Guild Tracks

First of all - Happy New Year!  I wanted to get writing yesterday, but ended up watching too much football and playing too much Rock Band 2 with my kids to get anything done.  Today though, back to work!  And I just thought of a topic too that I wanted to write about.

Between Christmas and New Years we stayed with my wife’s sister’s family up in Washington, as we usually do.  What was different though is that my brother-in-law had recently started playing Guild Wars.  He only had the Prophecies campaign so I bought him Factions and Nightfall as an after Christmas gift.  This was partially selfish on my part since I figured with heroes he wouldn’t need to pester me for help with missions and such down the road!  Talking him through things and helping him out really got me thinking about things from a new perspective though.  Since the introduction of heroes, it is very hard to find pick up groups (pugs) to complete missions.  And since many people have been playing for a while, it’s really hard to find even guildies who are still working on missions instead of title grinding.  Anyway I played with him some, but since I mostly PvP I wanted to make sure he could get some heroes himself to help progress through the game more easily on his own after I left.  He had already beaten Prophecies and tried some hard mode missions with no success himself.  After we got him some heroes, equipped and leveled them up, he was just blowing through things with no problem!  Of course I also helped him set up a decent skill bar for himself and his heroes.  Even though I am pretty much a novice PvE player, after 3 and a half years I guess I picked up enough to get by!  That plus the Guild Wars Wiki has a lot of good suggestions.

One of his big questions was about earning money.  While I gave him a bunch of perfect weapons along with 100k in gold, he still wanted to become self sufficient.  This is one area where I really don’t have much of an idea anymore.  I used to farm with a 55 monk, but it seems that most farming areas have been nerfed over the years.  Plus as a PvP player, I get a lot from selling Zaishen Keys I earn, both from GvGing and from making predictions about the monthly Automatic Tournaments.  Between these two I seem to earn 100+ keys a month, which is more than I really know what to do with.  I suggested he start farming the Zaishen for Balthazar Faction every day, which he could then either use to unlock skills for his heroes or could turn in for keys to sell for gold.  I also told him to make sure to pick up every little thing that drops for selling it later.  I’ll remind him to do the mAT predictions as well.  Other than these, I really didn’t have much good advice for a new person trying to earn money in the game.

I also had him download Ventrilo and helped him configure it.  He was interested in trying out PvP beyond Random Arenas, but I told him the learning curve was really steep for someone just starting with the game now.  Perhaps once he beats all of the campaigns I might work with him more on PvP, but right now he is still figuring out the basic mechanics of the game.

Anyway being a Guild Wars veteran who only dabbles in PvE now, working with my brother-in-law really gave me a new perspective on the game.  First of all, there are a lot of relatively simple things that once you learn them, they really help you figure out the game and have fun.  In addition though, how the game is played now by new players is light years different than when I first started - due in large part to what most veteran players are doing in game now and the lack of new people.  Because of these difference I think it is pretty much essential for a new player to have access to heroes right off the bat in order to have enough success to want to stick with the game long enough to get better at it and have fun.