Good Morning Folks! Sometimes you have weird little regrets that nag at you over the years. For over a decade, the defacto guild that I started in new games was House Stalwart, aka the one that I founded back in World of Warcraft. At some point the group of friends in the orbit of the AggroChat podcast standardized on Greysky Armada. I thought this was first used in Final Fantasy XIV, but I might have my sequence of operations out of order because it seems like our Guild Wars 2 guild by that same name was founded in 2012. Anyway one of the little things that had bugged me over the years is that for Final Fantasy XIV we have the guild tag of [GREY] and in Guild Wars 2 for whatever godforsaken reason I ended up choosing [GsA]. There was no way to change this through the guild interface and when I asked a friend who works for Anet they shrugged and said that they did not think there was a way.
I should note… said person is on the development side and not the support side because apparently, it is a trivial matter. Last night towards the end of my evening I put in a support ticket asking if there was a way to change our guild tag to [GREY] so that it matched our FFXIV guild, and this morning I woke up to see the ticket had been worked. It was worked at like 3 am my time after being put in around 9 pm the previous night, so it even had an extremely fast turnaround. I have to say I have only used Anet support a few times, one of which was trying to reclaim access to my Guild Wars account after forgetting the name of any of my characters… and they have been phenomenal each time. It was a simple enough request but I cannot emphasize how much this improves my enjoyment of our guild. Essentially it was one of those eye-twitch things that always bugged me when doing WvW or just talking in guild chat.
I spent some time last night wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure and it was a perfectly cromulent expansion I guess. The ending did not endear me more to the plotline or some of the characters, but it felt fine enough. I was annoyed by further rounds of “fill the bar”, and still feel like this design ethic needs to die in a fire. I get that it is a way of drawing out the content and making it feel like it takes longer… but that is probably a bad thing. There is no way that you can do this that does not feel like you are just artificially padding for runtime. It was not the best expansion, and at some point, I will probably do a ranking list post as I feel like I have things to say about that in general. However, I consider Living World content to be expansions and ANet does not. There is a lot of deeply uneven content in Guild Wars 2 and I feel like Secrets of the Obscure only adds to that list. The first half of the content was pretty solid, but it kind of fell apart once we entered Nayos.
In other gaming news, The War Within expansion has dropped for World of Warcraft, and my Dark Iron Warrior that I played in Panda Remix has become my new main. I have to admit though I am struggling like hell to attach to this content. I am not sure what it is… but it just sort of feels boring. I think I might just not be in the mood for World of Warcraft. The pacing of the content and combat just feels off to me after so much Guild Wars 2 and assorted ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch. Everything feels like it takes forever and is causing me to zone the hell out. Everything I have seen of the expansions so far seems perfectly reasonable, I just appear not to be in the mood for it. I think I might stop trying to force it because it is doing nothing for my enjoyment currently. I can be such a fickle gamer and when something feels like homework I turn my nose up at it. Hell, it took me the better part of a decade to fall in love with Guild Wars 2.
Back to Guild Wars 2, one of those sites that I use an awful lot for various sundry reasons is GW2Efficiency. I also use an Ad Blocker 100% of the time and refuse to turn it off. Yesterday I was finally guilted into exploring the various support options. I have to say I love that they have both monthly support options and one-time payout options. So yesterday I threw them $50 so I could feel better about my Ad Blocking ways. I think this is my biggest problem with Patreon in general is the slow constant drain it ends up becoming. I want the tools that I use to thrive, and if I use them enough I feel like I need to give them a non-zero amount of money. However, I am never super keen to sign up for yet another subscription. Lifetime amounts, even if they were higher… will always probably be my choice.
Anyways thanks again to ANet customer service… who very much will never likely see this blog post. Shit, I would be shocked if ANYONE from ANet other than my friend who works there sees this. I still feel like I have to brag about how good their service is regardless.