Guild Wars 2 - some thoughts

"[Y]ou have played for 255 hours 48 minutes over the past 25 days."

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Now that the most anticipated game has been released, I must confess that I'm a little dissapointed.

While the overall gameplay is nice and dynamic, it gets a bit repeative even if one tries to vary doing hearths, PvP, dungeons, exploration and general PvE. And as I said earlier, I'm hugely dissapointed in the fact the game lacks any kind of mana(well, almost, initiative doesn't count for this).

On it's defence though Guild Wars 2 has a really dynamic and dodge-heavy combat mechanics to balance that otherwise cooldown-based skill system.

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First I made an Elementalist, as the attunement managing was supposed require smart playing and all stuff glorious, but I found myself just using fire magic for everything due to the DPS it offers. Only occasionally did I use the other attunements. Ele also felt far too squishy in Orr even when dodging like crazy.

Then I made a Guardian. It had the survivability I wanted, and quite suprisingly also had some serious DPS, even more than my ele!

Next - not that the class was bad or anything - after getting bored(only slighlty) to Guardian, Thief was next. As initiative was a resource to be managed I was quite excited. But meh, the class felt like, I don't know, it was lacking something. So, after getting to level 24 I made an Engineer.

Now, at this point I was quite excited about WvW(see paragraph later). The Engineer has a Mortar elite skill and turrets, so it is supposed to be The perfect class for WvW defenses. It indeed offers various kits that can be freely used even during combat and without cooldown, making it a very adaptable class. Seemingly perfect, but the game has begun to take it's toll. Having already 'grinded' almost 200 levels, getting another 80 was starting to fell bit exhaustive.

Currently I have managed to get this new Engineer to level 30 and unlocked that tier two elite mortar skill. Now I feel like I might actually be able to take a small rest and do some casual WvW.

Except that I should be farming while I can, gem prices have skyrocketed during the past few days. Get some gems while they are relatively cheap. Oh well...

* * *

Endgame areas have also been suffering from an unfortunately high bugrate. Some skill challanges and events are frozen or otherwise rendered unplayeable. It is also possible to get stuck inside some objects.

On the other hand World vs World vs World has been full of suprises. During betas and also during the full game I've disliked the long distances and zergs there. It has changed, I got recruited to a smallish WvW guild by a chance and had a blast holding Redlake tower last night. Reinforcing, supply chain and breaking sieges suddenly felt much more enjoyable.

I accidentally a server – Part I

I hereby announce, that my infrastructure took a giant leap forward as I purchased a i3 server(i3 530, 4GB low latency RAM, passive cooling except PSU) on the small hours of some random day not too much in the past. Deals were smooth, the merchant in question was a semi-friend and a computer event was just coming up, so a trusted third party could pick the hardware from there, and then later deliver it to me. Effectively zero postage.

But then the curse kicked in. On the few last kilometers the transport of the 3rd party broke, and caused a delay of several hours. But then it finally arrived.

I found out that the case I had in mind had a bit non-standard method of attaching the motherboard, so I had to forcibly remove some parts from an earlier mobo from that case, and ta-da, almost good as new.

Next part of the curse: chipset does not support on-board video, and no low-end video cards available. Ok, let's just borrow one from routa.

But then things got hardcore; PSU did not have connectors for additional power the GPU requires. So, instead of complete PSU change, let's just power the GPU with another PSU! While it is still in another case, but not connected to anything else. Wirestart, mmm.

Now that the system was up and running, it came time to install an OS. I wanted to finally test out ESXi, and it installed to a USB stick and booted up just nicely. Unfortunately there was a catch; no support for sensors, no support for a Realtek NIC and no support for the mobo's SATA controller. There is some unofficial drivers available, maybe, but at this time I think I'll just install Gentoo Debian. More on that on a later post.

I accidentally Genelecs

I was actually very much considering on getting headphones, but having been repeatedly exposed to the eargasmic sound waves of my friend's Genelecs, I had no choice.

So, on one hazy afternoon Lannukka headed to Iisalmi. Prices had been negotiated earlier, so only a little while later we headed back, with a 7050B for Pilkki and two 8040As for me.

Unboxing, cabling, Zephyr. Oh, and photos.

Guild Wars 2 Public Beta: Observations

First of all: great job ANet, it only took few hours to get things working. It took close to 24 hours from Blizzard to get D3 Open Beta in any kind of working order :D

Overall the game seems to function fairly well, but there is some minor things I want to note.

• When opening map while holding RMB, character can't be steered.
• When using melee attacks, one must manually to move to range.
• Dynamic events don't change the world very much, all is a lie :(
• Dynamic events seems to have minimum difficulty, one or two players will have a hard time completing one.
• Looting requires a) navigating to corpse b) interacting with it c) claiming items, too long a chain.
• The there was about eight bugs I reported, but they are not included in this list.

But then there also is some bigger concerns

• Mobs start to regenerate far too fast, pull little too far and they get full health almost immediately.
• Leveling progression is slower than that of enemies, making fights harder and harder, and then there will be level grinding..
• I want Energy back to the game, this is just spam-fest now!
• There is not too much freedom on skill selection. In original Guild Wars I could fill my bar with heals, for example, but here I can only select one. The unchangeable skill selection for weapons also was bit of a let down. Of course one could change weapon, but I want to use that weapon differently.

But there was some great things, too.

• Dynamic events, at least when experiencing them the first time, they were just great. People would just pour in and everyone would just really want to beat the bad guys or whatever.
• New quest system. Yes, it is the same old 'Kill ten rats and/or do x', but no explicit quest accepting/turning in procedure, gives more fluidity for everything.
• And about fluids, water is an interesting element, no longer a barrier.
• Reformed combat. Moving while casting and attacking really gives a new dimension for combat and exploration.

A smooth start for the first Guild Wars 2 Public Beta, NOT! And diary!

The beta was supposed to start at 22 o’clock, but when I tried to log in about 21:45, I got in after a few tries !!1! Even managed to make a nice Norn Ranger and watch the opening cinematic, but then I was greeted by a black screen at the end of the opening cinematic and hung there… And now I can’t get back in, forums are down and there is talks about crashed servers. Well, so far this still has gone better than D3 open beta. Really hoping I get to play the game today.

22:57: Managed to get to character selection screen for a brief time, but all controls became unresponsive, so I logged out, again.

23:06: Third time in, failed to get to game world, and UI locked again.

23:54: Finally managed to log in, same error and lockup. Went to sleep.

-- Saturday begins

3:30: Woke up, checked whether the game works, it worked. Went back to sleep.

4:30: Couldn't sleep, started gaming. All is well.

5:46: Got kicked out. Got back immediately. Seems that my progress was rollbacked about five minutes..

6:16: Got kicked out, couldn't get in right away. I hear there's some maintenance.

6:50: It's on!

14:30: I was going to switch characters, but error messages greeted me then and every time after character selection. Maybe I should take this moment to eat something.

15:15: Servers allowed me to continue gaming.

19:00: Felt sleepy, wen't for a nap.

20:40: OK, let's continue.

22:45: Got kicked out without so much of an error message.

-- Sunday begins

00:45: It's on, finally!

00:55: Or not.. no error once again..

05:55: How about some sleep now? Not tired yet, but bad things might happen without sleep. Well, at least I played 18 hours and 30 minutes with the last sleep. Pity that beta end Monday at 09:00, and I have normal things to do then, so can't play too this following night.

14:10: It's on!

00:28: First ever crash for me.

01:55: Oh well.. have to get up fairly early in the morning, so this will have to do... 30 hours(exactly) is better than nothing.

07:55: Before going to sleep I heard there would a ending event, so had to wake up to play it. Turns out it only begun when the beta was supposed to end. Anyway, it was awesome! I even have few videos in youtube about Champion Bloodthirsty Black Moas.

09:03: Bam! Login screen without error message, I'm getting used to this. Pity this was the last time this would happen in a long time, as the BETA IS OVER! Playtime: 32 hours 8 minutes.The beta was supposed to start at 22 o’clock, but when I tried to log in about 21:45, I got in after a few tries !!1! Even managed to make a nice Norn Ranger and watch the opening cinematic, but then I was greeted by a black screen at the end of the opening cinematic and hung there… And now I can’t get back in, forums are down and there is talks about crashed servers. Well, so far this still has gone better than D3 open beta.
Really hoping I get to play the game today.

22:57: Managed to get to character selection screen for a brief time, but all controls became unresponsive, so I logged out, again.

23:06: Third time in, failed to get to game world, and UI locked again.

23:54: Finally managed to log in, same error and lockup. Went to sleep.

-- Saturday begins

3:30: Woke up, checked whether the game works, it worked. Went back to sleep.

4:30: Couldn't sleep, started gaming. All is well.

5:46: Got kicked out. Got back immediately. Seems that my progress was rollbacked about five minutes..

6:16: Got kicked out, couldn't get in right away. I hear there's some maintenance.

6:50: It's on!

14:30: I was going to switch characters, but error messages greeted me then and every time after character selection. Maybe I should take this moment to eat something.

15:15: Servers allowed me to continue gaming.

19:00: Felt sleepy, wen't for a nap.

20:40: OK, let's continue.

22:45: Got kicked out without so much of an error message.

-- Sunday begins

00:45: It's on, finally!

00:55: Or not.. no error once again..

05:55: How about some sleep now? Not tired yet, but bad things might happen without sleep. Well, at least I played 18 hours and 30 minutes with the last sleep. Pity that beta end Monday at 09:00, and I have normal things to do then, so can't play too this following night.

14:10: It's on!

-- Monday begins

00:28: First ever crash for me.

01:55: Oh well.. have to get up fairly early in the morning, so this will have to do... 30 hours(exactly) is better than nothing.

07:55: Before going to sleep I heard there would a ending event, so had to wake up to play it. Turns out it only begun when the beta was supposed to end. Anyway, it was awesome! I even have few videos in youtube about Champion Bloodthirsty Black Moas.

09:03: Bam! Login screen without error message, I'm getting used to this. Pity this was the last time this would happen in a long time, as the BETA IS OVER! Playtime: 32 hours 8 minutes.

In anticipation of next week’s Guild Wars 2 Public Beta

I’ve had high hopes for GW2 even before it was announced, and finally I’ll get a chance to try it out personally! Needless to say, I’m getting fairly exited here.

Or that would be the case had I not seen videos of previous closed beta. I’m having serious doubts on the fact they removed Energy from the game. That means that for most of the classes there is only a single resource to manage(recharge). Without firsthand playing experience I am having huge difficulties believing that recharge and timing alone give as much of a challenge and joy as they did in Guild Wars 1 which also had Energy.

And what I have gathered from videos and other sources, I feel that Guild Wars 2 has been dumbed down in other areas, too. Take the Mesmers, for example. They’ve been hugely shown in the media, but I haven’t seen them doing much shutdowning. Ok, Izzy mentioned that interrupts for example were given a much smaller role than in GW1 due to latency issues, but.. They worked just fine in GW1, don’t change that. They add depth to the game and encourage varying casting order and positioning away from the interrupter. On the other hand they allow skilled players to really dominate their enemies if they know what they are doing, rewarding expertise.

But that gets us to another key aspect: positioning. The dev team has been pretty exited about it’s importance and told that it would have a huge impact on battles. I’m not sure if they have been making it an even bigger mechanic as time has passed, but earlier they were very careful not to introduce [cheap] skills that affect position or movement, but recently I’ve seen more skills doing just that. It will be interesting to see what is the reality here.

Moving on to bigger stuff: the first M in MMO. Guild Wars 1 can be said to be only a MO, but now that Guild Wars 2 is here it gets Massive. The devs have faced an enormous challenge in transforming GW1 to a massively playable state. I have played some tiny amounts of WoW, and was quite pleased with the massive aspect in it, world felt like a much more lively place when another player could be seen doing the same things as you were etc etc. The massive aspect is one of the biggest things I am looking forward to experiencing, but GW1 mechanics might have difficulty directly translating  to a scale like this. There lies the danger of dumbing everything down to a point where old players start to feel uncomfortable about the core mechanics. Widest possible audience is sometimes not what you want.

But will Guild Wars 2 be Guild Wars 2, or just a MMO set in Guild Wars universe? If you ask me, the game mechanics are almost as important as story and setting. Next week will answer so many questions.

Still waiting for Raspberry Pi

This wait is killing me. All I want is a nice little computer running quietly on my desk/ceiling/wall/whatever with all kinds of specialized sw/hw.

• I want my very own shell.
• I want a portable thin client.
• I want remote controlled lighting.
• I want Nginx and Stackless Python.
• I want a battery backup using 18650s or capacitors.
• I want to use those temperature sensors I have in my drawer!

But as far as I know my luck, there'll be some kind of obstacle preventing me from acquiring this wonderful piece of equipment, or at least greatly hinder my plans. Still missing a video adapter, a quality power source and a memory card. Oh, and my network infrastructure is bit lacking, too.. but on that some other post.

Of the importance of simplified web page system

The last few months I've been more or less actively doing site&stuff for lumicraft.fi, I've realized that the way the site can be edited has a huge impact on the amount of edits one does. (sürprise..)

Back in dea.fi and lannukka.fi for example, LCS is being used, and they are quite 'repulsive' to edit. First logging in and then using that anemic, but still syntax hilighted text area to do the edit embedded HTML(not the whole page, only the content area) and then publish the edit and have the revision show up in the changelog. But what if you made a typo? New edit, new changelog entry :(

But on lumicraft I went back to a simpler system, there's just a directory containing normal text files with WikiCreole inside. Beautiful and fast-to-type syntax. Nothing fancy required. Just edit the file and voilà!

Of course I could have continued to just use HTML, then it would have been only a matter of include(), but seems I can't get around experimenting :p

Ok, I must admit. There is no way to keep track of changes to see how the site has evolved. No way to notify people that an edit has been made. Of course a cronjob could be made to diff the files etc, but it's just kludgy. Although a daemon came to my mind, listening to file change events and acting appropriately. Might actually work, but still bit of a kludge.

But the point: as transparency increases in editing, so does productivity.

Global/Finnish game jam aftermath, Sommerkopter

Well, that was interesting. As you might know, the event was about writing a game in 48 hours. I must say that it is not too much.

I was in a team consisting of me and five older students. Felt bit out of my league, considering we had decided to use C++, a language I had only a little experience in.

But everything exploded better than exceptions! This Game Jam was first real coding project for me involving other developers, and I learned much about working as a team. First of all, it was incredible to be able to work with like-minded people. People who actually also knew how to code, and with this particular language even better than me. When coding my part of the game(terrain generation), there was few particular challenges with memory management and syntax, but now I could verbally ask for help! I might not have been very productive, but at least learned a lot.

And what was wildly different from coding by myself, I could actually concentrate on only part of the project. No need to code everything by myself. Not even the graphics, those were made by the two 'highly skilled' artists in our team.

But actually, in the end there was only two other people in our team coding. Other two were on the graphics dept and one had to fight with our version control system for the whole weekend. But those two other coders, they made the bulk of the code needed to make this happen, I thank thee.

But I thank the whole team also, we all made this weekend amazing. I had great fun brainstorming and socializing with you (me socializing, o.o). And we actually created something very nice, didn't we? Something that actually might appear again in the future. (winkwink)

So I present you Sommerkopter: Global Game Jam project page and a gameplay video! A game where your objective will be flying logs from hills to a collection area, with a helicopter. Heli-logging at it's best.

And for the future: if you, the reader, have a chance to participate next year, please help yourself and do so. It will be fun.