Since the implementation of guild missions a couple of weeks ago, the Guild Wars 2 community has expressed a wide variety of, well, concern. A significant portion of small-to-medium guilds have not been able to even start the process of learning guild missions because of the high Influence requirements as well as the fact that the Art of War guild upgrades need to have been unlocked before a guild bounty can be unlocked. Right before the update, we saw a developer blog where smaller guilds were reassured that they would be able to participate in guild missions with ease. Unfortunately, the result is that while players can technically participate in another guild’s mission, they cannot earn the valuable rewards for participating.

This leaves a smaller guild with few options. The guild can merge with another, larger guild, which would work nicely for guild missions, but might harm either guild community. The guild can also actively recruit, which is probably the most effective possibility, but also extremely difficult when large guilds right now already offer a large chunk of guild missions and challenges. The third option is to unlock guild missions using gold. This seems to be the route that many smaller guilds are currently taking, but it’s proving to be a difficult road so far.

Psst, over here! Just in case, you know, you’re taking a break from the game– I’m here to distract you from work, er, chat about Guild Wars 2! Or specifically, headstart. The game’s off to an interesting start so far. I say ‘interesting’ because– let’s face it– not everyone has been pleased with their headstart experience. Despite ArenaNet managing to pull up the servers exactly when they said they probably would, it seems the servers had a hard time keeping up with the player load, and produced quite a large number of issues and game lockups.

Over the course of the weekend, players have experienced issues with logging in, staying logged in, account validation, guilds/guild membership disappearing, the trading post, the Black Lion Trading Company, HoM deliveries, WvWvW, and more. At the same time, not everyone experienced every issue, and in fact, quite a few players experienced a weekend of worry-free gaming. Some players were able to put in about seven hours of stable playtime before problems arose, and for the most part, those same players were able to log in a couple hours later. Not bad, right? Perhaps. But let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?

This video has been seen by many people already, but that is probably not enough. Enigmius gives us an in-depth editorial on the different ways to level and progress your character in Guild Wars 2. We’ve seen a lot of different people discuss on forums that they were confused on what to do in GW2, or that they didn’t know what to do and felt lost. This is hardly surprising as a generation of MMORPG gamers have been conditioned to go from golden exclamation mark to exclamation mark. and that is definitely not the case with Guild Wars 2.

So continue reading and check out Enigmius’ video where he goes over all the different sources of experience and the general flow of how the game is played. He’ll discuss W3, hearts, events, crafting and more!

There has been one constant in MMOs for the last eight years.  There have been casual MMOs, raiding MMOs, MMOs in space and MMOs in the future but, through them all, the Holy Trinity has been a constant.  The concept of the tank, the healer and the DPS has been ingrained in our heads over years of constant use.  When we face a boss, be it with four of our friends or nineteen of them, it has almost always been with a tank leading the way, a healer healing him and DPS killing the boss.  Sure, there have been a few exceptions, the Shade of Aran from Karazhan being a notable exception, but the exceptions have been few and far between.  The Trinity has always been there.