Guess the 3rd Year Presents!

Gaile has made a page over at the official wiki where community members can guess what the third year birthday miniatures will be. Here is the link to that page.

Birthday miniatures are a Guild Wars tradition that started when the earliest made characters (April 28, 2005) turned one year old. Any character that has a birthday will receive a birthday present. The birthday present item contains one random miniature from the set of that year's birthday presents. A character created one year ago will receive a birthday present containing a miniature from the 1st year set, regardless of campaign or type (yes, PvP characters can receive birthday presents).

On April 28, 2008, Guild Wars will be celebrating its third birthday having sold over 4,500,000 boxes.

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Suggestions

A fan of any living, evolving game is going to have suggestions for change because the nature of the game is to evolve. The same goes for Guild Wars, which has changed to amazing degrees. Some of the best changes have seemed to come directly from fans, such as, henchmen, moving mouths, and most recently the Party Animal title.

Suggestions, especially ones that are well thought out and give the problem, the answer, and the reason for the answer can have impact on the game.



The worst way to give information is to email ArenaNet directly or to write a support ticket with your suggestion in it. DO NOT MAKE SUGGESTIONS THIS WAY! Legally, ArenaNet might not be able to read your suggestion at all. So you might have written the best suggestion in the world, and it will be deleted without anyone being the wiser.

There is no best way, but there are a couple of really good ways to give suggestions to the community and ArenaNet.

Suggestions Forums. One good way is to post in a suggestion forum on the many good fansites. The best reason to post this way is your suggestion is thrown out to the community to pass through the grinder. If your suggestion sucks, you will know it.

The Official Wiki. Another good way to post a suggestion is to post it on the official wiki. Gaile has some official suggestion pages for Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, and even the website. Also many ArenaNet employees look at the talk pages for specific portions of the game. So, if you hate the usability of Lightbringer Signet you can make suggestions on the skill's talk page. (The PvP guru, Izzy, also has a suggestion page, but it is currently being reworked.)

Now you have the tools, so go forth and write well written, concise suggestions... and be sure to add the word "because."

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Izzy is clearly insane.

Isaiah Cartwright is the man behind the balance and metagame of Guild Wars PvP. His wiki talk page is a spawning ground of every imaginable conversation on skills and builds.

Today he spent quite a bit of time updating and reworking his talk page so that he could find and get good feedback without wading through piles of steaming wyrm bile. In the process of doing so, he cracked and went insane. Here we find a conversation he is having with himself:

John Dohs Discussion
Issue: This skill is an insane spike skill because it allows for a spike team to bring Deep wound effect without having to give up damage on the spike.
Suggestion: Reduce duration in order to force someone to spend the time during a cast to get the deep wound. ~Izzy @-'---- 19:14, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I think your point is really blow out of the water clearly if you use simple Chewbacca logic you would see that this skill is fine ~Izzy @-'---- 19:18, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
Are you kidding this is used in every negernate spike build out there l2play ~Izzy @-'---- 19:18, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
Clearly you just need to learn to use interrupts, and knockdowns. ~Izzy @-'---- 19:18, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
Oh come on you expect us to interrupt 16 skills they only need like 8 to actually kill someone, have you even played vs spike recently? ~Izzy @-'---- 19:18, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Luckily he finally mentioned that he was trying to figure out formatting and conversation styles. [source]

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Emily Diehl talks on her job

The wonderful Emily Diehl has written a veritable wall of text on her job at ArenaNet and what it took to get there (and what she believes is important for future game programmers/developers).

The high point for all you dreamers:

I don't think I can really stress just how ridiculously into games I am and have been my entire life. From growing up and falling in love with my Atari, to playing pretty much everything that I could get my hands on since then, to devoting tons of free time to crazy game-related side projects, it's (embarrassingly) obvious how much I live and breathe games. In my interviews, I was completely grilled about all kinds of game related things. Luckily, I can talk animatedly for hours on any game subject you lob at me, so I guess I did OK :)

And the low point:

School gives you some additional tools and (usually) some kick in the pants to apply yourself. If you don't have the passion to drive yourself and make yourself actually do stuff on your free time and work towards your end goal of landing a job in games, you're probably not going to get very far. I know so many people that thought the magic key to success was "getting that degree". Some of those same people are now in totally unrelated fields with huge school bills because they slacked off and managed to squeek through school to get the paper and then realized that they didn't actually have the chops and skills/examples of skills to land that dream job. It's a huge (expensive) bummer for them to get out and have that realization hit after the fact.

There is plenty more at the wiki. [source]

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BotWatch

Most fans of MMOs loath bot players, especially in Guild Wars where there is almost a mini-game dedicated to tracking bots and trying to screw with their macros.

Now if you notice a swarm of bots entering and leaving a specific outpost you can post on a special BotWatch page on the Guild Wars Wiki. This will help A.Net Agents do the inevitable.

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