Sunday, December 30, 2012

Guild Wars 2: Warriors are completly pointless


A mesmer out dps a warrior what happen to guild wars plus a mesmer got a good deal of survivability mirrior image thingy, seriously BUFF the hell out of warrior the only doable construct is a Crit Rifle construct i can crit for nearly 5k ye buddy, but nonetheless get pwnd, pvp has turned into a mesmer feast GG epic fail anet. i do most dmg being knocked out throwing rocks.

Not to mention this sort of comment is virtually mainly incorrect anyway. Everything things everyone else is OP and they are class got a raw deal. It comes from seeing the trees rather than the forest. I have seen a lot of particularly fantastic warriors do well in PvP and WvW, and in PVe, they are pretty adaptable. The only reason people say stuff like this is due to the fact they check out a insignificant portion of the picture instead of the complete picture.

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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Do You Play This MMO?


Hey guys,
I'd like to do a forum experiment on a lot of our most trafficked forums. This will be easy & straightforward. Below, you'll find a set of basic questions that I'd like you to answer (copy and paste the questions as is into your reply, retain all formatting, do not add anything). This isn't a discussion thread, so responding to other users' responses is not allowed. These posts will be removed.
Were you interested in this gw2 gold game before it came out? Why? Why not?:

Do you right now play this game?:

If yes, please explain why:

If no, please explain why:

What MMOs are you right now playing and why do you play these certain titles?:

What compels you to post in this specific subforum as nearly always (or infrequently) as you do?

Thanks for your responses! Remember, please just copy the above questions and answer them straightforwardly if you wish to participate in this.

NOTE: Please do not answer questions that at present do not apply. Feel zero cost to edit your answers to these questions in once the Guild Wars 2 gold game goes live.

A:
Were you in the market for this game before it came out? Why? Why not?:
Yes, I like the look of WvWvW, even though if I would prefer it to take place outside of a giant instance. I also liked the encouraged exploration.

Do you at present play this game?:
Type of (BETAS), & I've prepurchased so that I can play it fully.

If yes, please clarify why:
I am considering the PvP combat, as it is the closest thing to WAR that I have seen. I still prefer a good deal of variables of WAR although it has held quick at not taking the f2p rout. I also enjoyed the PvE I got to play and it genuinely feels like a step in the correct direction, despite the fact that still not ideal by far.

If no, please clarify why:
NA

What MMOs are you at present playing and why do you play these specific titles?:
LOTRO, APB: Reloaded, GW2 (Betas, awaiting launch), & SWG.

Why compels you to post in this particular subforum as generally (or infrequently) as you do?
I don't post a lot anyplace. The reason being that I do not think folks absolutely consume conversations & those that would, have a difficult time discovering it in the fast paced interwebs. I do not blame the web site, I blame internet culture (the type that skim everything) with the design of forums. I do take pleasure in blogging though, & I think it attracts my type of crowd ordinarily. Perhaps I will need to start blogging once again.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

The Greatest MMO of 2012


Finest MMO ~ Guild Wars 2

This year was a busy year for MMOs. The Old Republic went gratis-to-play, each Rift & LotRO had marvelous expansion releases, & however, Guild Wars 2 managed to work its way by means of all that and capture my attention most. ArenaNet gave an immense volume of dedication towards reworking the many longstanding conventions in MMOs in attempting to give the genre a bit of fresh air. The result was remarkable. Exploring the world & getting rewarded for it couldn't have actually been more fun, partaking in the numerous dynamic events occurring at the same time is a blast, and the ginormous world versus world PVP events are one of the coolest memories I'll ever have from an MMO game. Guild Wars 2 gold couldn't have actually been any better, & for the cost of $0 a month, it's most absolutely worth a try for the very first time!

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Dark Age of Camelot - The Sequel?


City State Entertainment teases the MMO crowd something fierce

With pride comes power. With power comes control. With control comes pride. Or so goes the introduction to a brand new teaser trailer posted by City State Entertainment.

City what who, now? Let's back up a bit.

If you have been in the MMO trenches for any length of time, you are in all probability familiar with Marc Jacobs, or at the incredibly least the games of Mythic Entertainment -- the company he founded way back in the 1990s.

Dark Age of Camelot, a first-gen MMORPG released in 2001 earned a well-deserved reputation as a superior PvP game caused by the presence of 3 opposing factions -- known as Realm vs. Realm -- instead of just the two we seem to have settled in on nowadays. As a matter of truth, this really is quite especially something that ArenaNet developers said influenced their choice to do the same in Guild Wars 2's WvWvW game mode. And as you can imagine, with former Mythic and DAoC producer Matt Firor heading up The Elder Scrolls Online, you are compelled to bet the design played a role there as well.

In 2009, fans eagerly awaited a 2nd-coming of sorts in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. While this game had a lot of redeeming qualities, it also had a few glaring flaws & bugs when it launched, & several give consideration to it the very first true MMO "blockbuster failure" that we have come to know all too routinely today. These events led Jacobs to unceremoniously leave the company he founded.

He disappeared from the gaming scene for a while, but finally re-emerged with the founding of a new studio, City State Entertainment. Their first project was an iOS game entitled March On Oz, a road-defense style game reminiscent of Plants vs. Zombies, but set in the Oz universe.

So as far as we knew, that's all that CSE was working on. Casual/mobile/social gw2 gold games, albeit with high production values.

Rapid forward to yesterday when this video appeared on my RSS feed. What does it mean? No notion. Yet the fact that they deliberately named it a teaser indicates that something is coming. & based on the content of the video, plus the lack of any further description, to me implies we're *supposed* to assume a DAoC-like state of mind. That is sound reasoning, no? I'm right, right?

So, will we see a spiritual return to realm pride in 2013? Might be. This just may be the most interesting gift MMO'ers get this getaway season.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Should you are clueless about video games, ask


Picture the shock that editors felt when they read this letter, commonly in light of Friday's Newtown shooting tragedy.

As a student at Reidland High School, I see fights dealt with promptly, tobacco abuse punished based on college regulations, and even profanity is tackled promptly. Yet we have a student, somebody who sits in class with us, who has brought weapons twice and most recently plotted a map of bomb and gun attack sites around the school vicinity. This student has however to be punished for anything. Is it that Physician Waldrop, the superintendent, is afraid to enforce university rules? Is he being protected due to a few minority status? While he's not a minority. Is he unique ed? Regardless the rest of us sit in class with him knowing he's hazardous. What would you do Mr. Editor?

This really is a letter from a student in Paducah, Kenn. that the newspaper, The Paducah Sun, ran. By the subsequent day, law enforcement had closed schools and searched for the culprit. In spite of this, after a lot of interviews and talking to the letter's author, it was concluded what he saw was a student drafting plans for the video gw2 gold game, "Minecraft."

Here's yet another nearby tv report concerning the incident: http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Reidland-183886911.html

A variety of highlights:

Reidland High and Middle schools will be closed on Tuesday, December 18th after recieving a "serious threat."

In accordance with the McCracken County Sheriff's Department, a reporter from the Paducah Sun contacted sheriff's deputies Monday morning, stating that a letter containing a serious threat was sent to the newspaper's editor relating to Reidland High College.

Sheriff deputies requested the letter as well as the author's name and phone number which was attached to the letter. Their request was denied, citing ethical obligations to safeguard the newspaper's sources.

There was also an update via WPSD's Facebook fan page that "The Sheriff's workplace responded that they have known concerning the threat for a couple of weeks."

Here's the challenge. While I applaud the editor that passed the data to nearby law enforcement, the dilemma is before going public with the data, a closer look would have acknowledged one or two clues.

This is what "Minecraft" is in a nutshell.

Minecraft revolves around 1 logical principal: survival. The game is split into day and night cycles. During the day, you spend time gathering resources, whether it be looking to buy ore, digging holes, fishing or planting crops. Night is spent either indoors, mining underground tunnels, building tools or running around outside being chased by monsters.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Guild Wars 2: Winter Wonderland - tips and solutions for winter jumping puzzle


In Guild Wars 2, this year's winter has started! During the event you expect inter alia also the jumping puzzle winter wonderland where you look erhüpfst numerous snowflakes and gifts your way up. Get tips and the solution to the riddle jump it in the video of a fluke.

Friends of Anchor puzzles come in today launched winter that runs until 03.01.2013, again at their own expense: The winter wonderland waiting to be mastered!

Jumping to the puzzle you will be taken, by talking with the festive youths. This is close to the mystic forge in Lowenstein, who has turned into a big snow ball. What exactly do you expect when jumping puzzles, you see in the above video of a fluke - tips included.

Have you mastered the winter wonderland successfully? How do you like the Christmas Jumping puzzle?

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Friday, December 14, 2012

The Secret World embraces the modern MMO business and drops subscription fees


Funcom and Ragnar Tørnquist's MMO, The Secret World, has struggled to find an audience since its release earlier this year, but the publisher is making it easier to play by dropping subscription fees.

The Secret World came out half way by way of 2012 five years after it first went into full development. It was supposed to be the MMO that finally, after nearly 10 years of World of Warcraft, transformed what MMOs are popularly understood to be. This wouldn't be a Star Wars: The Old Republic that basically added a patina of competent storytelling to the same old fetch quest & combat tree rigormoral. This would be a intelligent, challenging, & literary fantasy from the mind of Ragnar Tørnquist, writer and designer of The Longest Journey.

In quite a few methods it was just that, but each developer Funcom and the gw2 gold game are struggling in the wake of its troubled release. It could have already been better at realizing its lofty ambitions than Star Wars: The Old Republic, however like BioWare & EA decided to do, Funcom is dropping the monthly subscription fee from The Secret World. It is not going full free-to-play, though.

Funcom announced by way of The Secret World's homepage that subscriptions to the MMO are now "optional."

"That means that after getting the game you can play all of the heralded storyline & all content accessible right now without paying a monthly fee," reads the update. This contains all 4 of the expansion updates released for The Secret World. A 5th update due in early 2013 will be made accessible for any person that pays the full $30 for the game before Dec. 31.

People that keep their subscriptions to the game organically get a number of perks, which includes an item that can be used once every sixteen hours that briefly increases doubles the experience you gain in fights in addition to a discount on everything sold in game. Members will also get a zero cost monthly gift, however Funcom didn't elaborate on what that can be. Subscribers to the "Grandmaster" package get even more discounts.

Funcom's answer is certainly more inviting than the non-subscription solutions & subscription-based premiums provided by BioWare in Star Wars: The Old Republic. That game's switch to free-to-play proved so noisome to players that BioWare had to announce significant changes to the new system within days of its release. Funcom could also be in a position to stay clear of some of the criticisms leveled at other games that have dropped subscriptions by not calling The Secret World "gratis-to-play."

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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Guild Wars 2 'Wintersday' event detailed


In roughly four days, a further event will be available in Guild Wars two in which the gw2 gold game will celebrate the winter and getaway season.

Beginning December 14th by way of January third, the Wintersday event will be accessible for everyone. As with all events in Guild Wars 2, expect many everyday events and rewards by just participating. 1 of the principal events to look forward to during the Wintersday event, is the appearance of the Toymaker Tixx, who will appear and distribute toys in all of the major cities.

As for the list of events, take a look at the official site for complete details.

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Sunday, December 9, 2012

An Examination Of Rudimentary Programs In Guild Wars 2


ArenaNet brings a degree that it becomes imperative regardless of the platform you play.

After a few months on the road, finally we enter the deep (and personal) analysis 'Guild Wars 2'. A title that is crowned as king of its kind and unparalleled catch those who enjoy the MMO as those who have never ventured into them.

We arrived late for an appointment, we are aware of it. 'Guild Wars 2' takes on the street several months and many of you were thinking Blogocio we had forgotten him. Not at all.

The more than 150 hours we have invested in the title of ArenaNet serve to qualify the gw2 gold game as a launch unequaled not only gender but also for general users. Now ye lovers of shooters, puzzles, platforms, gives exactly the same style your favorite game 'Guild Wars 2' is made for those who enjoy MMO Tyria not want to leave, but for those who are not fans of online role very first discover a world that will plunge into an adventure like no other as not been seen years ago.

Nothing better to make it up your patience to the analysis, a comprehensive review as few have had Blogocio personally and could be labeled as the most challenging I've done so far. The importance of play, the experiences and a cluster of sensations that surely will notice over its more than 10 pages.

Without further ado, I hope you enjoy it. Going for you.

Forging a legend

'Guild Wars 2' occurs 250 years after the first title acontencimientos, with so much time in between is normal to have acontencido important facts in Tyria, which since then have put the continent on its head.

The Charr and Humans have faced in a bloody war that has not only caused fractures in different relations with other races dividing the kingdom, seizing the moment of military tension in each of the world's rinconces, dragon awakens from its Zhaitan lethargy with one intention: raze Tyria to become the greatest exponent in a land that now hangs in the balance.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Guild Wars 2 welcomes Wintersday this month


While hardcore Guild Wars 2 players almost certainly knew to anticipate it, the news that Wintersday is coming to Guild Wars two is welcome however! ArenaNet has just announced that the game's second vacation will be arriving on December 14th & will continue till January 3rd.

Today's Wintersday is a Tyrian break that binds a few distinct celebrations together with the mutual love of toys. An Asuran Santa Claus, Toymaker Tixx, will be traveling to all of the substantial cities to hand out toys to the great minimal boys & girls. & yes, that means you, even though you've been flirting with the "naughty list" this year.

The official Wintersday page is sparse as of however, although keen-eyed visitors can spot quite a few cool pieces of concept art, incorporating 1 of Tixx's awesome airship.

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Monday, December 3, 2012

Guild Wars 2 Interview- We talk to ArenaNet about how the MMORPG has been doing post launch


It seems like these unique touches you’ve given to the genre are some of the things that are really endearing to the Guild Wars 2 community. But when you’re working with a genre like the RPG or the MMORPG, genres that have got so many well-worn stereotypes, do you find it quite difficult being creative and innovating within the genre?

I wouldn’t say we found it difficult to be creative or innovative. I think the challenge we had was getting people to accept that creativity and innovation is acceptable in an MMO. I think you said it best, there are a ton of stereotypes. When people hear the word ‘MMO’, there’re very specific expectations they have about a game. They just come in and say ‘that game won’t have a storyline’ or ‘it’s going to be super grinding’ or ‘I’m gonna have to fight other players all the time, I’m always going to be competing with other people’ or ‘I can’t play with other people without someone getting in the way.’

There’s really just a lot of expectations that come with that MMO genre. And trying to get people to accept that you can make a gw2 gold game that doesn’t have one of those things is a really different thing to do. We wanted this big, open, living world experience, and I remember the very first time that we beta tested the game, or rather alpha tested it internally, we brought it a bunch of testers and we popped their characters out in the open world,  and we said ‘Alright! Go play the game.’ And they turned around and said ‘Where do I go? I don’t have a quest blog that tells me that I should go here, then go here, then go here.’ So I said, ‘You can just roam around the world.’ And he said, ‘I don’t understand. I can just run around and find stuff?’ I’m like ‘Yeah! Go play the game, it’s okay!’ It really took years of building on messaging. Just because people have had so many years of this extremely linear, streamlined experience where they don’t have this open world and they don’t have this sense of exploration.

It was something that we knew from the start we wanted to build on. But getting people to accept it and understand it was a really hard thing to do.

Interesting. As you said, these alpha testers wanted a lot of hand-holding while they were playing. I mean, this is something that seems to come up a lot in commentary, particularly online journalism- how games today are too easy. There’s too much handholding. People are looking back to the SNES days, going ‘Well, these games were hard!’ I mean, what do you think about how you had to balance the difficulty of Guild Wars 2 to accommodate so many people, to try and make it accessible yet challenging?

Yeah, it’s really hard. It’s still something that we’re working a lot on- making sure there is stuff that is challenging for the really great players but also so new players can feel they can log in every day and there’s a lot of fun stuff around to do. And every month we’re updating the game, that’s still something we’re continuing to work on, to provide more and more stuff for people in all of those categories.

I think one of the hardest things about an MMO, to make an MMO really successful, is that you need to be approachable enough that the casual gamer can get into it, but you need to be deep and rich enough that the advanced player can play for years and still find new things and still discover things in the game and continue to grow. That’s a really, really careful balance to walk. I think that you’re always on the risk of upsetting the casual players by making the game too hardcore, and you’re at risk of upsetting your day-to-day hardcore players by making the game too casual.

It’s definitely something that’s really challenging. You see a lot of the MMOs falling into one of the two categories. They’re either really casual games or they’re very niche games, and a really hardcore group of players play it for a really, really long time, but they can’t attract the casual audience, because the game isn’t approachable enough or casual enough. And I think we’ve done a really good job with buy Guild Wars 2 gold so far, we’re kind of bridging the gap between those two, providing a game that allows the casual gamer to really get into it and go and have fun and just enjoy themselves and provide depth for the player who’s looking for more. And I think that, in particular for both of those groups, we’re gonna continue to build the game and make sure there’s enough for both of them as we go forward.

Considering you worked on Guild Wars 1 as well, I’m just curious about how you found working within the MMO genre with the shadow of World of Warcraft. I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it, but obviously, working in that genre the popularity of World of Warcraft must have been something you guys were considering. Were you trying to compete with WoW directly, or…?

Well, it’s obviously an elephant in the room when you’re making an MMO. With Guild Wars 1, we decided to not compete with World of Warcraft and we made a game that was very different, that was distinctly different and free-to-play and it was really a completely different game type. We called it a cooperative RPG, not MMORPG. People ended up playing it like an MMO and it kind of adopted that name overtime but we always thought of it as a co-op RPG. And we never intended for it to directly compete with World of Warcraft.

We’re definitely going after a different audience and some people from World of Warcraft would also be interested in this game. But we didn’t just want to make Guild Wars 1 again. So we decided with Guild Wars 2, let’s make a pure MMO, let’s make a giant open world game and let’s try to accomplish the things that people really want to see in an open world MMO, which is a truly living, breathing world that changes and you can just explore to have a great time. That’s really what we set out to do and sure, we wanted to compete with World of Warcraft. We wanted to compete with every game in the genre when we were putting that game out and make a game that basically defines where the genre of MMOs is going. I think the MMO genre had stagnated a lot, and over the course of 7-10 years before Guild Wars 2 came out, there wasn’t a lot of innovation. It was all just ‘Let’s make a game, and World of Warcraft is working, so we should make exactly what they’re making’, and as MMO players, first and foremost, most of us working here were kind of tired with that, because if we wanted to play that game, we could just go play that game. And we didn’t see any reason to make that game again, because there’s plenty of them we can already go and play.

So we wanted to do something different, but we wanted to definitely appeal to that core MMO audience, and that also extends to the RPG audience out there that was looking for an MMO that was more than just an open world quest that you just marauded through. We wanted to make something that was really more like a true RPG, like a Skyrim, where there’s this big open world for all these experiences for you to have. And it just so happens that you can do them with all your friends. I think that appeals to MMO players, it appeals to WoW players, and it appeals to people who play any MMOs out there. Or RPGs.

Yeah, the whole WoW vs Guild Wars thing- the one thing that initially got me into Guild Wars was the lack of a monthly subscription.

Uh huh.

But at that time, it seemed like kind of inevitable that Guild Wars 1 would not have a monthly subscription. But now, you have more and more games that are dropping the freemium model, with microtransactios. Did you guys consider microtransactions in Guild Wars 2?

I think that just like there are stereotypes with MMOs, there are stereotypes with free-to-play games. There’s an expectation with most F2P games that they are inherently very casual, and they are games that will probably rip you off with microtransactions, so that you can actually play the game you want to play, because they make all their money off microtransactions. Then you play the game, you’re an hour in and something pops up saying you can’t go any further unless you pay us $6.99 to do this thing. Those stereotypes were one of the reasons why we didn’t want to do a free-to-play game.

We didn’t want to get caught up in a system where we have to build microtransactions like that to say profitable. I think there’s a real danger there, if we head down that path. And with the one-time upfront box-fee, which is what most game players are used to, we’re still approachable. We don’t charge you monthly fee, so we’re not limiting the approachability of the game by having you basically have to decide whether you’re gonna stick with us for a long time or not. You can make that choice on month-to-month basis or day-to-day basis and it’s not costing you anything to make that decision. And looking back at growing up as a game player, I don’t have a problem with paying forty or fifty or sixty bucks for a video game and then getting to play it for my whole life. It’s always felt weird to me that I buy a game and I have to keep paying to play that game. When I grew up playing Mario and Zelda, all these games were- one I bought it, I had it. That’s cool, I got it. I don’t have to pay for microtransactions to get little features. I don’t have to pay a monthly fee to keep playing it. And that’s really what Guild Wars 2 is all about.

We have microtransactions in the game, but none of them are mandatory, none of them are ever things that you’ll need to use during the game. They’re all bonus things that people can use if they want. But at the end of the day, you can buy our game and you can play it forever, and you’ll never need to pay for anything more than the core box, and that’s something that respects the gamers, respects the time and commitment the gamers want to put into the game, and respects sort of a tradition of the gaming industry. And that’s something that is really important to us.

In our conversation so far, we’ve had a lot of talk about gaming now and gaming in the past and the kind of interface between the two and kind of charting how PC development has gone over the years. With the PC, as a platform, now being more and more dominated by startup and independent developers, how did you feel making a Triple-A title like Guild Wars 2? Do you think Triple-A production on the PC is being threatened by the rise of indie gaming?

Uh, I don’t know if ‘threatened’ is the right term, but I would say that when you make a game like Guild Wars 2, when you make one of the huge MMOs, you’re gambling your entire company on that game, because it takes so long to make it and it takes so much money to make it that you can’t afford to fail. If the game is even mildly popular instead of really popular, odds are you’re gonna have to fire a whole bunch of people.

The risk that comes with it is incredible. And I think seeing more and more companies that are stepping away, thinking ‘We don’t want to take a risk by making a big this big, it’s too expensive, it’s too risky and our whole could fall if we don’t succeed’. You don’t have to worry with the indie game model, you know. You can make two or three or four or five games that aren’t crazy successful, and they’re not very expensive to make, and they don’t take a lot of people, but the second you make Angry Birds, when you make that one that really explodes, you’re crazy profitable and you have enough to hold your company for ages. And I think that’s the biggest thing, in why we’re seeing more and more of that. It’s very easy to form those companies, it’s very easy to make a small indie gaming company, and you’re not risking your entire company on one game when you build stuff. You really have the capacity to make a lot of games and stay in business even if your game isn’t hugely popular. You can sell a small number of copies and keep everyone employed to keep your company going. And I think that’s part of why we’re seeing more and more of that going forward.

It’s that the risk of making these big companies, and in particular, MMOs is just crazy. I really don’t think we’re gonna see that many more MMO companies in the future. I think too many companies have attempted to be WoW and folded and failed. And you’re gonna start seeing very few companies taking risks making games as big as Guild Wars 2.

The whole high risk/high reward thing you just mentioned is very interesting with regard to piracy on the PC platform. It’s quite a big issue at the moment for a lot of people. But I suppose the MMORPG is safe from piracy, due to the online nature. But, you know, even things like WoW have seen hacked servers and people pirating the game and stuff like that. Were you concerned with piracy while you were making Guild Wars 2?

Piracy is not something we were worried about at all. You have to log in to our servers for verification and everything, because it’s an online game. We’re in the position in the PC market where we really don’t have to deal with piracy. We do have to deal with, however, a boatload of security issues. You know, there’s always hackers, there are always people stealing other people’s credit cards and using those to get into the game. They’re always people trying to steal other people’s accounts. That stuff never goes away. This is something we didn’t experience much in Guild Wars 1, because the game wasn’t as popular as Guild Wars 2 is. The popularity of Guild Wars 2 means that we’re attracting all sorts of people from every corner of the internet, and they’re trying to come in and cause problems in the game.

So we hired and built an entire internal security team that basically monitors the game, protects people’s accounts, gets rid of hackers and modders, and they’re actually to the point right now where the game has a ridiculously low rate of reports of people doing those kinds of activities. It’s way lower than any other game I’ve seen before. And it’s something we’re really proud of, especially with the population we’ve got. But that fight will never end. Every day there are people trying to take advantage of the game and our userbase or something. But as long as we’re a crazy popular game, we’re always gonna have to fight that.

Well, yeah, evil’s a society that never goes away. [Laughs]

[Laughs]

Yeah, regarding the kind of popularity of Guild Wars 2, you guys are at the moment working on a Mac port, and obviously that’s going to extend your popularity. But have you guys considered a Linux port? Do you think Linux users will be able to get their hands on Guild Wars 2 in the future?

You know, it’s something that we check around every now and then, but there’s no one actively working on it right now, and we won’t be working on it in the near future. But we have talked about it, yes.

Fair enough. Regarding other kinds of ports- the MMORPG is one of those genres that’s only ever on PC. But we’ve seen some MMOs on consoles in the past. Have you ever considered porting Guild Wars 2 or making a console MMO, ever?

We had a small team that was investigating it at one time, and who knows what might happen someday. But right now our focus is on making the Guild Wars 2 PC experience the greatest MMO we possibly can, and that’s pretty much what all of our research and all of our company time is going into.

Sure. This is one of those questions that I really hate asking. I’m sure you get it all the time, but I feel obliged to. Even though you guys are going to be supporting Guild Wars 2, like you did with the original, for a long time now, what are the chances of you guys starting up on a sequel? Within the next, you know, five or so years. I mean, you think we’re gonna get a Guild Wars 3?

[Laughs] Well, I can’t speak for five years from now, and I have no idea what we may end up doing then.

[Laughs]

But it’s certainly not something we’re looking to do anytime in the short term. We’re focused on making the game we’ve got as amazing as we possibly can, every month giving out the kind of releases you would expect you would have to pay for, but we’re gonna give them out for free. And, you know, developing expansions down the road to continue to build on the things we’ve done with the game. And that’s really the 100% of our focus right now. We haven’t even talked about Guild Wars 3 at all at this point.

Fair enough. Trying to predict that far into the future is a little difficult. Just one more final question, I’m sure you’ve got stuff to be getting on with. I’m just interested in what you thought about the addictive element of MMORPGs. You get stories popping up regularly about people getting serious addiction to certain types of games and some people have even died from playing StarCraft too much. Considering how addictive the MMORPG is meant to be, did you feel any kind of weird weight or responsibility, making Guild Wars 2? Because it’s a pretty addictive game. I wouldn’t be surprised if people would have been losing sleep playing Guild Wars 2.

Yeah, that’s one of the weird things about being a game developer. You know, you want to make these games that people are going to love, and we go to game shows, and we meet our fans, and we hear these stories of people who met their wife or husband in our game or I’ve met some fans over the years that got really, really sick, and they said Guild Wars 2 is the thing that helped carry them through when they were unwell. And they continued, and after that they got their lives back, but they look back and that is one of the things that helped carry them and, you know, those moments make you really, really proud as a game developer. They make you feel like, ‘Hey, the thing we’re doing is really making a difference in some weird sort of way that helps make people’s lives better.’

And then there’s always the opposite end of that spectrum of people who get too involved in something or don’t have the self-control to regulate how much they play it. We’ve tried to build Guild Wars 2 as a game that you can jump into, play for a while and jump back out again. You don’t have to log in for six straight hours. We’ve always had things like that. In Guild Wars 1, we had messages that popped up that said ‘You’ve been playing for two hours, you might want to take a break.’ We try to consciously think of stuff like that and find ways to build into our game. You know, messaging and systems that help encourage people to play our game. And we love it that they play every day. But we don’t want them to play every day at the cost of their real life, at the cost of their relationships, at the cost of their happiness. And I think that that’s a really tough thing to do. As a game developer, and especially as an MMO developer, you have to make a game that people want to play every day. But at the same time you have to make a game that they don’t play for 24 hours and kill themselves every day. Finding that careful line between the two of those is a really difficult thing. And I’m proud to say, so far with Guild Wars 2, we haven’t heard any major reports of issues there.

It seems like our playerbase understands what it needs to do and understands that it’s a game that’s built around playing and having fun, but it’s okay to take a break. And hopefully that’s something that continues forward. But it’s definitely tough. Any game developer and any part of gaming will always have to deal with that for the rest of time. They’re making something that can be addictive. I mean, as great as the community aspects of an MMO can be, where you build all these great relationships, there can also be some negatives that come there too. I don’t really know a great way to try to respond to that other than just as a developer, trying to make games that allow people to take breaks. You know, give messages, or encourage them to play the game, but also to go out and enjoy real life and enjoy those moments you have outside of the game.

I think if somebody is playing a game all day, they’re probably not very happy. They should be playing games and playing other stuff, and enjoying life. And Guild Wars or any other game should be just an element of the things that they enjoy. It’s not the thing that drives their entire life, you know.

We want to thank AreaNet and Colin for their time and a wonderful chat. We hope you guys enjoyed the interview. Tell us what you think in your comments below. You can also give our mega-review of Guild Wars 2 a look here.