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Flameseeker Chronicles: Guild Wars 2 dungeons and dungeon talk
I finally had enough time set aside to head into a dungeon this weekend. We made it through the Ascalonian Catacombs story mode with considerable grace, and I'm hoping to progress through each story mode before doubling back to start on explorable versions. Having made more than 60 silver in coin and drops (and only losing a small handful to a single armor repair after the dungeon), I feel a bit better about the currency gain throughout the game. I've heard plenty about people giving up on certain explorable branches of certain dungeons because they were effectively losing gold due to armor repair costs, but I can't really speak to that yet.
Flameseeker Chronicles: What's your golden carrot?
On the Sunday of the most recent beta weekend for Guild Wars 2, I found myself trying to figure out precisely what incentive my friends and I might have to go through the explorable mode of dungeons before we hit level 80. The question arose, in a roundabout way, because there's not a tremendous amount of XP available (you spend more time killing fewer things), which makes sense if you're a developer trying to discourage players from entering a dungeon they have no intention of completing in order to farm experience, but it left us wondering whether we'd feel compelled to participate in explorable mode dungeons as we progressed through the game. The point of the matter is, unless you're well and truly enamored of the armor attainable through a specific dungeon's tokens, there might not be much empirical motivation to get through a repeatable dungeon. This stood out to me because so much of the game's reward structure is so clear and well-designed. Although I'll certainly never make the claim that the game will please everyone, or even that ArenaNet's fine folks are trying to please everyone, it is evident that they're building in support for a wide variety of play and reward styles.
Guild Wars 2: For glory!
The second Guild Wars 2 press beta weekend has come and gone, and Massively was there every step of the way. Stay tuned throughout the day today for even more guides, impressions, videos, and Q&As to get you ready for the highly anticipated sequel to Guild Wars. A lot of my weekend was devoted to glory, both the in-game resource that you earn for competing in PvP and that distinction that you wallow in after doing something cool. The game allows for a lot of something-cools to be done, but the ones I'm presently interested in are hot-joinable PvP and the beta's one accessible dungeon.
