[GW2] Guilds: My most Laboured Metaphor yet!

The first game's guild system is like having a full time job, not in that it's a chore - just in the way it's set up.

You can't have two full time jobs (you ain't got a time turner, crazy fool) you have one job and you work hard at it. A job can be heaps of fun if you work alongside the right people and enjoy the work. It can be a pain in the arse if you don't have the right people by your side, because it's the only damn job you have and for the moment you have to stick by it. If your boss is a douchebag then it's going to be extra difficult to get along - they're the one in the driver's seat, after all (but that's a whole other metaphor, stay focused!). Even if your workmates are the best in the world, if your boss is a wankstain it's not going to be an easy ride. Changing jobs can be equally painful; if you move to a rival company then you're going to piss off the people you leave behind and workmates who became good friends can easily lose touch over time.

Ballbag

Don't get me wrong, if you enjoy your job and work alongside some really great people then you probably wake up in the morning (ie, log in) and think "DAMN I can't wait to get to work and start that freaking filing!". However, imagine if you work alongside some really great people and your working life is great, but then an old friend approaches you with an idea for a start up company - selling porcelain elephants.
It can't fail; its-a-freaking-GOLDMINE!
You'd have to leave those workmates behind to start your porcelain pachyderm factory.

(Still with me on the metaphor? About halfway now, how about taking a break: stretch and take a deep breath... ready to start again?)

In the new game the guild system is like going to a bar. Walk through the door and there could be any number of people milling about. It's likely you've come here with a few friends and that's great, but you know that there will be people in and out of this bar all night. You might choose to visit a few bars over the course of the evening, maybe jump from group to group and socialise with a number of different people. One night you might choose to spend the whole evening in a chill out bar, drinking ice cold vodka from frozen shot glasses. The next you might flit from sports bar to nightclub to strip club - you saucy devil. It doesn't matter if you decide to leave a bar and go elsewhere, you can come back later just as easily if the shisha bar across the street turns out to be a little crappier than you thought it would be.

If you're enjoying an ice cold beer with a group of friends from college (probably discussing the viability of starting up some sort of porcelain elephant production) and you're approached by the smoking hot barmaid from the pub just around the corner, you can excuse yourself from your current group - promising to return once you inevitably strike out - and attempt to woo the frisky young vixen with your talk of dynamic events and epic dungeon crawls whilst enjoying a cloudy ale and a packet of pork scratchings.

Besides, don't you spend most of your time at work wishing you were at a bar?

ps. the metaphor works equally well for class vs playground, but this was the more "mature" version.

FLASHBACK: Revolving at Nine Hundred Miles an Hour

PLEASE NOTE: This is a repost of the very first article I ever wrote for this blog, I thought I'd post it here as a reminder (mainly to myself) to be thankful for what I have. And to be angry that I wasn't born with laser eyes. Enjoy!

Sometimes I feel I have to remind myself how terribly unlikely is my continued existence. Just the plonking together of so many chanced variables to create me. The same applies, of course, to you... and to Jimmy Carr, and my boss Alison, and Robert Mugabe and David Attenborough and everyone else on this Earth. Let me see if I can illustrate what I mean:

Here is a picture of the Universe:

Its not a very exhaustive representation, they don't make webpages big enough, but I think you get the idea. As far as I understand, the Universe contains a finite amount of matter - lots of different kinds stuff and crap which comes together to make other stuff and crap. Planets, Stars, asteroids, bicycle pumps, sellotape, coffee mugs, anchovie pizzas, cotton wool - everything. It just so happens that matter had formed to produce our solar system, just the way it is. Look, here it is:

Look at all the happy planets (I have included Pluto - whatchagonnado?) all whizzing around, and the big shiney Sun in the middle. Brilliant.

Now, the right matter has come together in just the right places to produce this working solar system, each planet is exactly where it is because of a number of cosmic forces working together and against each other to produce this dazzlingly complex system which just kinda works. In the vastness of the Universe, I think thats kinda cool.

And (yeah, I'm starting this sentance with AND, whatchagonnadoaboutit!?) ...and nestled somewhere near the middle is Earth:

Its just the right distance from the Sun, not too cold, not too hot. If the interplanetary calculations were off by the slightest bit, we would be an arctic wasteland, or an arid desert of noxious gasses - but nope, its just right, and then... BAM - toasters, marker pens, Tesco Clubcards, wineracks, staplers... everything! Although when compared to the vast Universe shown at the top of this rambling post, the Earth might seem like a speck on the shoe of existence, it is still pretty fricking big. And being so big (oh look, I did it again), it houses a great number of people. Last headcount I did we were around 6-7 billion. And out of those 6-7 billion it just so happens that two people met and did the sex. EW. I know, I thought I'd slip that in there nice and fast and hope you wouldn't notice (just like they did, eh? eh? Urgh, dirty Distilled). But the fact remains - thats pretty unlikely isn't it? That these two people, shown below...

...would find each other and make a baby, out of all the other people they could have (and may have!) made babies with, they made a baby with this particular partner and that produced you. Yep, thats right, out you popped. Ask your Mum, she probably won't say you just popped out, but she will probably confirm that the expulsion of you from her nether regions was as a direct result of the bumping of uglies betwix herself and your Dad. But, its not as simple as that, there is yet more unlikeliness and chance involved. Not only is it terribly unlikely that these two very particular people would meet and "make-a-de-babby", but it is also terribly unlikely that in "making-de-babby" the mixing of their respective mojos would produce exactly - you. Here you are:

Humans have 23 pairs of Chromosomes (drawing on A-Level Biology here, bear with me... RAAA!), and when we reproduce the sex cells contain a set of these chromosomes and half are drawn from the male sperm cell (go Dad!) and half are drawn from the female ovum (woo Mum, yeah!). But there are numerous combinations which could be produced from this super sexy sperm/ovum chromosomal love-in, there are recessive and dominant genes to take into account, and environmental factors, random mutations and unforseen complications. You could have turned out like this:

or this

or this

What I am trying to get at is that the likelihood of producing you is nothing short of a miracle. That all the matter in all the Universe converged on one particular spot and then you were brought into the world. I'm not saying its Divine, or the work of some creator, merely that there were so many chances over the millenia leading up to your creation for the whole plan to be derailed - the Earth could have been hit by an asteroid and blown up, we could have been just a few feet further from the Sun and spun out of orbit crashing burning and screaming into Mars, your Mum could have been at a different party in the 80s, wearing different leg warmers which didn't match your Dad's frightful 70's throwback moustache in both colour and texture - you could have so easily not existed.

Then again, you could also have so easily been born with LASERS FOR EYES.

Swings and roundabouts, really.

Guild Wars 2: RP your way to Fame and Glory

MMO game worlds are massive. Hence the name, I suppose. By massive I don't just mean in physical size, I mean in population, social structure, demographic movements - a lot of things happen in these games on humungous scales. Skill changes cause sweeping shifts in meta and addition of content pushes market prices on items back and forth - these are gigantic movements.
Contrary to this, however, these large movements are built up of a million tiny movements - the movements of the players involved. Skill changes cannot change how the game plays unless the player changes how they play. Markets cannot boom and bust without players changing the prices of their items. My point is that out of these million tiny movements; how does a player get their movements noticed?

Being an exceptionally good player (and having a large audience to watch you be excellent), being "server first" etc for important feats and, of course, being an active community rep (ie, a blogger, arranging events and being active on forums) are all pretty good ways to get yourself noticed.

However, I think one of the most interesting ways to get noticed would be to roleplay (RP) a character in-game and faithfully play out the persona whenever you are in a certain area. Any player passing through your village, or cave, or beach etc, would become part of your story and hopefully take away a little bit of an experience from the interaction. The dynamic events system would really help to make this interesting and interactive.

For example, perhaps you could decide that you are a guard of a small human village on the Krytan border - ideally one which has a touch of trouble with centaurs. It would be your job to defend the village from marauders, to fight off the hordes if they approach and to attempt to retake the village if it falls foul of the murderous beasts. I think it would be awesome to be known as the guard of little Will-Town (they named it Will-Town after me, don't you know?).

Do you plan on doing any RP in GW2 or other MMOs? Do you RP yourself already?