Greetings Traveler!
Tomorrow marks the Tenth Anniversary of the release of the fantastic sequel to Guild Wars. Well, technically, this coming Sunday is the 10th anniversary, but since they do updates on Reality Tuesday™, we're celebrating early.
As you have probably heard, existing ANet accounts will not be able to be transformed to Steam accounts and vice versa. From everything I've seen, this is due more to economics than technical issues. The only benefit to the player would be the ability to open GW2 from the Steam client, while Valve takes 30% off the top for all proceeds from purchases of expansions, bundles, and gems (the core game is free to play). So, while it's good for ANet to get more potential players, they don't want to sacrifice their current full profits from existing players to do so. Sounds fair enough to me. But then, I don't use Steam all that much.
There has been a lot of encouragement, both from the GW2 Devs and many in the playerbase, to be welcoming to the newbies; hang out in the lowbie zones to answer questions, help with events and hearts, recruit to guilds, show off fancy armor and mounts, etc. I may do that myself, depending on the environment. I hope the environment can stay friendly and helpful and not become toxic as I have seen happen in other games. On the other hand, I think ANet has done an excellent job making the game noncompetitive (except in PvP and WvW). The presence of other players is generally a help, not a hindrance.
One cool thing about GW2 is the regularity of open-world bosses. If you're high enough to be in the area, you're high enough to participate in some pretty epic battles, with rewards to match. The lowest world bosses are level 15, and they're pretty fun events.
Sadly, there are always toxic players in every MMO, both toxic elites—who insist that everyone on the team have a certain gear score (or whatever) or a meta-build—and toxic casuals—who insist that everything be handed to them and don't want to hear about their own subpar performance or build. Luckily, that seems limited to "high-end" raiding and strikes. Scooter and I have been lucky enough to avoid that, at least in game. We even got into our first real strike the other day in an effort to get our Turtle mounts. The group was fairly understanding, and everyone got their prizes despite several deaths during the battle, including my own.
As for other celebratory things, I assume we'll get some prizes for logging in. A mount skin was hinted at. We already got a free Black Lion Chest Key (Yes, unfortunately, the gamble boxes are in GW2 as well.) and a Total Makeover Kit. I, personally, am unlikely to use it, as I already have one in the inventory of some toon or another. I'm pretty happy with my current stable of characters, though I have used (free) kits in the past to change hairstyles (a bit overkill, since they have Hair Kits). I did change my Charr's face and markings. For years, I thought I had done a gender flip on my thief, which is possible with the TMKs, but just now, researching, my screenshots I realized I must have deleted that character and started over. Not to turn this into a commentary on the TMKs, but I wish you could change races, as well. However, that would interfere with the character story (at least that's the excuse they give).
Tomorrow marks the Tenth Anniversary of the release of the fantastic sequel to Guild Wars. Well, technically, this coming Sunday is the 10th anniversary, but since they do updates on Reality Tuesday™, we're celebrating early.
One cool thing about GW2 is the regularity of open-world bosses. If you're high enough to be in the area, you're high enough to participate in some pretty epic battles, with rewards to match. The lowest world bosses are level 15, and they're pretty fun events.
Sadly, there are always toxic players in every MMO, both toxic elites—who insist that everyone on the team have a certain gear score (or whatever) or a meta-build—and toxic casuals—who insist that everything be handed to them and don't want to hear about their own subpar performance or build. Luckily, that seems limited to "high-end" raiding and strikes. Scooter and I have been lucky enough to avoid that, at least in game. We even got into our first real strike the other day in an effort to get our Turtle mounts. The group was fairly understanding, and everyone got their prizes despite several deaths during the battle, including my own.
Some players have been posting on the GW2 forums and Reddit, that ANet should give away a set of Legendary (stat editable) gear for everyone. While I suppose that would be nice, the regular Exotics you can get either through drops or the Trading Post, are fine for 99 percent of the game, and Ascended or even Legendary items are only slightly better and/or have stats specific to Fractals and Raids.
In any event, I'm looking forward to seeing new names (because the faces will all be similar) tooling around in the newbie zones, and bustling cities. There's lots to celebrate on Tyria, and hopefully ten more years of awesome.
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This article from I Have Touched the Sky is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you repost part or all of the work (for non-commercial purposes only), please cite me as the author and include a link back to the blog.
Scooter proofreads almost all my articles before I post them, for which I am very grateful. However, any mistakes are mine and mine alone (unless otherwise noted). If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after publication. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.
Scooter proofreads almost all my articles before I post them, for which I am very grateful. However, any mistakes are mine and mine alone (unless otherwise noted). If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after publication. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.
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