Bookahneer’s Geekwatch: 2 weeks after launch

Welcome to today’s Bookahneer’s Geekwatch! The place about miscellaneous interesting news related to Guild Wars 2 – and on occasion, other games.

This is the first time we’re officially using the new Bookahneer image. Isn’t he cute? And just as the Guild Wars 1 version, he comes with bad “photoshopping” skills brought to you by… me! ;)

So let’s focus on the game. I have a few topics that I wanted to write about but I didn’t think they’re worthy for an entry on their own.

 

Network error when joining more than 4 guilds

The Trading Post is finally working properly and that has made the game so much more fun for me already. It just didn’t feel like a complete MMO without it. Unfortunately, I have found another bug that’s disappointing. For days now, I have been trying to join one guild and whenever I do, I get “Network error . Please check your internet connection and try again. (Code=3040:1002:3:1930:101)” After talking with others, it seems that the promised “Guild membership is account wide, and you can add as many guilds as you like.” (source: Elixabeth on Talk Tyria) is not working. You can join a total of 4 guilds and that’s it. I’ve opened a ticket on August 31 about this error and I’m still waiting to hear from ArenaNet about this.

I know that for many others, this won’t be a bad thing, but in my case, it means that I now have to decide which community I am not going to be a part of. I have my main guild, my hide-out guild for when I want to be with RL friends or completely on my own (those days exist), a guild with other German friends and family, the GuildMag guild – and then I wanted to join the Twitter guild and, of course, another guild with people and former guild mates that I got to know in Warhammer Online. So, just in case you’re getting the same error: It’s happening because you can’t join any more guilds (for the time being).

 

10% tax in Trading Post

Something that not every player is aware of is the 10% Trading Post fee for successful sales. You’ll have to pay that one on top of the listing fee. The listing fee is 5% of the price. So when you’re selling things and actually want to make a profit, calculate those into your price. In a lot of cases – those where you list things for 1 copper above merchant price, it would be more profitable to just look for the nearest merchant and sell it off there.

 

Bag space management

This leads me to the next point: If you’re running out of bag space, look for ways to handle it. I’m not saying you should shell out the money to buy the next bag tab in your inventory. ;) But make sure you have a salvage kit with you. You can use that to salvage crafting materials not only from salvage items, but also from almost all armor and weapons. In a lot of cases, it’s not really worth doing so for the items of blue or higher quality as the resulting crafting materials are worth less than the items themselves. Those you can either sell on the Trading Post (which you can access by hitting “O” anywhere in the world) or sell them to the nearest merchant. But salvaging the white items and the salvage items usually already saves a lot of bag space. In case you haven’t noticed, by clicking on the wheel at the top right of your inventory, you get the option to put all “collectibles” into your bank. Collectibles are crafting items (like cotton, leather, wood, ore, totems, jewels,…). You can find them when accessing your bank. They’re in a separate tab. By doing that, I can play just fine with my 4 extra bags with 8 to 10 slots each. I know you can buy even bigger bags, but I’m currently spending my coins on gems in the game to buy more bank space. ;)

 

Account security: Use a new email address

I hope you’re already sick of that topic, because if you are, it means you have probably read everything about it and have hopefully followed those steps. ;)

Back when I had created my Guild Wars account, I had been smart enough to use an email address that I hadn’t used for any other games. In the meantime, my primary gaming address has been in the list of “stolen data” and I did get a zillion password reset requests for Guild Wars 2. Fortunately, I had only used that email address to sign up for the Guild Wars 2 beta registration. I have still changed the password now to something more secure. Even though my real game account used an email address that I haven’t used for any other games, I still wanted to make sure it’s as safe as it can be. I know the feeling when people say: “Oh no. Not another email address! I’ve already got a ton!” and you’re probably right. I have got a ton as well. I decided to instead use a new alias. My password for my email account is, of course, one that I’m not using anywhere else. And GMX is nice enough to allow one alias (the name in front of the @-sign) and two additional “fun email addresses” with a new alias and a completely different domain name. All of those email addresses belong to the same account, so it’s very important the password is a unique one! But I only need to remember this one password to log into my email account. The email address now used for Guild Wars 2 is one, however, that has never been used anywhere else on the internet. Gold farmers will have a hard time guessing that one! ;) And if it ever becomes known (just look at which companies got compromised already), then I can easily delete that email address and create another one without having to sign up for a whole new account. I don’t know which other email hosts allow that, but I think it’s a really nice feature!

 

Torchlight 2

Last but not least, something completely unrelated to Guild Wars 2: Torchlight 2 finally got a release date and we’ll be able to play it starting September 20! I’m excited, even though I’m not sure I’ll be playing the game immediately. ;)