Invasion of the Everything

Part of my Explorer of Tyria journal - you can find the rest here!

Guildwars 2 zones have come under attack by the forces of the seemingly too smart for her own good jester sylvari, Scarlet - who made her grand(er?) entrance during the closing ceremony of the Queen's Jubilee. She's far too interesting to be Trahearne's evil twin, so I'm now guessing she is the "Harley Quinn" to the Mad King's "Joker"... and I'm Batman! Well, no I guess I'm just one of the Gotham PD in that analogy because everyone is a hero and because I'm not rich. :P

Harley is way hotter than Scarlet though.

She's been a busy little plant though as not only does she have the tech and forces of the steam creatures, the sheeply stupid molten alliance and a small country of aetherblade pirates at her disposal - she also has twisted the watchwork knights in Divinity's Reach to her will turning them into... uh... Decepticons? From her barricaded position within the Crown Pavillion she sends them out in huge numbers via steam portals, and joins the forays herself just to remind everyone who is behind the attacks.

Really have to keep an eye on the clock if you want to participate in stopping these though (and to continue the story, you NEED to participate in at least SIX or have a buddy who already did that for you). A window of 10 minutes at the start of every hour is all you have to waypoint to the hot zone and once there expect to be way pointing around more to stop the gazillion foes warping in. Thank the gods Kiel won with her cheaper WP costs!

If you miss the entry window you will be sitting on your hands for 50 minutes, being left out and simply "waiting to have fun". GW2 likes introducing mechanics where you wait to have fun. They really are carefully going through that first manifesto and breaking every point they had. One of the achievements needs you to participate in 13 at the minimum (13 hours on the hour) but likely it will be more since you need to luck out and get 13 unique zones.

Fortunately the rewards are pretty good, better I think than the Crown Pavillion circuit but that may look more appealing after Kiel's WP reduction runs out after the next few weeks. I know I'll be participating as much as I can, that's for sure. Never had as much gold as now, yet I still don't have enough for a commander tag. I'm poor. :(

Ellen Kieled it! Time to celebrate with the Queen!

Part of my Explorer of Tyria journal - you can find the rest here!

Kinda glad now that my previous post with "art" incentives was overlooked as Ellen Kiel has emerged the victor in the voting for the Captain's Council seat - thrashing the hopes and desires of all of Evon Gnashblade's supporters (and hopefully their wallets too). Story-wise, unless you were playing either an evil aligned, human hating, or charr loving (beastiality much?) character then you -should- have voted for Kiel. A surprising amount of people decided to vote for Evon without RP consideration. They just wanted the fractal he offered which now will have close to zero chance of coming to fruition thanks to their collective failure. ANet did a good job getting players involved in the election so it will be interesting to see if they can keep it up in the next arc: the Queen's Jubilee.

From what I've seen so far it looks pretty fun inside the Crown Pavillion - lots of things to fight and lots of loot for the taking. Ofcourse the aetherblade pirates are still being a nuisance but aside from the opening ceremony most of their antics are with content outside the city. Haven't explored those yet mainly due to the shineys dropping inside the new zone. Also the solo arena fights, which you can watch/be watched by other players are pretty interesting. I've beaten the first three rounds so far and am hoping to make it all the way to the end!

Definitely going to be a case of this though.

Vote for Ellen Kiel!

Part of my Explorer of Tyria journal - you can find the rest here!

Turns out this whole politics thing is just as dull in game as it is out of game, adding only three activities for people to do. Kiel offers Capture the Fla...Crystal (PvP) in Aspect Arena where you use pieces of a dead dragon to fight each other. Evon offers Southsun Survival/Battle Royale (PvP) which I find more fun - having to scrounge up supplies and food to out survive the other people both living and dead. People compare it a lot to Hunger Games, but I've never read it nor seen the movie so ... *shrug*. Lastly you can go fight aetherblade pirates for either. All the above come with ludicrous repetition (and paltry rewards) if you want achievements.

ANet even encourages people to nullify their own votes by being able to vote for both candidates to get those little AP points on either side which is silly if you ask me. I'm just dumping all my votes in Kiel's basket up at the zephyrite airship. Why? Because she's the "good" guy as far as I'm concerned.

I've even gone so far to offer some "art" incentives to help Kiel win but so far it doesn't look like it has picked up any traction. Oh well. I tried!

Well hello Lady Kasmeer!

Fortunately the heavy PvP content plus the rather useless rewards (backpieces and minis) aren't really necessary to get vote tickets. Also, given that I can get vote tickets by simply murdering large quantities of pixels in standard zones I can just go for my slayer achievements instead of having to sludge through the minigames. Turns out APs aren't really what I'm after at the moment (despite my last post) - I'm gunning for laurels (now on 25/100)! :P

Achievement Based Play

Part of my Explorer of Tyria journal - you can find the rest here!

The new change in GW2 of rewarding achievements and more importantly, the new achievement interface has seen an increase in play time for me now. Suddenly I -want- those APs and Laurels because those ascended items have suddenly been put within my reach - and who doesn't want to better their character right? ANet is just going to keep adding item tiers and make the hamster wheel bigger and bigger I think. Anyway, more importantly is I suddenly have a goal again. The clever little change in the UI that displays what achievements I'm close to is a real driving force for me, even for the grindy ones. After doing the daily/monthly I look to that to see which one I can tick off the list. I alternate this with Neverwinter Online where the quest structure and story is pretty rigid, and wonder what I'll be doing there once I finish all the content... oh yeah, making foundry missions! Kinda slacked off on that due to XCOM.

Anywho back to Tyria where the council seat election looms and while I know who I'm voting for, the whole thing seems structured for grinders to have a larger say - given you need to kill stuff or do "x" to acquire vote tokens as opposed to one vote per account/character. Fair enough given that it is the 24/7 grinders who will be most affected by whatever change takes place. I'm not sure if it is better to hide or show the current vote count as the event goes on but either way, based on the forum noise it has already generated I think ANet are onto a winner release. Sounds very PvP-oriented this round though, and again with backpiece skins as rewards - Really? I think that's the only piece ANet enjoy changing. Anyway the little list will keep me busy - I think I'm shooting for 100 laurels all up and that's gonna take me awhile. :P

Aspects of Fun

Part of my Explorer of Tyria journal - you can find the rest here!

After a nice break where in I got to do other stuff (including exploring a vertically challenging aetherblade base within a holographic mountain) while the rest of the populace helped capture Aetherblade Captain Mai Trin in her dungeon, I returned to news that a bunch of flying merchants had docked at some difficult to reach cliffs to display their wares. I like exploring places so I headed on down via ship to visit the spectacularly beautiful (yet deviously deadly) Labyrinthine Cliffs where these Zephyrites had parked. Not only do they have interesting goods (most of which are dangerous - where do they get this stuff and more importantly why are they selling them to unsuspecting folk?), they also have developed a form of travel using aspect crystals to either dash quickly, jump high, or jump far and pray to god you don't end up as a splat on the ground as you climb higher up the dizzying heights. Being sadistic bastards they also setup a scavenger hunt for sky crystals in the zone to encourage self-termination via gravity.

Insane and Insanely Pretty!

High atop their anchored sky ship (which have diving goggles on the prow... as I said, these people are psycho) you can participate in their "aspect training" which comes in the form of a race. A very fun yet very annoying race. Took me 28 tries before coming first, mainly due to aspect lag (a skill ANet didn't forsee nor cater for). I did come up with a short list to help others overcome it though. The Zephyrites were also victims of robbery, not just from random Aetherblade raiders but from skritt running off with a bunch of their kites. The bastard rats even took the time to hide in various jumping puzzles, one within a fractal and one in the PVP Obsidian Sanctum.

Ofcourse I did all the above and kind of regret not chasing down the Aetherblade Caches in the other JP's and mini dungeons previously because I forgot how much fun they were. My favourite was the final kite at Obsidian Sanctum. Upon entering the Eternal Battlegrounds to find that an enemy server, Drakkar Lake, had complete dominion over it (them Germans are good at war). I had to aid my Gunnar's Hold compatriots in violently capturing our low lands corner including three nearby towers and the keep before making my way into the puzzle proper itself, solo. Inside I encountered maybe ten more Drakkar Lake players (in various small groups), any of whom could have really ruined my day but through salute/dance truce (opposing servers cannot hear chat; you can only communicate through action) I freely passed all of them without any aggression whatsoever.

With a boost in achievement points which will help my later achievement unlocks I also was rewarded a permanent quartz node as a symbol of my awesome ambassadorial skills (I don't recall doing any ambassadoring though). Plotwise the newly appointed Captain and ineffective ex-Lionguard Investigator/Policewoman Ellen Kiel is going head to head with Black Lion Company founder Evon Gnashblade. Both trying to secure a trade agreement with the flying salesmen to help their claim to the vacant council seat, made that way from the events last month. I didn't really pay attention to the politics. There were cliffs to be climbed! :P