Doofy Babby Turt

Good Morning Friends! I swear sometimes all it takes for me is to complain about something and then the universe decides to immediately make me wrong. Yesterday I complained about how difficult it was to get a Dragon’s End group so that I could get my turtle egg. Then yesterday over lunch while eating my shin ramen, I zoned into Dragon’s End with the thought of grinding out some Writs, and moments later… an entire map’s worth of skyscales arrived. So I had to hold on for dear life because I had won the lottery and was able to join up on the commander and ride along for a meta completion. The final fight sucked a bit and it took me a while to realize I could resurrect on an airship and fly back down to the battle. The part that freaked me out a bit is that I did not specifically get a turtle egg of any sort drop… instead the only way I knew I completed it was that I got an in-game mail telling me to go to Arborstone. I am sure I probably got an achievement as well but so many scrolled by for completing the event that I absolutely missed it.

The Commander also did a Dragonstorm so I rode along for that event as well. While the group is going you might as well get as much out of it as you can. I know I talked about this yesterday but if you find yourself in a group with a good commander then you should just go with it until the train ends. This was maybe the easiest Dragonstorm I had ever done, so kudos to that team. I think about the time I play something over lunch, I am getting the benefit of the oceanic crew doing activities because there are often things going on in zones. I learned this early in my gaming career, but “Aussies” and “Kiwis” are just fucking awesome to play with when it comes to group content. Back during our Late Night Raiders days in OG World of Warcraft, we had a contingency of about twenty Australians and they were all amazing. I miss gaming with my friend Banzai, which reminds me that I should try and check up on him.

After the squad wound down I started chipping away at some of the requirements for the turtle. Luckily I had been growing Kale for ages in my home instance garden, so I had more than enough of that. I might even liquidate my reserves at this point. I was able to get through the first hurdle which was making turtle baby food and then bought my way through the fishing requirements. This left the “Suiting Up” achievement to complete which involves completing a bunch of events, hearts, and bosses in Cantha. After last night I am down to just two sub-components, getting a successful kill of Renyak in Seitung, and completing the Kaineng Overlook Strike Mission. The last bit is what worries me as I have not completed ANY strike missions. I’ve been watching the looking for group “training” section to see if anyone posts a Kaineng Overlook, but so far no luck. My plan is to post a message maybe tonight looking for a group and admitting I have no clue what I am doing. The Guild Wars 2 community seems pretty chill so we will see if this holds for group activities.

What I love more than anything thought is just like the Skyscale, my baby turtle loves me and follows me around. Whenever I zone into Arborstone the turtle comes running… or what passes for running at the pace of a giant turtle. As soon as it gets within range of me the heart bubbles start floating up which completely melts my heart. It is dumb how a game can make me care so much about a virtual pet, but it absolutely does. Growing up we regularly had turtles that would come and eat the leftovers of the dry cat food, and I would regularly befriend them. I remember I had a turtle that I named Yertle, because of course you have to name a turtle Yertle… that I drew designs on his shell with a paint pen. I have no clue if that is harmful to a turtle, but he didn’t seem to mind. I would bring him random treats… mostly in the form of lunch meat that he really loved. Having a big doofy turt following me around Arborstone is bringing back all of those memories in a constant flood.

I continue to be surprised at how seemingly poorly “What Lies Beneath” is being taken at least by the YouTuber crew of Guild Wars 2 players. I think the first component at play is that none of them seem to appreciate the amount of work that resurrecting Living World Season 1 had to have taken by Arena.net. The assumption is that it is recycled content so it is just a matter of re-releasing it… and while technically there are some components of it that are, it is very clear that everything was rebuilt from the ground up. You can look at Living World Season 1 content and compare it to Living World Season 2 content for example, and the re-release is way more akin to what we might expect from the most current content releases from End of Dragons. The content was better than it ever was at the release of the game and is structured in a modern and accessible way rather than what I remember from the tiny bit of the Living World that I experienced. I’m a developer… re-releasing code is always a misnomer because you always have to refactor it to meet current standards which takes time and effort and careful surgery to make sure that you don’t completely break everything.

The other big problem that I see is that Guild Wars 2 is sort of everything to everyone. Inside the game there is enough content to be able to support a bunch of different communities that all want something slightly different:

• Raid
• Small-Scale PVP
• World vs World
• Strikes
• Dungeons
• Fractals
• Fashionistas
• Legendary Crafters
• Trading Post Barons
• Casual Map Completion
• Meta Trains
• Story and Lore Hounds

There are probably several others that I am not even listing out, but each one of those has a dedicated community that feels that Arena.Net should focus the game on their interests. So at any given time, any release is going to let someone down. The consensus that I have heard is that folks felt like there simply was not enough story and that there was not enough going on with the Gyala Delve map. There were no new masteries and the map is completely devoid of hearts. The component that I do agree with more than any of them however is that the final boss fight of the current meta is not great. Killing the same boss four times in a row per platform is a bit annoying, and I wish there had been some sort of “Voltron” thing going on where the three platforms coalesced into the center platform into a larger boss for the final phase. I enjoy the meta enough to have run it a half dozen times so far, but I am not the biggest fan of that final boss. Killing the bosses that spawn afterward is way more enjoyable as a whole.

I mean every game has its doomers, and Guild Wars 2 players honestly have more reason than a lot of games to feel that way. The history of the game seems to be a history of false starts and wild shifts in direction, trying to narrow in on how exactly the game should proceed with its content. Would I like the quarterly updates to have a bit more meat on the bones than Gyala Delve did? Absolutely… I think everyone would. Was I fine with what we got? Absolutely, because I got quite a bit of enjoyment from the gorgeous map and will likely be adding it to my rotation of low-key metas. Content creators oftentimes end up being the biggest doomers because their livelihood lies on a constant feed of information both positive and negative to bring eyeballs to their content. Outrage usually sells better than joy, but it is up to you to moderate your own reaction to their content. I think Guild Wars 2 is in a really good state, but I feel that way because I have ten years’ worth of content to fully explore. Maybe if I had been playing this game as my ONLY game for the last decade I would feel differently.

In the meantime, however, I need to get over my fear of human beings and get a strike group going. I really do want to get more comfortable building groups in the game. I don’t have a commander tag, but if I can get comfortable doing some lower-stress grouping, I might pony up for the 300 gold and buy one. I did the math yesterday and a commander tag is about $15 in gems so in reality it would probably be worth that to me to have one eventually. There is a version of me from the past that would absolutely be leading zone meta events, but that is a version that was not responsible for managing human beings in his daily life. Moving into management in the work world decimated my desire for any sort of responsibility in game.