Its stuck to my fingers
Tasha
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Home page: http://www.tashadarke.co.uk
Posts by Tasha
Assortment Box of Beta-ness
2 months ago
Nope I haven’t quite disappeared. I’ve been lurking in the background, half keeping an eye on Guild Wars 2 stuff, half trying desperately to juggle real life stuff. The job is hectic, the guild has sprung back into life, and to top it all off I’ve exceeded my download limit for the month watching Guild Wars 2 videos. Anyway, here’s a selection of the random thoughts that have been bouncing through my head of late.
Hot topic of the month has to be trait refunding, if it’s good or bad, disruptive to gameplay or a good way of making choices matter. I don’t wish to weigh in with my opinions on this matter (mostly because for once I don’t have one) but I do want to remind people that attribute points were not always freely re-distributable in Guild Wars. From launch to September 05, the concept of Attribute Refund points existed which players gained through gaining xp or completing missions – each point allowed you to decrease an attribute by 1 point. Increasing an attribute was free. It was hard work to reassign your points and I’m told by those who were playing at the time, a pain in the backside. The point is this – even fundamental stuff can and will be changed after launch.
So what about those things I was looking for before the floodgates opened? The ranger’s pet seems to have improved in it’s performance but seems quite squishy. I’ve seen quite a few videos of people running around with their pets dead which to me indicates that either people don’t immediately see the value in the pet or it dies so often it’s less hassle to leave it dead. I do like that even while dead it still follows it’s owner around though – very nice touch.
Mesmers I’m still not convinced about. Illusions and clones are looking less exciting than the first glance indicated and there seems to be a lot of emphasis on them. I’d have preferred to see more of the other skills. But all the footage needs to be taken with the pile of salt that is new players and early game.
Guilds… oh my what’s not to love. So many options. I can’t quite express how much more elegant the influence & building system is than guild hall upgrades. Activity brings more benefits which brings more activity. I also like that the benefits are so varied, including options for parties. I’m also delighted with the server system providing home servers and the concept of visiting – it’s a better but not overly dissimilar solution to one I proposed nearly a year ago. It elegantly provides the flexibility to play with everyone while giving WvW a sense of meaning.
Speaking of which, I’ve been pretty disappointed with the footage of WvW we’ve seen. I think it’s because the maps weren’t overly full but I haven’t been able to get a good sense of what it is like to play in WvW. The keeps and castles look amazing though and I can’t wait to give it a go myself.
Course we have no idea when that will be yet but I did join the million other people who signed up for the beta. Fingers crossed!
Press Beta Coverage Thoughts
2 months ago
by Tasha
in Guild Wars 2
Like everyone interested in Guild Wars 2 I’ve spent the last few days soaking up the various editorials and videos, and have been struck by how different press members have approached showcasing the game itself.
Editorially, I’ve been most interested by those from people who would not consider themselves fans of Guild Wars or MMOs in general. They’ve generally been positive with constructive critism. It’s natural that not everyone will be won over by the game, and despite my frustration last week I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the comments I’ve seen in response to these articles. Faith a little bit more restored.
Video wise, I’ve been most thrilled by the videos from the Yogscast and Total Biscuit, both for various different reasons. Many people choose to showcase cities, or ui or WvW and that’s great but they aren’t overly relevant to people. People generally want to know 2 things: will I have fun in this game, and how does everything in the game impact me as a player?
The Yogscast totally encapsulate the former. Neither Simon or Lewis really played Guild Wars, but have been looking forward to Guild Wars 2 for a while. They made characters of a particular race, jumped in and just started playing. It was wonderful to watch how they discovered stuff about the game, especially a tricky encounter with a Broodmother that reinforced the need to dodge rather than just stand there and take a beating. The delight while feeding bear cubs was infectious, and their discovery of an underwater passage that led to a new area highlighted the explorer’s dream that is Guild Wars 2. If nothing else, their videos are not forced or formal but still showcase the game fully. This is the reason for their success – at the end of the day it’s 2 friends exploring a game together in a way that people can directly relate to.
Total Biscuit on the other hand has gone for a different angle. He was not able to play the beta himself due to commitments, but his team recorded around 2 Tb of footage and he has been commentating and releasing videos. They are focussed and well presented, while being humourous and pointing out the rediculousness of the game (who knew boars had such complex social heirarchy!). Mainly though, he states why you should care that a Guardian could use a hammer and not just use a staff. He makes the information relevant to you as a player rather than just giving a brain dump of information and expecting you to draw certain conclusions from it.
Anyway, those are just a couple of observations from what I’ve seen of the beta footage so far. Bring on today’s secret surprise!
Inquiring Mind Wants to Know
3 months ago
With various press outlets revealing their involvement in the upcoming Guild Wars 2 press beta, and an NDA lifting on the 20th, I thought it’d be fun to compile a few of the things I’ll be hoping get cleared up.
How is the ranger shaping up?
I really really REALLY want the Guild Wars 2 ranger to be oozing with awesome, but from what I’ve experienced so far the pet weighs down this class with a massive anchor. Have ArenaNet solved these issues to make man and beast run as one? Here’s hoping, but I’m not holding my breath.
Go mesmer go!
I fell in love with the mesmer from the first videos that got leaked, but after reading some of the editorials over at Mesmer.me, I can’t help but wonder if maybe I’m getting my hopes up over another lacklustre pet-centric profession. More videos and first hand opinions please.
Guilds, guilds, guilds
I’m busy getting my guild’s website ready for the launch of Guild Wars 2, and also mentally preparing how best to “play” the new challenges brought up by the multi-guild system. I would love to see what tools I get to play with, or what’s missing from Guild Wars 2 itself. Also, since there will be no guild halls at release, where the guild meet up point will be.
Skills
Work on GW Templates is coming along swimmingly, and I’m starting to look forward to what can be done for Guild Wars 2. That means gathering as much information about skills and traits as possible.
Around the world
How are servers shaping up, and what decisions have been made to accomodate international guilds. MYST already had a few members in Asia and the Americas in Guild Wars, now some have emigrated from Europe to more exotic climbs. Can we all still play together? Fingers crossed.
Trade, glorious trade
I’m a trade junkie. No two ways about it. In Rift, I play the artifacts market obsessively – in Guild Wars it was all about mods. So what tools will Guild Wars 2 provide to those of us who like the sound of a busy market and how much space will be granted to the inner packrat? Will I have to pre-order 2 copies for myself?
World vs World vs World
I got to play some Conquest at Gamescom and loved it as a competative mode that was accessible. But I really want to find out what WvW has in store beyond ArenaNet’s latest blog post. I keep hearing whispers of Dark Age of Camelot but I never played that game. The closest I’ve played was Aion with it’s forts. Which for me was a lagfest at best and a client crash at worst. Will the servers be able to smoothly handle that much fighting in one area? Also how is directing the battle going to work? Will there be a guild of commanders, are voice communications required and will players really be able to avoid PvE all together and just WvW to 80?
Those are just a few of the questions I’m hoping will be answered on Monday or Tuesday next week. I’d love to hear what you’re itching to find out. Remember and enjoy this moment – this is the calm before the storm. Come Monday, the gates of hell will open and the hype train will be on full steam.
Blizzard vs Valve – Dota 2
3 months ago
by Tasha
in Software development
If this one hasn’t passed you by on your favourite source of video game news, may I introduce the latest in legal wrangling that is Blizzard and Valve having a spat over Dota 2? I’m not really going to delve too deep into the history of Defence of the Ancients (or DotA), so feel free to familiarise yourself with what has happened in the saga so far.
The basis of the lawsuit comes down to trademarking. Whereas copyright protects the game code as a whole (as opposed to lines of code), trademarking is more about the brand around the game, protecting it such as not to confuse customers. Valve have applied for a trademark for Dota 2 to protect their logo and similar. (By the way, Valve have acknowledged the names are similar but have decided to call their game “Dota 2″ to distinguish it from “Defence of the Ancients” but acknowledge the continuation of the genre’s development.) Blizzard are attempting to block it by claiming ownership of the tools made to create the original mod from a game that was released a decade ago, amongst other things. They’re bothering to do this to “defend seven years of goodwill that Blizzard has developed”.
Excuse me while I choke on PR speak from both parties.
I think this entire scenario is unique in gaming history. I certainly can’t remember another example of where an entirely new genre has sprung from the world editor of another. It’s made extra complex by IceFrog, generally seen as the main caretaker for DotA for the last few years, not only being hired by Valve to work on Dota 2 but also having a hand in Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends. Yes, there were and are other people working on creating, developing and maintaining this incredibly popular competitive game, but IceFrog is seen as the incredibly lucky head honcho.
The bottom line is that Valve knew exactly what they were doing when they called their game Dota 2 and not “Mega Pwnies of Doom” or something. After that, all they did wrong was hiring lawyers to do the what that lawyers do to protect games (see Bethesda vs Mojang for more information). And the only reason Blizzard hasn’t packaged up DotA itself is probably due to the contract that was shipped with the World Editor, not for some reason of goodwill. We’re talking about the same company that has decided to make World of Warcraft Monopoly and Starcraft Risk. Oh and sold sparkly ponies for $25 a pop. Forgive me for being sceptical of their motives.
Rants aside, I see the success of Blizzard’s objections resting on the EULA and similar documents around the Warcraft 3 World Editor. I think for modders, it would be better if Blizzard were not successful. After all, if you happen to have a great idea that an entire community gets around, I would rather see you get rewarded than see a company which already has enough money swoop in and deny you the recognition that is deserved cos they happened to have the tools you needed to make it. It’d be like Microsoft swooping in to plant a flag in your awesome game made with XNA. Not cool.
Worst case scenario in all of this is that Valve have to change the name of their game. But seeing as how a beta version of Dota 2 was already the second highest paying eSport in 2011 I don’t see it being a big problem. The game has already won and Blizzard will be left trying to defend and monetise DotA without a significant member of the community, while competing with 3 successful and similar games in the market.
Should be an interesting legal battle to watch being smashed out.
The Monk That Grenth Forgot – Part 3
3 months ago
This post is a follow on from The Monk That Grenth Forgot – Part 2 and Part 1
It’s been a while since I wrote anything about what I’ve been up to in Guild Wars and figured it was time to rectify that issue. 7 months ago I was making progress on my mental self-set challenge of trying to achieve God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals on a character that had accumulated 0 deaths, and was sat at 14/30 titles. Over those months, I have dipped in and out of playing Guild Wars itself. Mostly, not playing it in fact. Partly because I was doing real world things like revamping my guild’s website in preparation for Guild Wars 2 and dealing with being promoted, but mostly because when I did have time to play games others were more appealing. I don’t see it as anything that Guild Wars did wrong, just something that happens when you’ve been playing the same game for 6 years and trodden the same mud over and over again.
Some time in December, I picked up the game again and started regularly logging in. During the holiday break, I decided to work a bit on my survivor character, loaded up the Zaishen vanquishes and bounties that would have been helpful and went for it. I did pretty well to be fair – a large chunk of reputation was gained in the Norn and Asuran titles, I’m now down to the last 5 or so vanquishes in Tyria, and the last 10 or so in Cantha. I made the mistake of trying to vanquish Nebo Terrace in Prophecies having started War in Kryta accidentally some time ago, and was surprised to find the extra mass of White Mantle and assorted bosses having cleared the entire rest of the area. Swearing occurred, and lots of it. Still, clearing that area went fine until I encountered masses of minions and after having to hot foot it a couple of times to save my bacon, decided that I’d have to take a specialised anti-minion build for that area.
I’ve always maintained through this entire challenge that anyone can get 30/30 without dying as long as they are patient, careful and attentive. I failed in all 3 categories while vanquishing Rhea’s Crater. I’d love to say I got stomped by some horrible combination of things outside my control, but in actuality I did the most stupid thing in the world. The heroes were taking down the final group of the vanquish and I went in search of the final piece of map to uncover in an area seemingly clear of enemies. As the vanquish completed animation flashed up on my screen, 3 Oni appeared near my monk. The heroes were out of range and I panicked. I could have protected myself, unflagged them and been fine. Instead I mashed a load of random buttons and watched my monk die. I should have known better, especially in Factions. And I broke my golden rules for the challenge.
So that’s where I’ve left my monk now. She’s still on 14/30 with 1 death and several titles close to completion, but I haven’t really decided what to do with her. I already have one GWAMM with Tasha, I got 50/50 in the HoM 10 days ago and am now in the process of gathering items of use to people building up their Hall for the inevitable panic when a firm release date does get announced for Guild Wars 2. Is it worth allowing myself the one relapse to complete the challenge, or is that it done? I’d love your input on this, so comment away.
Something else I realised the other day that’s been playing on my mind – when Guild Wars’ servers eventually do close down for the final time, I’ll lose the place I first met my husband back in 2007. Wonder if I can get a model made of Kamadan!
Year of the Dragon
3 months ago
So I’m guessing you’ve heard the news, wooped some, pinched yourself and wanted to hug Mike O’Brien until his eyes pop. I’m right there with you. Although I had to hold in the excitement for 8 hours or so as I had demo’s of my own to give.
I could do what many commentators will do and speculate on what this means on where they are in the development schedule & what’s left, but really, there’s no point. Other than knowing we’re on the home straight and that Guild Wars 2 will be in our hands in 99 days at a minimum or 342 days at a maximum, there’s nothing else I wish to try to infer from this news.
I’m excited. I’m also looking at the checklist of stuff I wanted to do before launch and wincing. GW Templates is still in development, and I’m hoping to get it out of test in the next month. All the features are in, its a question of entering the masses of information about Guild Wars skills. Then there’s the additional features I want for the guild’s website. And then seeing what stuff can be offered for Guild Wars 2.
99 days is enough right?
ICT: The Next Generation
There’s been quite a lot of discussion in the UK news lately regarding ICT in schools in the UK and a lack of IT literate job seekers. As someone who now works as a programmer and knew she wanted to work in technology (though not this career) at a young age, I can say that around 5% of my ICT classes have been of use to me in a professional capacity. Most of the useful bits was making a turtle draw shapes on the screen as a very basic precursor to graphics. The rest of it was learning how Word, Excel and Powerpoint worked. Course I’ve had to relearn that a few times over since the versions of those products have changed.
The Education Secretary has decided that the solution to this problem is an Open Source approach to ICT, where businesses and universities get involved in designing a computer science and programming curriculum in schools. Great idea, but ultimately flawed. Enough kids don’t care about ICT as it is and not everyone needs to learn programming to do their job. For many, I expect knowing the basic office products is enough. And industry already says that graduates lack the skills to be employed – will a pot luck approach to introductory CS improve that?
There’s also the issue of what language? What kind of programming? If you put 4 industry “experts” in a room and ask their opinions, you’ll get 5 replies.
The best advice I can give to anyone who wants to learn programming is choose something that you want to make and learn the skills to express your idea. If that’s a website, head over to W3 schools and devour all you can on HTML and CSS to start, PHP and Javascript/JQuery next. If that’s something desktop based you can pretty much choose your weapon from C++, C# and Java. There are other languages, and if you do end up in industry you will learn them. But everyone has to start somewhere and those 3 are well documented and used a lot.
Something clearly does need to change in the way we teach ICT to the next generation, but expecting consistently good results from an open source approach is misguided. If you want to get involved in programming, do it if your school teaches you or not. You won’t be wasting your time. My inbox is always open.
Busy Bee
4 months ago
I’ve been a bit quiet the last few weeks, not just because of the holiday season. I’ve been a bit of a busy bee.
After the work I did on the Mystic Spiral [MYST] website, I realised that all of our old articles documenting various farming builds would be better in WordPress than in phpbb3. But I couldn’t find something that would display the various templates, and seeing as I’m anxious to learn and improve my web dev skills, I decided to dive right in.
It’s a little ways off being ready for release to the general populous, but I couldn’t resist giving a sneak peek to the new GW Template plugin. 
The Road Ahead
5 months ago
So the 8th profession has been revealed and it’s a good ‘un! I’ve been struggling to find a profession to call my own in Guild Wars 2 and luckily the mesmer is ticking all my boxes. So here’s what I think I’ll be playing at release:
Human female mesmer – Tasha or Tasha Darke. Pirate clothes are a must.
Asuran male elementalist – Nyxx (first time I’ll be playing a male character!)
Norn female guardian – Still working on a name. Current favourite is Varda Morke (roughly translated from Old Nordic as “guard against the dark”). Suggestions welcome.
Charr female thief – still unnamed. Considering bringing back “Kimera”, the name of my warrior in Guild Wars.
After that, it gets a bit trickier to choose professions. Still, with the 8th reveal out of the way and beta news before the year’s end, there’s a sense of being on the home stretch. Here’s hoping.
Seriously…
What happened yesterday with regards to the “news” about Guild Wars 2 maybe coming on a console was a load of crap. It seems to be a reoccurring theme of late – small piece of maybe news gets twisted in some person’s head, rabid population explodes, community manager has to put it in perspective.
I could write a big long piece here about how I’m disappointed in some people who call themselves “fans” (which isn’t a good word to call oneself in my opinion, look at the etymology for why) or journalists but what’s the point? The people who are causing the image of Guild Wars 2 harm and would benefit from having their actions examined won’t read this.
Thing is knowing these people are actively trashing a game I’ve willingly dedicated a lot of my spare time to doesn’t make me want to continue doing so. It is a given I will play the game for all the flaws I consider it to have and will support my friends and guild mates on their adventures through it. But when it comes to the wider community, trying to do something beneficial when I know it will get shit on just seems like a waste of time and unnecessary stress. Some people may not view that as a loss to the community but if I’m feeling it, how long till others start feeling it too? And more importantly, how long before those who are employed by ArenaNet to deal with the community get fed up of putting their real work on hold to put out fires and decide they’d be better off looking for new jobs?