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Flameseeker Chronicles: After beta action report
Well there you have it, ladies and gents: The first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend over which people had direct control over their participation has come and gone. It was quite the exciting weekend, and it's amazing to see the volume and content of feedback being provided. If you missed out on a chance to get your hands on the game, feel free to form some vicarious impressions; there's tons of footage out there from oodles of people. Massively has a few streams recorded, and I have a niggling feeling that someone will have plenty of extra footage. It was great to be back in the game, it was great to get to talk about stuff with people and stream and share pictures, but mostly it was great to see the world populated the way it really needs to be to feel alive and whole. Beta being beta, that brought its own set of challenges and learning experiences -- mostly for ArenaNet -- but on the whole I hope that most people agree that this was, if not a truly delightful weekend (I can't expect everyone to share my taste in games), then at least a solid and informative one.
The Perfect Ten: Clever ideas
I'm a sucker for a good, clever idea. You know the type: the ideas that make you slap yourself on the forehead and shout, "Why didn't I think of that first?" Or for the less humble of us out there, "Why, I did think of that first! But I got lost on the way to the patent office and I'm pretty sure that someone stole my dream journal to pilfer my genius notions!" While critics point their fingers at the MMO industry and proclaim it a barren wasteland of innovation, there are quite a few awesome -- if small -- ideas that bubble up in MMO and move the genre forward. Maybe they're teeny-tiny baby steps; maybe they're giant hopscotch leaps over the six-spot with the rock in the middle. But these ideas can and have had the power to change how these games are made and played. So this week I'm saluting 10 clever ideas, both large and diminutive, as a reward for a job well done!
Queue no more thanks to Guild Wars 2's overflow servers
Picture this: You've just come home from a hard day of work and you want to relax by gaming and perhaps responsibly enjoying a delicious beverage. But wait -- there's a queue for your server! What are you going to do? You could reroll and get into the game faster, but then you can't play with your friends on your precious main character. You can also sit it out and just twiddle your thumbs for a bit, but otherwise there's not a lot to be done. Or at least, there wasn't until Guild Wars 2 got into the picture. Martin Kerstein, ArenaNet's community team lead, stopped by the Guild Wars 2 Guru forums to give players a peek at the title's server overflow feature. With this feature, the above scenario plays out a bit differently. When there's too much traffic on one server, your character will be temporarily sent to a different server. Once you've reached the front of the queue, you'll be asked if you want to transfer back to your original server, and voila: home, sweet home. Any progress made on the overflow server will be carried back to the home server, so you can even be productive while you're waiting in a queue. How's that for efficiency?
