Just In: Guildwars 2 Release Date: Aug, 28, 2012

Posted by FelizB on Jun 28, 2012 in Guildwars 2 | 0 comments

Arena Net just announced the Release Date for Guildwars 2 on their Arena Net Blog : Aug, 28th, 2012. We all have been waiting for this for a long time, but I personally didn’t expect it in August. Somehow I got the impression for it to take another three month or so. But that was just a gut feeling, not backed up by hard facts.

Arena Net will spend most of the time until the release with optimizing, balancing and with bug fixes. I doubt they will touch any new feature until then. It would just be irresponsible software development if they did.

Additionally, they announced a final Beta Weekend for July, 20 – 22.

Shooting Yourself in the Foot with Dual Pistols

Posted by FelizB on Apr 30, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

My Guildwars 2 beta weekend wasn’t much fun, because I was distracted by troubles with my blog. When I wrote my first post on Saturday morning, I noticed that there weren’t any ads visible. The Google Adsense console also showed that they hadn’t served any since the day before, but Google Analytics showed normal site traffic. Strange. Two other websites I am working on didn’t display any ads, either. Fearing the worst, I expected an email telling me that my Adsense account had been disabled, but that hasn’t happened as of the time of this post. I created a trouble ticket with Google hoping to get some help there.

Things like this can mess up my weekend. I ended up checking my email for answers from Google frequently. And every time I checked my email, I looked for other ways to fix the problem or reasons why the account should have been blocked.

This continued until today and will probably last a while longer. However, I have one scenario which is most likely: The Adsense policy clearly states that your site has to be squeaky clean in regards to content. No adult content, no hate speech, no drugs, tobacco or alcohol. In short, everything an advertiser wouldn’t want to be associated with.

So what’s wrong with an MMORPG blog? Nothing. It’s completely acceptable. Except when you write an article about Hardcore gaming. And use that word frequently in your article. And it is used in the comment section as well. Add a link to a blog who’s got the offending word in its title. And use that word in your post title, the tags and meta tags and -descriptions. Meta tags and -descriptions is text that’s visible to  Google and other search engines to make it easier for their bots to analyze your content. And I just told them I have content on that page they don’t like.

I should have written that article about guns in MMO’s. Guns in general, and perhaps dual pistols in particular. But no, I have to shoot in my own foot.

I’ve taken down the post in question, hoping the problem goes away. Perhaps there will be an acceptable way to repost. But just to be clear, I haven’t gotten any communication from Google if my troubles are caused by this single article. But I have some more indicators pointing in this direction. Until then, there are backup ads from another provider. Plus a single Adsense ad below the blog roll, which is currently not being served.

Barfight

Posted by FelizB on Apr 28, 2012 in Guildwars 2 | 0 comments

It took me a while to get playing, since I had graphics trouble. I could get into the game right after character creation, but my screen was mostly black, green or blue. Playing around with the settings would fix it for a while. However, there were still spots in the human starting area where the problem reappeared. Eventually I found a forum post telling me that the graphic card should be set to allow the application to set anti-aliasing parameters, something not to many gaming apps actually do. I may have some collisions with other games eventually. I didn’t get access to the forum posts right away, since those were lagging out as well. Since I played in the closed beta, I had to keep my old server, named “Borli’s Pass”

As for actual play, I created a Charr thief, but I just don’t like that race. On top of it, things were chaotic and laggy, which made me create a human thief named Shamble. The lag in the human starter area wasn’t less than the lag on the Charr side, but the area quests were a bit more straight forward. I got to level 4 quickly, somewhat annoyed by my own overblown heroism in the cut scenes, but everything else seems okay. I made it into town, to meet up with my old friend Petra who’s a server in her dad’s tavern. And got promptly into a scripted barfight. Smack a few ruffians around, make a few more surrender and finally duel their boss. And way to late I find those bottles standing around in the tavern, ready to be picked up:

Once you pick up the bottle, the action bar changes and gives you 3 options: Bash, drink or throw. This is possible with many other items you find throughout the game world. I’ve found a garden hoe and a shovel on one of the farms and they could be used as improvised weapons. The Charr players will have to pick up mortar shells and some mini games use this feature to grab fish to feed a bear or to pick up some bags and defend them against attack rabbits. Weapons you find in game are treated with a slight difference: the 3 options aren’t available immediately. They have to be trained by using the weapon.

I am having fun despite the lag and random guild invite spam. And now I am off to play some more.

All the Cool Kids Play Guildwars 2 Beta

Posted by FelizB on Apr 27, 2012 in Guildwars 2 | 0 comments

Me too ! If  I am not forced to play on my pre-open-beta server, I’ll be hanging out on the Tarnished Coast server. Name(s) to be determined. I’ll post them in a comment here. I will be playing a thief, after having tried out ranger and warrior already. I liked them both, but don’t want to spoil my fun down the road. Perhaps I can think myself into a Charr thief playing him as diplomat, spy and assassin, although I am a bit troubled by the overall looks of the Charr.

You will not find me anywhere near PvP or WvW, I am just not cut out for it. I did get a glimpse of the tradeskills, though and will see what’s going on there.

Social Media Tilt

Posted by FelizB on Apr 18, 2012 in Guildwars 2 | 3 comments

A couple of minutes ago, this tweet shows up, sent by @Guildwars2:

Participating in the Beta Weekend Event?@Ravious over at @KillTenRats wrote a nice guide, check it out: Post at KillTenRats

Woohoo ! Where’s the announcement? I check Twitter and find nothing, except the usual stream of messages, not even when selecting for @Guildwars2. Facebook doesn’t have much either. The flood of messages on facebook is actually modest, since I have an account just for MMO related things. The Arenanet RSS feed hasn’t been updated since April 10th. And my email inbox has no GW2 related messages. Steam’s coming out of my ears.

After my third visit at Kill Ten Rats I finally notice a link to the original @Guildwars2 tweet ! A tweet 7 hours old. And there it is, a Facebook post as well, 7 hours old, too. But there’s still no RSS update, no blog post. nor is there any email.

And there I was, thinking I was set up well to keep tabs on my MMO environment: My RSS reader is subscribed to the feeds I am interested in, a couple of aggregator and news websites like ZAM or MMORPG, plus a lengthy list of blogs I like. Then there is Twitter and Facebook, both on isolated accounts, keeping the Foursquare Check-Ins and the sharing of cat pictures separate in my personal account. I am also subscribed to the newsletters of various games and gaming companies, which are filtered and labelled on, you guessed it, another separate email account.

This is serious information overload, and in the cases of Twitter, Facebook and the News sites, things get lost, since the news items are published in sequential order without any further options to filter by source. Things get, because often enough, the announcement of a “Game of Thrones” MMO is scrolled off screen by the competing babbling coming from @RandomGame and @UpcomingGame. And if that’s not enough, there’s a Zombie trivia  event by @YetAnotherGame going on as well.

What I am saying is this: News and Information is drowned out by the noise coming from social media. This is not being helped by the availability of multiple channels like Facebook and Twitter. The creators of news end up feeding all channels. Leave it to the recipient to filter out what he needs. But I don’t have a tool that can filter the news in a way I can process it. I know there are some efforts out there trying to make life easier, but those tools want to be found, and worst of all, need to be configured.

Until then, no “Game of Thrones” for me.

Guildwars 2 Beta Signup Twitter Storm

Posted by FelizB on Feb 24, 2012 in Guildwars 2, News | 1 comment

Only 3 hours left to signup for Guildwars 2 beta. A small twitter storm has broken out with people and @Guildwars2 tweeting and retweeting beta notices in all languages from Latvian to Klingon. It leaves me wondering if this is going to be the biggest beta flood in MMO history. SWTOR and Rift seemed more stretched out over time. And I don’t recall to much about the WOW beta signup phase.

In any case, this game is highly anticipated, lots has been written about it already and hopefully we get to see more of it soon.