, but oddly missing in SWTOR. However, it should have the option to turn it off if for some reason you don’t want it as some people really enjoyed that SWTOR didn’t autocast.

+ Skill system. Some complain, others like it. I am in the latter.

- Camera control. I like to use my mouse to zoom in and out, with the right button acting as camera control. The right button seemed to work somewhat as expected, but the mouse wheel didn’t zoom in and out. They don’t seem to be using it for anything else, so why not make that a default?

- Spawn Rates. The respawn rates of some mobs seem a bit high.

- Some buggy story modes. This is beta, so I would guess they’ll fix the issues. One time there was a lot of dialog going on that wasn’t on the screen, the characters just stood there while the dialog got to the one part that was in the text. There is a disclaimer in the top right that it is a work in progress, so that is undoubtedly what they mean. The color changes too, which is perhaps how solidly fixed it is…

- 5 Character Slots. I know I mentioned this last time, but as an alt-holic 5 slots is too few, and I am thinking even 6 would be too few. 8 minimum… it really depends on how much slots cost. If they use the $9.99 price that is way too much. I guess we should be glad to get 5 over the old 2, but still…

- Bags. Okay, I have a 15 slot bag and an 8 slot bag, I need to repair or something in another bag… I have to do a lot of moving around as after I double click the toolset it won’t let me scroll down or click the other bag to get to it. All bags should have the option at least to be one bag… auto arrange… SWTOR got close to right on this whole thing…

- Local time zone clock. Perhaps it is in the option menu somewhere. Honestly I didn’t make a big effort to find it, but I would like to put a clock with my minimap, this should have the option to be my local time and the server’s time.

- US Servers – No Time Zone Info. The servers just said US Server, and didn’t offer which time zone they were in. If they are all on one time zone, then just saying US Server is probably okay, but see above, there needs to be an option to set the clock to specific time zones (and turn on or off Daylight Savings Time).

- Chat. The /local chat channel is a very large area, so when somebody needs a res, they could well be a very long ways from you. You want a global chat at the same time you need certain things put to a smaller “local” area, such as rez requests and thank yous… of course people will spam the global even if you had a local option… so I am not sure what the best option here is. Perhaps /local is smaller area by default, and if you /yell before the chat it goes where it is going now…

- UI customization. See what SWTOR finally did as a prime example of how to make customization possible without the need for APIs and mods.

- Armor seems to go down too fast and with too little notice.

- More Beta Weekends. Not every weekend, but perhaps every other weekend, and reset the characters each month until release, that way you can get two weekends in with one character set. Of course the game seemed stable, and fairly close to release, so there may be only one or two more months anyhow. I would guess the next main one (end of May) would be testing GPU optimizations…

- No /dance emote. Some cool other emotes, but everyone has /dance and GW2 should be no exception.

- People who QQ in chat and on the forums over game mechanics that were clearly explained in videos and previews. These are clearly people who didn’t read those or watch those videos and just bought the game not knowing really what to expect and wanting it to be WoW or some other standard formula MMO. Don’t buy something you don’t understand and complain it isn’t what you want. It would be like buying an adventure game and complaining it isn’t a first person shooter because the one clip you say showed shooting… Also the people who don’t understand what beta is, especially that first day when they were working out the bugs in the server load.

- Overflow server return. Coming back from the overflow server is a big problem for me. I was in the city and when my server opened, it popped me out of the city and back to the foothills. Not cool. The expense to travel back wasn’t much, but it is more of the convenience factor. If I have to come into the server at a the nearest active waypoint to where I was.

-? Overflow while in parties. What happens if I am in an overflow server and part of a party, does it get split when we move to our server? I would think most likely that the parties will split as they probably come from different servers. I would have to guess that once on a regular server you won’t go to a overflow server unless you leave it for some reason… but what if you as a group go to WvWvW and then return with some going to overflow? Party control needs to be considered when going to and from overflows. EDIT: I’ve read complaints about people in a group and being split to be put into an overflow. Once on a server you shouldn’t go to overflow.

? Friends. I don’t have any friends playing yet so I don’t know how the friends menu works yet. But I do hope it is more like WoW in that I can tell when my friends are on, without having to know all their Alts. How a modern MMO like SWTOR can skip that is beyond me. That said, the one thing I thought Blizzard could have done to make it better is better privacy options. That is, perhaps I want to restrict certain alts to just certain friends or none at all. So perhaps the default is set to all, then you can turn off individuals or groups. I am not sure how that would work in a game menu so making groups (think Google Plus Circles) might have to be done via the web at your account page, but if it can be done in game all the better. We also need a way to group together better.

! Mesmer Illusions. Lots of complaints about how Mesmer illusions disappear as soon as the mob is destroyed. While this is indeed a pain while battling groups or accidentally pulling another mob (too easy to do as I often overcast as I didn’t rely on the autocast as I perhaps should) I don’t think they should stay on full time as some suggest. They should stay on after the mob is destroyed if they are still on cool down, no doubt about that. I think a nice compromise would be to stay on until cool down is over, and then have a short timer for them to disappear if you don’t engage another enemy soon after, if you do then they stick around until their health goes down (or you shatter them yourself, not something I used much at all).

! Age. While I enjoyed the character customization options a great deal, some people do make a good point of needing to add more “old” people to the mix.. to age them.. Also like SWTOR we should have a more “portly” body option.

! Shift/CTRL key Modifiers. I don’t use them, but I can see how others would like them, especially to help with key reach on their bindings.

! Dynamic Events. They are positive and I like them, but they don’t seem as world changing as I expected from the promo material.

EDIT: I only played Mesmer (favorite), Elementalist (second favorite so far) and Necromancer (did very little of) so far.

Overall I still think it is easily the best MMO on the market… well not on the market yet, but soon. To that end, I honestly think they could, depending on how the GPU optimizing goes, could release in July or August.

EDIT: I follow this up with a third post… And Another Thing – Yet More Guild Wars 2 Thoughts.

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Guild Wars 2… worth it IMHO.

Here are my first impressions in no particular order, with plus or minus or unsure notes…

+ Personal Loot. You might not be able to use everything a mob drops, but it is for you and you alone. I haven’t done a dungeon yet, but it works the same there, personal loot, no need to greed or need something. We’ll have to see how this works for bigger drops as the game goes on, if they have those epic drops that makes people ninja things in WoW and SWTOR.

+ Graphics and Artwork. I personally really enjoy the looks of the game and I don’t have it turned all the way up yet. It may even be better looking than SWTOR. The high degree of character customization is also nice… something SWTOR could learn from.

+ Color matching armor. This may seem trivial, but as I understand it, all the armor you pick up will end up matching the color pattern you picked for your character. This seems to have held with what little I’ve picked up so far. As I said, this may seem trivial, but it is a feature that many gamers wanted for ages. EDIT: Also if you want to change at a later time you can be using the hero menu.

+ Day/Night cycles. I commented on Day/Night cycles in this and other games before, but it really adds to the feel of the game. I haven’t had, at least to my knowledge, any events that were specific to a day or night cycle, but I haven’t really been in the game long enough to tell yet.

+ Local dynamic events. Love them so far. Nice to pop back in one from time to time as well and help others complete them.

+ Less grind. WoW could be a big grind fest if you don’t have the stuff from another character to give to the new alt. SWTOR was far less a grind, but there was still a bit of grinding at time, but I found it to be a bit more enjoyable. So far, and again, this is only a few hours into the beta weekend test event, it doesn’t seem to be even at SWTOR’s grind level.

+ NPCs actually walk around, and do stuff… This is sort of WoWish, but unlike SWTOR, which was one of my pet peeves about SWTOR, far too many NPCs you couldn’t even talk to and get a canned response. Seems more like WoW in this game in that many will say something, even if they all say more or less the same thing.

- Only 5 character slots. For the betas we should have quite a few more. Even in game I feel 5 is too few (you can buy more slots in the game). There are 8 professions, or classes as most games call it. There should be 6 at least. I can understand that since additional slots are for sale, they don’t want to give too many slots for free, there is no monthly fee after you buy the game itself, still 6 seems a better compromise to me than 5 and not just because it is a bigger number, so is 7 but I can see that as being too many for how their system works. For the beta however, I think they should perhaps highlight 5 or 6 slots with a note of some type saying this is the limit on release, and just have more slots for testing…

- No Asura testing yet… boo. I really wanted to try these guys out. I also wanted to try a Sylvari, but again, not in the present day beta. Both races are yet another reason for more than 5 slots… Really guys, if you are reading this post Arena Net (developers of Guild Wars 2), Asura, next beta test weekend… make it happen… please…

-/? Charr. Personally, I think they look too much like WoW’s Tauren. The Tauren in WoW are a bovine sort of race, while the Charr are feline, and in the face it shows, but the overall appearance is just too Taureny… and it isn’t that the Tauren are a bad race at all, but for some reason they rub me the wrong way. I’ll still probably roll a Charr at some point, but they are my personally least favorite race as of the moment, but who knows, the story may grab me. This is just me though as I know lots of people really dig the Charr. EDIT: Even my 3 year old, watching a video of somebody playing a Charr was like “Cow! Moo!”

? Dungeon queuing. I haven’t ran any yet, so I have no ideas.

? Crafting. I haven’t seen any crafting trainers yet, but I am still in the starting zones and those tend to show up at the first major city outside the training zones, so it may be just a matter of time. I really think SWTOR did a really good job with crafting. One super positive thing is that like most games, you are limited to only two, but you can trade you skill in one thing for another, pay a fee and you are good to go, then return to your old crafting skill and not lose your experience points and recipes/blueprints/etc in it. In most games if you unlearn a craft, you unlearn it, and have to start from scratch. Of course the higher you are in a craft the more expensive it will be to get that craft skill back, but at least you don’t have to grind it all the way up. The crafting system also sounds a lot like Minecraft in the guess how to make something system…

? Gathering. I haven’t done any of this yet, but I know that it is instanced, which means that if a few people come to the same node, they can all gather from it, and not just the first one to finish.

A video on gathering/crafting/transmutation

Closing initial thoughts. It is getting late, so I’ll close with a few thoughts and may add another post after trying the game some more. I am overall very impressed with Guild Wars 2 and in a short period of time it replaced SWTOR as my favorite MMO. With no monthly fee, the game is nearly like buying Skyrim or some other fantasy RPG, but with much greater variety of interesting content and you play with others. I am not going to stop playing SWTOR on occasions as I still really enjoy it, but GW2 has moved to my number one spot. I don’t know of anything else coming out any time soon that is as good a match for my play style. There are other high quality MMOs coming out, but they aren’t the sort I normally play… I may still demo them if they offer demos as I would like to try The Secret World for example, but I have doubts as to it fitting the kind of style I like to play. It may be a high end, high quality game, but if it doesn’t fit my personal style, then… Anyhow, if you like the fantasy setting, like RPGs and/or MMOs then I say Guild Wars 2 is well worth the money to buy. At least there isn’t a monthly fee. For what one would pay for a high end modern RPG, you get a very full game that is lots of fun that will keep fresh for some time to come.

EDIT: I follow this up in A Few More Hours in Guild Wars 2 and then And Another Thing – Yet More Guild Wars 2 Thoughts.

Get select items from this post:
Guild Wars 2… get it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic, perhaps my second favorite MMO game after Guild Wars 2 now. I am taking a short break from it, but if it didn’t have a monthly fee, I’ll probably still be a bit more active in it.

World of Warcraft (this edition has the main game and the first expansion for one really low price). WoW is still the grand daddy… not the first MMO, nor the first successful one, but it is the king of the hill and likely will be for a very long time for the solid fact that despite its age (and it shows it in many ways) it is still a fun game.