Ladies and Gentlemen, Guild Wars 2 is — much like the Thunderbirds — go.

Well, for the most part…

You see, while the launch of the game has been generally a success for myself, a very vocal section of the GW2 community is having issues: 72 hour bans due to naming violations or hacked accounts; issues with WvW; performance issues; login errors; error codes out the wazoo for silly reasons like trying to log in for 3-day headstart when you’re only eligible for 1-day… and so on and so forth.

I’m not wanting or trying to belittle anybody for their experiences. I just haven’t had any of those problems, apart from the odd time the login server has been jammed.

That’s not to say I haven’t had issues though!

Guilds and Overflows

For me, this is where the trouble has been. I was one of the people who created a guild on the first day of headstart only to see it disappear after the servers went for three hours on Saturday afternoon. It took until Monday for An Unlikely Krewe to resurface, and even then it’s a tad buggy in terms of guild chat and seeing who is online and when.

In fact, seeing and playing with other players is really the biggest problem I’m having in the game right now. I’ve taken to partying up with guild members so that we can chat, as /g chat is either laggy or not working. At least influence gain is working!

Saik-ing Up!

After the tragic failure of Final Fantasy XIV, my longtime partner in gaming crime, Saikyo, pretty much swore off MMOs. He, like I, am very nostalgic for the “golden glory days” of our Final Fantasy XI experience, but World of Warcraft failed to truly bite him, and FFXIV failed to live up to anyone’s expectations, let alone ours.

So it was with some anxiety that he logged into GW2 for the first time. He’d not played the game before, and I was quite nervous as to what he’d actually think — especially as he’d already warned me about getting my hopes up about the game.

Due to the issues with /g not working, and the “Join in…” feature for parties not working very well either — coupled with the rather actiony nature of GW2′s combat that doesn’t really lend itself well to a lot of typing in dynamic events — he was rather quiet for a lot of the first couple of hours as he orientated himself, went through the tutorial,etc.

But I did ask him what his thoughts were and, much to my surprise, he really enjoyed what he played. Sure he was totally confused by skill challenges, and traits, and dodging, and how dynamic events work, and what vistas are, and so on and so on… but then so was I when I first started playing in BWE1.

He’s logged back in since, so that’s a pretty good sign as far as I’m concerned. And, if nothing else, he has no subscription fee to pay, so even if he doesn’t have a lot of time to play, he can always pop back on whenever he wants: and due to the area scaling, I can always go back and mess about in lower level content with him!

Now if only the game has a fishing gathering discipline.Then he’d be hooked! (Pun maybe intended!)

Exploring Tyria

So what have we been up to? Well, exploring mostly. 95% of all the screenshots I’ve taken so far have been of the views found in the vistas cutscenes. They’re just too impressive to resist.

I started off on Saturday levelling a sylvari necromancer as expected. She’s up to level 33 now, but I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with her. Out of all the professions I’ve played, she seems to lack a bit of versatility. If I get bored of the staff or dagger/warhorn combo, I have few choices to switch to. Axe seems slightly underpowered compared to how it was at the start of beta, and scepter just doesn’t fit my playstyle for the necro very well (though more on scepter in a second).

Because I’m an altoholic, however, I have already made another handful of characters, and I’ve just today got my norn guardian up to level 20. She’s using a scepter/focus combo (which has got buffed a lot since my first experience with it in BWE1 and now does significant damage) and a staff. I do have other weapons as backups, but mostly I’ve been running around in groups and the staff really shines as a support weapon: granting AoE might to everyone, as well as swiftness.

And then I have my human elementalist. She’s only level 5, and she’s sat under the Queensdale bridge with her staff and lightning attunement, ready to farm some more Weak Bloods for my crafting pursuits if I require it!

What I can unreservedly say is that I’m having a blast, and that will only increase when they fix guilds and parties so I can easily team up with people and go and do stuff with them!

~Demajen