Player Housing Ideas

I recently submitted a fairly lengthy post about player housing to the Guild Wars 2 sugesstion fourms and thought it a good enough post to put up here. I will be using this site for some of my more wild tin foil hat ramblings letting Relics of Orr focus more on news analysis and community events. Below is my design idea reposted in its entirety.

I wanted to talk about guild and player housing on Relics of Orr, but since we probably won’t see either for six months to a year I figure it’s not great content for the show right now. However I’ve been thinking about how they could implement it. Now is the best time to discuss housing on the forums as any input we give could influence the design document before they start coding it. Once they have an initial design document radical change becomes much more difficult. I personally would like to see open world housing in GW2 and to that end, I think they have a few interesting options open to them.

Relics Of Orr

Hello my dedicated readers you may be wondering where I have been of late. That answer is simple I’ve been working on the reawakend Relics of Orr as well their new show tapestries of orr. I’m having a ton of fun with Guild wars 2 and have some content in the works for here as well. If you ever want to contact me in game I’ll be playign Shongaqu.

Travel

Merados Goldwind eyed the small pale skinned Asura with a calculating gaze. In the background muffled conversations droned, punctured by the tinkling of glassware.  The Asura for his part ignored the large human and focused on shuffling a deck of cards in his tiny, but surprisingly dexterous hands. As he shuffled the deck he drew no small amount of attention from the other parishioners. Asura were not unheard of in Ascalon, but few if any Ascaloneans had actually seen one. Most news of the arrogant race came from stories told by Dwarven traders.

Taking a Stance in Guild Wars 2

It’s a good sign that after the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend the nitpicks I have are minor when compared to other beta’s I’ve participated in. In SWTOR I rolled my eyes every time I entered another copy of “generic cave layout 1”. In The secret world the combat felt loose and the quests repetitive. Champions Online had a confusing attribute and gear system. While those game did improve over time I was amazed that GW2 felt so functional. One of the few nitpicks I did have with GW2 however was the human appearance options.

Over the Edge in the GW2 Stress Test

The first thing I did after logging into the stress test was take my engineer Miriam to Lions arch. Looking neither right nor left I made my way to the secret area behind the waterfall. I was on a mission; I was going to jump off the edge of the world.

There are a number of dangers associated with hurling one’s avatar beyond the confines of the world the developers have painstakingly mapped out. In some games going falling through the world could result in characters being destroyed due to glitches in location data. Other times companies will ban a player who wall glitches outside the approved playground.

Getting back to the land behind the waterfall was simple enough. I paused a moment as I passed the stalagmite pit to grab some video. Continuing on I ran up a ramp, under a rock, over a hill and then inside a rock. Once again I was face to face with the cerulean expanse. I paused and debated the wisdom of what I was planning to do. Miriam was level 23 and barring a character wipe she was my best bet at a chance to run ascalon catacombs during the next beta weekend. With a mutter of “its beta” I made up my mind and drove Miriam off the cliff.

It was a shorter fall then I was expecting. I only lost half my health to the fall. Looking around I realized I had hopped off a false edge, there was still more map to go. I crossed the unnaturally flat ground, preparing to cast myself off a promising looking ledge when a path between to mountains off to my left caught my eye. After a brief detour I returned to edge of the map and looked down over the cliff curious to see if this was another false edge. It was not.

Far below the map were what appeared to be white capped waves, flowing along in perfect tiled symmetry. I leapt Miriam forwards excited to see how long she would fall for only to ram into an invisible wall.

“What?” I cried.

“No,” I replied

After a few fruitless seconds of slamming Miriam against the invisible wall I went to looking for another cliff. The next cliff I found seemed promising as it was in slightly from the invisible wall. Perhaps I could slide underneath my unseen nemesis. It was not to be.

As I watched Miriam slide downward, trapped between the cliff and the wall, I debated whether I should try again. Miriam hit the bottom of her slide and face planted, taking something to the tune of 60k damage. I ported her back to the main plaza of lions arch and decided that that was enough glitching for the day. Contented with my attempts to fling my character from the edge of the world I logged off Miriam and rolled a Mesmer. Not everyone can jump and if I’m going to run guided tours I need to start thinking with portals.

The Yin and Yang of the Guild Wars 2 Beta Part 2

I had a ton of fun playing Guild Wars 2 this past weekend. Going into the beta I, like many players, had a plan; I would play an engineer and a guardian focusing primarily on crafting as gold and material permitted. Amazingly here on the other side of the weekend I actually managed to stick to the plan. My guardian was a Norn Male named Ag Mund as Agmund was blocked by the offensive name filter(If anyone know why please tell me in the comments). The engineer was a human female named Miriam Symata who ended up being my main. I also rolled a ranger an Elementalist and a necromancer. While I was planning on avoiding playing necromancer at all this weekend the siren song of minions and death shroud was too sweet to ignore. That said I only played the necro to level 4 (about an hour) at which point I realized if I didn’t stop immediately I wouldn’t get back to my engineer.

The Yin and Yang of the Guild Wars 2 Beta Part 1

One of the best parts of getting my hands on Guild Wars 2 is that I now have a real perspective from which to contemplate it. Before this weekend the general previews of GW2 had been so glowing that I actively sought out dissenting voices to balance out the hype. Now armed with reality I can actually bring pertinent observations to the table.

Still alive

gearing up for the beta weekend. Going to focus on the crafting system.

The Tyrian Post

The printing press changed the world; it enabled an increase in literacy,education and allowed copies of the manuscripts to maintain greater consistency. Enterprising individuals used the printing press to create tracts and begin publishing magazines and news papers a revolution in data sharing on par with the internet age. Oddly enough the warlike Charr are the race that brought this revolution to Tyria.

You may be thinking to yourself ‘wow Shongaqu, the printing press, why do I care’. For role players the answer is simple as the majority of their characters were probably illiterate before the printing press was developed; now literate characters are much less of a social anomaly. For everyone else I submit the idea of the Tyrian Post an in game news paper.

Reverse the Polarity of the Magitron Flow: Role Playing an Asura

The seductive sentient sprouts will probably be a popular choice for players when Guild Wars 2 launches later this year, but not everyone wants to be a nature loving hippie fichus. Some want to be the smartest character in a group. They want to have a role-play reason optimize the living daylights out of their characters. They want to know the science behind everything in Tyria ever. Their naked ambition to prove their superiority drives everything they do. They want to play an Asura.