Meta Enough For You Yet? : GW2

Trampled underfoot by the Borlis zerg, my poor Asuran necromancer lying crushed into the dirt at Bay, I took a moment to tab out of GW2 to check Feedly. A link to Massively led me to the following headline :

Release page for Guild Wars 2's upcoming patch vandalized by marauding villain.

For a fleeting moment I thought hackers were back at their tricks but then the wording struck me. No-one short of Shaggy or Velma could conceivably use the term "marauding villain" and expect to be taken seriously. Something stranger than a simple hack attack must have happened.

Indeed it had. ArenaNet have splashed virtual paint over their own website, slashed red crosses through Queen Jennah's eyes and turned her pouting smile into a scary clown frown. Well, it got my attention. I'm a sucker for a touch of postmodern decontextualization, me.

A few very lucky websites also received this lovely fob-watch. Perks of the job I guess. (The GW2Guru folks kindly donated theirs to the upcoming Pink Day In LA charity event).

With the watch came a rather clumsily scanned poem. I won't reproduce the whole thing, but the first verse is certainly intriguing:

Tick tock goes the clock

It's almost time for time to stop

Something you all must understand

Your world is built on fog and sand

Make of that what you will. It's almost enough to make me believe Jeromai's theory. I hope that is where we're going with this. It wouldn't be original but at least it would be a closed loop, and I've wanted to know what those Steam creatures were up to since the first time I ran into them out in Lornar's Pass.

It all kicks off on the 20th, which falls very conveniently between the end of the ultra-short FFXIV open beta and the beginning of Head Start. After all this build-up, I do hope it's a one-off event like the Karka invasion last November, even if that means I miss it and end up watching it on YouTube. I'd really hate to think all this is leading to something that repeats every couple of hours so we can go on another two-week Achievement binge.