We all have things we love about Guild Wars 2, places that make us cheer out and say “yes, this is my ultra-mega place!” We all have classes, abilities, and features we’re passionate about, either negatively or positively. This is a place to share all that. Once a month or so I’ll be raising a Guild Wars 2 question to the community– hopefully an interesting one– and we’ll share our opinions. I’ll start off with my opinion just to get the ball rolling, but these questions will not have any right or wrong answers, so feel free to argue with me to your heart’s content!

I think a lot of us were blown away when ArenaNet turned their April Fool’s Day gag– Super Adventure Box– and turned it into a full-fledged event complete with its own story, 8-bit world and system, novelty items, and rewards. For those of us who grew up in the 8-bit era, the whole thing is a bittersweet trip down nostalgia lane, and ArenaNet, frankly, did an awesome job integrating an 8-bit world into the Guild Wars 2 world we’re already familiar with it. It was a taste of the odd, a taste of the fun, and for most of us, it was refreshing to have a mini-game that gave us so many completely different options to explore. Yes, I will break all those pots and bounce around collecting shinies, thank you very much.

The potential problem with this awesome mini-game distraction, however, is the fact that at the end of the day, Super Adventure Box is still a game within a game. It’s a fun little adventure that distracts us from what we’d normally take part in during our time spent in the game. Distraction can be fun, but at some point, many of us kind of find ourselves stepping back and wondering, “okay, now what?” Can you ever have too many shinies and mini-games within a game?

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?

I want to start with a bit of a confession.  I’m a cooking junkie.  Cooking is always my tradeskill of choice in any game that it is available.  I’m a fan of cooking because I love the idea of creating consumables as a tradeskill, as there is always a built in demand due to their limited use.  Other tradeskills must compete with world drops, but Cooks have only a very small amount of competition in this regard.  Further exacerbating the competition factor in Guild Wars 2 is the fact that the Trading Post operates across all servers, and while all crafting disciplines will undoubtedly experience increased competition as a result of this, the built in continuous demand for consumables should help to keep the chefs of Tyria profitable.

Today, Venturebeat.com published an article with their opinion of Guild Wars 2:

During my beta adventures I only scratched the surface of Guild Wars 2. The amount of content and gameplay options, combined with the lack of a monthly subscription fee, makes this a very compelling product. It should appeal to most MMO players and even to fans of single-player RPGs like Bethesda’s multi-million selling The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.

Guild Wars 2 does a much better job than its predecessor of offering interesting content for solo players and creating the feeling of a dynamic, live game world. I got to do cool things quickly with minimal amounts of irritation and confusion. Though I focused on the firearms-wielding and turrets-building engineer, the seven other character classes seem equally interesting.

Make sure you check out the rest of their preview in the link above and see if your agree with their assessment of how GW2 is challenging the MMORPG market with their subscription-less method.