2641

I need the area and lore of a game to give meaning to what I am doing. Its just pixels and mobs with a fixed HP bar, so something else sould convince me that I am doing something heroic.

Its not just the graphics, pixel density, polygons number, or even the prettiness of the zone. Its the pretense of what I am doing.

I would consider worth fighting for the charr, if not where a soo obliviously a race in decadence (have you played the tabletop Small World?).
The Asura are another group of idiots survivors going nowhere.

Humans are doing a Turtle Defense, and losing everything even inside spiting distance from the city walls.
I have seen enough villages and towns, and the like. In games like Rift, or most wow clones. You can ask me to care about a hobbit town, but I can’t give a fuck about a human town, there are lots of others like this ones… at least in other “worlds”.

2642

Fair enough - to each his own.

I can’t speak much about the lore - because nothing about it has appealed to me enough to make me take it seriously. As far as I’m concerned, it’s among the weakest areas of the game.

However, I can’t really say until I play the full game. I think the problem is the writing style/approach more than anything.

2643

I don’t know much about the lore either.

It seems the charr destroyed the humans place generations ago… I even remember being there!, I played the old GW… kind of funny that I will be fighting ghost of these people (I worked hard to help them on his petty issues).
Now the charr are not evil. I will need a adjustement here, note to self: remove charr from K.O.S.

Here in the nord, we have something like a anual party “Whos the best hunter?”. That is like a Oktoberfest for Conan the Barbarian. Search the biggest thing, kill it, drag the head to the town. Simple enough. I can get behind that.

There are magic and dead tricksters, and stuff, but I feel that If I poke these things with a axe enough time will stay quiet.

If you ask me, these Asura and Charr guys are like crows, dragging everything bright for his made-up “houses”.

About the plants people, the savagii, or whatever are called. What are his plans? You are the younger race in the world, what are you tryiing to achieve? If your whole race is dedicated to one case: Bring PEACE to the world, Are you strong enough? are you ready to fight for that cause?. This race lacks a strong will.

2644

(Cartman voice) Goddammit! I’m feeling the MMO pull…but the game is so damn expensive. THose Digital deluxe items arent really neccesary, are they? As in, one will outlevel it quickly?

2645

El-giganten har det til 289 kr. (fragt inklusiv).

http://www.elgiganten.dk/search?WFSimpleSearch_NameOrID=Guild+Wars+2+(PCCD)

2646

Men kan jeg spille imorgen så? ;-)

2647

Rettet prisen.

Nej, du må vente til tirsdag ;)

Men der er vel også lidt server-sjask de første par dage.

better return to english

2648

My wife and I also had a few different things happen when we tried to sign into the stress test yesterday.

When I logged in, it told me I needed to verify my email and I had to send a confirmation email to my account email address and then click on a link there to confirm it. It seemed a little strange, but it originated from the beta client application I have been running for months now so it all seemed legit.

On my wife’s account, she linked her account to her original GW account which is one of those @ncsoft accounts way back when we pre-purchased months ago. She was able to use this throughout the BWEs, but yesterday when she signed in it also told her to update her email. She couldn’t use the @ncsoft as that isn’t really an email account (that I know of anyway and that is what it told us when she tried it). She put in the email address that her account is linked to (and the one she is getting emails to about BWEs and such) and it tells her that the email is already in use. So, we are hoping she is all set and can just ignore all of this, but it has us a little concerned. The whole GW/GW2 attaching of accounts with the @ncsoft stuff was all really confusing the first time around and I still don’t fully understand it. She did log into the forums after all this to confirm her @ncsoft login credentials still worked and it let her log in so I am hoping she can still use those and get into the release later tonight.

2649

Account linking is up at account.guildwars2.com for those who haven’t been able to properly link their accounts or who want to check if their accounts are linked. Once you log in and then click my accounts, its right below the link to security.

2650

If that aspect of the Nord race appeals to you, then you’ll be in heaven when you run across Meatoberfest in the second Nord zone!

2651

One last question before I try to convince the missus its a great idea I have yet another MMO play is : How much exploring is there in the game? Can one go off the beaten track (Vanguard), or are you clearly railroaded (Starwars:TOR)

2652

I had the same thing on my GW2 account the other day.

2653

The game is designed to be explored, there’s no quest hubs. If you’re not out roaming and exploring, finding Vistas and Skill Challenges and stumbling into new Dynamic Events, you’re doing it wrong. The exploration aspect is great (and tons of XP to boot).

2654

Bastards…

2655

The game is supposed to be quite exploration-oriented, and speaking as a non-fanboy, I have to admit that the world looks very appealing.

One of the primary “tangible” reasons for exploration is the nature of dynamic events - because you can’t predict where they appear and how they will be.

Also, you can get skill points through challenges that you can find through exploration.

However, I don’t think there’s anything like the open dungeons in Vanguard (there are caves and stuff, though) - which was a big part of the appeal of exploration in that game. At least, I haven’t heard of any open dungeons.

But, yeah, if you enjoy immersing yourself in a visually appealing world that will reward you for going off the beaten path, GW2 is probably a good choice.

2656

There is a lot of exploration in the game. Of course, each zone has a set number of points of interest, which are often located in interesting areas. Then there’s vistas, which are areas that when you visit, give you a 360 panorama of the spot (which is also very cool).

Zone completion involves completing all the hearts, grabbing all the waypoints, and visiting all the POIs and vistas in a zone - doing all this gives you a fun little reward (typically transmutation stones, which you can use to transform the looks of a piece of armor). Plus you get XP for visiting all those areas and opening up new portions of the map.

In addition to all that, you can sometimes run across interesting stuff in zones as you explore. For example, I was running through a zone once and found some guys in a cave who were repairing their tanks (it was something like the Charr 32’nd mechanized division). There were some conversation options when talking to one of the NPCs - no heart or quest or anything, it just looked like you could talk to him. I went thru the conversation tree and “repaired” the tank by picking a few choices, and I was rewarded by a set of town clothes!

Oh yeah, in addition there area around 20 “jumping puzzles”, one per zone (I think) which you have to stumble across and then figure out how to complete. They usually involve jumping skills and timing things. At the end is often a nice reward (and an achievement, so you can look at the Explorer achievement category to see how many there are). They’re often tucked away in caves or underwater or in areas you’d only find if you were running around looking for interesting stuff.

So yeah, there’s things that explorers can do!

Edit to add: there are things I’ve heard called “mini-dungeons” in the game, but that might have transitioned into the jumping puzzles. There’s one I found in Diessa Plateau called (I think) the Font of Rhand - there’s a waypoint there and it’s a cool looking area but it has a locked grate in front of it. When you talk to a NPC there he says the Flame Legion has locked it and you need to defeat them or some such, to unlock it. And a nearby Flame Legion area shows a portal to this area. I’m hoping there are multiple locations like this, but there’s at least one of them!

2657

Charr have the Meatoberfest.

2658

So for those having performance issues on hyperthreaded Intel CPUs or Bulldozer AMD CPUs, there’s been a lot of talk about a Windows 7 power saving feature called Core Parking. Basically, when the OS determines a CPU isn’t needed, it “Parks” it. The problem is that when the CPU is needed again, it first needs to unpark/wake up, which can cause microstutters and other sudden dips in framerate. This feature has been much maligned, from what I’ve seen, since idle processors take very little power anyway and really isn’t useful at all in desktop environments (where you’re not trying to maximize battery life, like a tablet or notebook).

From what I understand, this tweak isn’t possible on Core2Duo machines (not sure on Quadro), but applies to all AMD Bulldozer CPUs and the i3/5/7 line from Intel. There’s a related Windows hotfix for the AMD CPUs, since I’m not on an AMD system I don’t know if this hotfix is downloaded automatically or if you have to grab it yourself.

If you’re interested in trying this out, just to be on the safe side I would recommend created a Restore Point in Windows, which will let you roll back the registry if you need. If you don’t know how to create a restore point, it’s pretty easy. Just type “Restore Point” in the Start Menu and you’ll see an option for “Create a Restore Point”, click “Create” at the bottom of the dialog, and give it a name.

You can manually tweak your registry or run the powercfg command-line utilty to disable core parking, but the easiest way is to just grab this tool (instructions provided in link, but it’s simple).

As GW2 is currently unavailable, I haven’t been able to test the effectiveness yet, but from some Google searches it looks like this has been a pretty decent performance increase in other games, like Battlefield 3, and eliminates microstuttering and brief dips in FPS in a lot of cases. This page has a small benchmark that showed some pretty significant gains running WinRAR (which is CPU intensive).

As with all things of this nature, if you’re not comfortable making tweaks to your system, don’t. I’ve disabled it on my system so far with no adverse effects, but I haven’t run it through any tests yet. The whole Core Parking thing was brought to my attention via a link to this page on Reddit.

2659

I don’t think they are necessary at all and I’m a huge GW fan. The starting items you will outlevel and the other items are consumables. Save your money since you may want to buy some micro items like extra character slots (mandatory for alt maniacs) or stuff like more bank space.

2660

I decided I’d take that $20 for the digital deluxe and buy some gems with it instead to buy some of the permanent upgrades.

The only thing I saw that might actually be useful for a while early on is the Hero Band but you get that with any prepurchase.