Bookahneer’s Geekwatch (January 18, 2015)

Welcome to the first Bookahneer’s Geekwatch in 2015! The Geekwatch is the place where we post about miscellaneous gaming news that we find interesting.

Something is coming to Guild Wars 2. We know that this something is called “Heart of Thorns” and that more information will be coming on January 24 during PAX. If you’re one of the many people who can’t go, there will be a livestream on Twitch as well. As usual, time zones may be confusing. The panel starts at 8.30 am PST. But for our convenience, ArenaNet added a Save the Date-page which lets you add this panel to your google, outlook or apple ical calendars. I tried it out with Google and it nicely adjusted the time to my local time zone (17.30 or 5.30 pm Berlin/Paris time, by the way!).

While playing Trove yesterday, a warning message was broadcasted to all players. With an upcoming patch, warpseed will be used to trade for treasure. The message says

Trovian economic update – Pirates are on the way and they want your warpseed in exchange for treasure, probably a good idea to start saving it

I really like that Trion announces this upcoming addition in-game. I have seen it quite often that people who “only” play the game without hanging out on livestreams, Twitter or the official forums miss such announcements and then believe they get a good deal for a previously very cheap item because they did not realize it’s getting another use soon and will be worth a lot more at that point. As far as I know, we don’t have any details yet on what exactly those pirates give us in exchange, but “treasure” does sound promising, at least. I have stopped using my warpseed for gardening for the time being and am looking forward to giving it to pirates instead. Also… pirates! Who doesn’t love pirates? :)

And while I’m already talking about Trove: The game is still in beta, but the recent Producer Letter makes it sound like they want to get out of beta very soon. I guess this is going to be an exciting year for us Trove players!

Meanwhile, Rift is having another of their promo events where you can buy – rather expensive in my opinion – troves which may contain a neat mount. I love the design of the arclight rider, but I will not fall for gambling my hard-earned money just to maybe get said mount. Anyway, you can also do two dailies that give you 20 “enduring sourcestone battery” per day. For the low price of 850, you can buy that mount. The event started on January 15 and will end on January 22 giving you a maximum of 160 of that currency via those dailies. As you can see, you will need more of those promo events before you can buy the mount.

Anyway, there is also a new minion, the “Mech Anik”. This is earned through an achievement called “Capacitor competency” which you can find in the “Promotions” achievements tab. There is a 5 minutes minion mission (“Arclight Rider Power Couplings”) found in the usual 1 minute XP mission stack. Once you have completed this mission 10 times, you get this minion card sent via in-game mail. Please note that this mission appears randomly in the 1 minute XP mission stack. It is also apparently on a cooldown. So, after you have completed it, it won’t immediately reappear in that mission stack. Bookahnerk had a pause of 17 minutes between two of them. I had a break of about 20 minutes in between two of those missions.

Bookahneer’s Geekwatch (December 15, 2014)

Welcome to today’s Bookahneer’s Geekwatch! The place about miscellaneous interesting gaming news.

I am mainly using this column – and with it, this charming asura you can see on the left – to announce that the winners of our first week’s giveaway have been chosen. Once again, congratulations to Wedge and Kalabajooie!

Don’t forget that week 2 is still going on! If you want to own a mini llama, here is your chance to win one of the two we are giving away! Also, here is a hint: We actually have three codes… one is… waiting for a special moment. ;) Speaking of hints: I added two more to the llama giveaway. Here is the full text:

This NPC has blonde hair.
Okay, maybe it’s fur.
And not all of the fur is blonde.
There is some white added into the mix.
This NPC was a Tribune once in the Blood Legion.

And the German translation (because I don’t have the time to translate this very article here):

Dieser NPC hat blondes Haar.
Okay, vielleicht ist es Fell.
Und nicht das komplette Fell ist blond.
Weiß ist auch dabei.
Dieser NPC war einmal Tribun bei der Blut-Legion.

Just remember: Leave a comment on the actual giveaway’s post and give us the name of the NPC (English OR German) in order to enter!

Week 3 will be starting tomorrow, so check back here for a chance to win some more stuff (no, no mini llama this week…).

And last but not least, we are also participating as a host for Guild Wars 2’s Window Decoration Contest. Check our blog post for more information and don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you’ve got any questions about this contest!

We have also just recently changed the layout and the colour scheme of this blog a bit. I have to admit, I got bored with the dark red background and the blog text being squished in between two sidebars. I do, however, love having so much space on the sidebars, so you can now find both of them on the right. We will be working on making it actually look a bit better… so be patient if you don’t like the look with the two sidebars right now. I promise it will look better soon. ;)

On personal gaming news: I have finally hit level 65 with Meffanda, my main character in Rift!

I’m still in love with that game. If only the combat wasn’t so old-fashioned. Although movement is important, I just miss my dodge rolls from GW2… or double-jumps like you can do in Trove (well okay, I think my character is up to 10 jumps in a row now).

Bookahneer’s Geekwatch (November 25, 2014)

Welcome to today’s Bookahneer’s Geekwatch! The place about miscellaneous interesting gaming news.

There was no new update today in Guild Wars 2, but as is custom on the non-update Tuesdays, we got to see a short teaser for next week’s update. Be warned, though, before you click on anything: If you haven’t played through last week’s update, this video may contain spoilers! If you have played through the story already or if you don’t mind spoilers, then go ahead, click this link and enjoy the video. :)

Next week, we will not just get an update to the living story, we will also get quite a few changes for sPvP. Mostly on how matchmaking works (see the official blog post for more information) and changes to queueing, a system to vote on maps to play on and a bit more. Again, see this official blog post for more information. The best news: Since you need to stay in the Hearts of the Mist while queued, you will find services like the trading post there with the update!

Because of the upcoming changes, there will be an episode of Ready Up tomorrow at 12 pm PST (should be 9 pm Berlin/Paris time). “Ready Up” is their PvP-related Twitch livestream.

 And in case you are interested in Guild Wars 2, but haven’t bought it yet or know somebody who would like to get the game, it’s currently on sale again on the official website (you can only buy the digital versions there!).

But Trove has stuff on sale as well. Block Friday has the starter packs 50 % off! The official store currently does not list the sale, which is very weird. But when you add the starter pack to your cart, it shows the discounted item. Please also note that credits are not on sale.

The Primal Pack currently costs 8.99 €, the Hero Pack is 22.49 € and the Voxstar Pack is 44.99 €. According to the recent patch notes, this sale will last “this week only”. I would assume this means from Tuesday to next Monday, but I’m not certain. You can also buy those packs from within the client where it’s actually showing the correct prices! :)

“This week only”

I’m sorry if this all sounds a bit like an advertisement for those two games. I guess it is, in a way. But as always: I would never tell anybody to go and buy a game. Only do so if you really want to buy it and if you do, well, then a sale is the best time to actually spend that money, right? :p

Now excuse me, my candy barbarian is calling for me as she wants to gain another level tonight. ;)

Edit: Ohohoh! I am so excited to see that they added an extra line to the terraformer items’ tooltips! You may remember me writing in my Second Impressions Review

Then we decided to expand the club world and added a few more biomes. What we did not know: Everything built within 40 to 50 blocks from the border of where the new biome will be placed will get destroyed. The tower got hit and disappeared and with it all the items we had placed there.

I had sent in feedback and just now, when I looked at the terraformers, I saw that they added a new line to the tooltip. It now says:

BE WARNED – this will destroy everything in that zone, as well as the borders of the adjacent zones.

I cannot tell you how happy I am that they added this! Too late for us, of course, but I hope it will keep other players from losing their buildings and losing precious hours of work.

BE WARNED – this will destroy everything in that zone, as well as borders of adjacent zones.

Bookahneer’s Geekwatch (August 7, 2014)

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

If you have thought about trying out Trove in their alpha, but thought that paying 18.99€ for a game that you have not been able to try out first, then this deal may interest you: From now until August 10, you get alpha access for spending 4.99€. What’s especially nice about this deal is that you will get almost every of the milestones you can see listed on that page. You can read my first impressions here on the blog. My opinion about the game hasn’t changed since then and I do not regret spending money on it despite having free alpha access. If you need more information, have a look at gameplay videos on YouTube or Twitch. There is no NDA on Trove. :) If you still don’t want to spend any money on it, then watch their Reddit page, as they apparently always include a multi-use alpha key with their patch notes.

Rift has had another patch which revamped the auction house interface. For the most part, I love it! It now shows you suggestions for prices based on the sale history of items. This is a great feature, if you ask me, especially for players who do not “play the auction house” regularly and spend hours memorizing prices they have seen for various items. Unfortunately, they also increased the fee you pay for listing items. Artifacts used to be very cheap with a flat amount (I think it was based on a low percentage of the vendor price) you paid for listing them, but now it’s always based on how much gold you’re asking for. On the other hand, at least they will increase the time the items will be listed to 7 days. I always found 48 hours as the maximum amount to be much too short. For more information, this blog post may be useful.

And the last bit of news today – isn’t about Guild Wars 2 either. I wrote about that game yesterday already. :p No, the last bit of information is that WordPress has released a new feature last night. You can now “like” comments. For existing blogs, this feature is automatically disabled, so you need to manually enable it if you want your readers to be able to like comments. I have done so. So, if you’re ever here and see a comment that you like, feel free to hit that button!

Bookahneer’s Geekwatch (June 25, 2014)

Welcome to today’s Bookahneer’s Geekwatch and the first Geekwatch in 2014! The place about miscellaneous interesting news related to Guild Wars 2 – and on occasion, other games.

I’m going to take a quick break from our summer break to post, because there have been two quite cool announcements today. For one, we finally heard something “official” about the next Rift expansion. We have already gotten the new crafting profession (Dream Weaver) as well as the four new souls and the PvP dimensions. But as far as I know, we hadn’t yet heard the name of the new expansion or what the new content will be about. A new producer’s letter was released today: The expansion is called “Nightmare Tide” and the new content will be free. There will also be new equipment slots which you will have to unlock on a per character basis by playing the game. They also announced a “digital edition” of Nightmare Tide with no further details. It will unlock those equipment slots for your account immediately. We will see what this means exactly, I guess, how much it costs, how difficult or time-consuming the unlocking process will be in the game and so on. For now, I’ll remain excited about the fact that they did announce their expansion and gave it a name and even said that it will be here “this year”. Hey, you never know… ;)

Let’s switch over to Guild Wars 2. By now, the whole Maguuma trailer is old news, I assume. But that’s not the news piece that I meant anyway. Guild Wars 2 now has a tumblr account as well. I had already seen that account before today’s announcement, but I really like what they are planning to do with it. It is not just another page where they mirror their news posts, etc. Instead, they want to use it to promote fan art! The good thing about tumblr is that you can submit your work to them. So, you won’t have to wait and hope for anybody at ArenaNet to spot your creations. Point them at your art instead! If tumblr is totally your thing, by the way, we are mirroring all our posts over there. ;)

And now, let me go back to stressing over the upcoming move. If all goes well, we will have uninterrupted internet access, at least! :)

Bookahneer’s Geekwatch: Post Feature-Patch

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

Today’s Geekwatch is all about Guild Wars 2. With the recent feature patch, ArenaNet introduced quite a lot of changes. I will not go into everything they have added here now or bore you with what I think about every single feature. Instead, I will just mention two features and one thing I like and one thing I dislike about them, as that’s what stood out the most for me in the last few days.

The first is the wardrobe. I still prefer the systems where you buy wardrobe slots and cosmetic outfit slots like Lotro and Rift have, but that’s another story, I guess. I think it’s great that you can wear your outfits in battle now and that you can dye them (as a whole, not individual pieces). Most of all, that you can dye them! Just look at my ranger in her pirate outfit and her moa pet. Aren’t they cute together? :p It’s also great that once bought, I can activate and deactivate the outfits as often as I like without having to pay anything again. The thing I do not like is that some items, like the reading glasses, did not receive that treatment. You can activate outfits for free, but if I want to wear the reading glasses, which I bought from the gem store for real money just like I did the pirate outfit, I have to pay real money again. Every time I change my character’s head armor, and if I want to keep the reading glasses, I have to use a transmutation charge. It annoys me that I have to pay twice now. Sure, for that, I can also wear them in battle, but at the same time, I can’t wear them at all anymore unless I pay with a transmutation charge. Before the change, I wore them when I wasn’t in combat and I used to alternate between having my mesmer or my warrior wear them. I just think it’s inconvenient that this isn’t possible anymore. Alternatively, I would love to have a white account-bound head item that all my characters can equip, without stats, that I can put the glasses skin on. Then I could still have the functionality I want for them, switch the glasses between my characters and use them in non-combat situations.

Another big thing is the megaservers. Oh yes, those dreaded things. No, I actually really love that change! Levelling up my thief, who is now level 32, it feels just like post-launch when the lower level regions were crowded. Almost dying in an event because it’s too hard? No, doesn’t work that way anymore, since there’s almost always somebody close who will join and do the event with you! The only downside was that until this morning, the EU servers saw quite a lot of flaming, and using very inappropriate words and insults when people dared to speak a language that isn’t English. The problem here is that despite people rolling on a French or German server, they get put onto a megaserver with the rest of the EU players. There was a certain lack of tolerance towards people using foreign languages. Actually, as sad as it is, that’s not that different from the flames I see in whatever MMO – including Guild Wars 2 – when playing on a EU English server and people use a language that isn’t English, but the amount of flaming increased a lot with the recent change.

With the latest hotfix, however, the default setting is that you only see map chat from people whose client language is the same as yours (with a few exceptions mentioned in the patch notes). You can disable that functionality (click on the wheel icon on the upper left of the chat window and remove the check) and then you’ll see the chat from the other two client languages as well. But if you do that, I think it’s safe to assume that you’re okay with people using different languages in your chat channels. I personally would have preferred to have separate map chats that you could join (simultaneously, of course, so that you don’t miss out on any language if you don’t want to) for the different official languages (and maybe a few more than that, because… why not?).

Then there is a something that I haven’t seen in any patch notes: The “Consumable” category in the Trading Post is finally working correctly! I have no idea when that one got fixed, but I do remember clicking “consumable” and then “food” to buy food for the Daily Feast and only getting beverages as a result. Today, I clicked on those categories again and I was positively surprised that they’re all working correctly now. Finally! :)

So yeah, apart from the reading glasses, I’m happy. But those I clearly do miss and I’m working on my ascended helmet for my warrior, so that she can get her glasses back on an item that I’m going to be wearing for a long time.

Bookahneer’s Geekwatch (January 5, 2014)

Welcome to today’s Bookahneer’s Geekwatch and the first Geekwatch in 2014! The place about miscellaneous interesting news related to Guild Wars 2 – and on occasion, other games.

We have been relatively quiet for some time, as we had visited bookahnerk’s family over New Year’s. My plan had been to use the time away from my main PC to play around with Folk Tale and its Location Editor Preview on my laptop. Unfortunately, my laptop – which isn’t a gaming laptop – can’t handle the game. I shouldn’t have been surprised about that, I guess. ;) On the other hand, that left me with more time to play board games with the family which isn’t a bad thing either (and I got to play all the expansions we have for Talisman now).

So, as I just mentioned, Folk Tale got another update. Yes, updates are very slow with Folk Tale and if you have bought into their Early Access, you’ve got to be patient. But they do update us regularly on their blog about the progress behind the scenes and I was very pleased to see they kept their word and rolled out the Location Editor Preview before Christmas. What it does is basically let you build maps. I decided to start slow and spread out over the map later. What you can see in the picture below is just a very tiny area of the space that I could fill theoretically. But even this tiny space took me about an hour or two. I need to get used to the controls first and need to get to know all the different pieces I can add. But it’s a lot of fun! I still do not regret having spent money on that game. True, it’ll take forever to get my hands on the game, but it still looks like it’ll be a great one for me. And in the meantime, I have this thing to play around with. I’ll build my perfect like Paerokaville. ;)

Folk Tale Location Editor Preview

If you’ve been away over the holidays like we have, you may have missed the winter events. Guild Wars 2’s Wintersday is running till January 21 (the next patch will be on that day, so depending on when the patch lands, which time zone you’re in, etc. make sure you’re done with everything on January 20!). Rift’s Fae Yule Celebration will be available until January 9, while Lotro’s Yule Festival will end on January 14. So, no matter which of these three games you’re playing, you still have some time left to finish everything.

Of course, even gaming companies, or rather their employees, take some time off during the holidays. This means there weren’t any live streams from the developers. The first 2014 twitch live stream from TrionWorlds will be next Friday, January 10, 2014. It has become part of our weekly routine to have the live stream open on Friday evenings, so it was a tad bit disappointing that there were no such entertainment this Friday. ;) Guild Wars 2 did not have any live streams either. They are concentrating on finishing/making the next four living story releases. Hopefully, after that, I will never have to see Scarlet again. I suspect ArenaNet will have another live stream soonish for the next patch. With the patch coming on January 21, I doubt the live stream will be this Friday, though. Oddly enough, Turbine – or their community manager Sapience, at least, is joining the ranks of using twitch live streams. Sapience wants to start streaming regularly. Nice to see them getting closer to the community. Or, we’ll see, at least.

And last but not least, I am proud to mention that Tilion from Dragon Season launched a News Section on their website! This works by him and certain partners using the twitter hashtags you can see on the left when they are making tweets on Twitter. Bookmark this site if you don’t want to keep checking the Twitter website for news about Guild Wars 2.