Positively The Last GW2 Post : GW2

Until the next beta weekend, that is. When is that, anyway?

WvWvW

• First attempt Saturday night: complete failure. Couldn't even find the zone. Went through the Mists, ended up in Lion's Arch.

• Second attempt Sunday night: found the zone straight off. What kind of an idiot would miss it? It's right there!

• Three very enjoyable hours defending a massive castle. Saw three more keeps on map, one for each world. Never went anywhere near them. Thought that was the whole thing Marveled at the size of it. Realized reading the Wiki this morning that was just one of four WvW zones! Understand now what all those portals in Lion's Arch were for.

That's me on the left, protecting our door!

• Fighting was constant, fluid, fun. No lag, no hitching, no strobing. Died just three times in three hours, recorded fourteen kills. Doesn't sound much but the Monthly WvW Kill Target Achievement is only fifteen. No clue what causes a kill to register. Must have been involved in ten times as many. Contribution? Killing blow? Nifty hat?. Who knows?

•  Verdict: Great if it stays packed. That's a lot of space, though.

Random Stuff I Liked

• Charr running on all fours. Bounding, really. Feels gloriously non-human.

• Creatures running at low health. Better still, creatures running, meeting a stronger ally, joining up and coming back. Saw this happen repeatedly with rock drake hatchlings and rock drakes.

I will if you will...

• The vertiginous climb and dive in Lion's Arch. Bit of a Baywatch vibe going on in Lion's Arch, now I come to think about it.

• Buying and selling from anywhere but only being able to collect money and goods from a Broker in town. Ideal compromise between facility and worldliness. Bet that gets changed.

• Creatures fighting each other. Harpies hunting warthogs on Diessa Plateau sticks in my mind but there were others.

• Discovering recipes. Yes it's all on a wiki already but I have enough willpower not to look until I'm stuck and fed up. 

• Talking rats! Found one in a Lion's Arch and a Citizen too! Player race! Player race!

Random Stuff I Didn't Like

• Animals dropping weapons and armor. What is it with game developers? How hard can it be to put appropriate drops on mobs? Spend all that time banging on about immersion and then stuff your wolves with magic swords.

• On a related note, what's with the Globby Goo? Drops off everything. Beta placeholder for unfinished loot tables or global parasitic infection? Either way, get rid of it!

• The extreme speed of learning skills. Shortbow dropped for me around level 16. Off a warthog probably. Pigs are notoriously skilled archers. Took around 15 minutes to unlock all five skills. A few hours per skill would be better. If skills are going to unlock in minutes might as well hand them out with the weapon.

Let's see your papers "Citizen"

• The extreme speed of leveling. Level 19, give or take, in a weekend. I was locked out of the game for a few hours, had to learn new game systems and environments so that's fast. Too fast. As I said in feedback in game. If the famous flat level curve (can a curve be flat?) is still in the plan that means level 80 in around a week. Call it a fortnight to allow for work and sleep. Six months would be better. Three at the outside. Maybe it does slow down. I hope so.

• Super-fast crafting. That thing where if you make a stack of items the first takes a second,  the next half a second, the third a quarter of a second and so on. Really annoying. Watching the progress bar tick down remorselessly on a stack is one of crafting's great pleasures. Also good for making coffee and checking email.

• Naming WvW teams Red, Green and Blue. The enemy's already anonomized enough with all names removed. Hard to work up any "World Pride" when no-one even knows the name of the World.

• Personal Story. I could do without this. Mine was good, but it's out of kilter. Instanced single-player RPG storylines don't fit with an open party open world. Can you even invite someone else into your personal story instance?

That's all I made notes on. Nothing game-breaking there. Not even game-bending. I was enjoying myself far too much to quibble. Not that quibbling isn't enjoyable in itself

Roll on next Beta Weekend. Better yet, roll on launch!

Over Here! I Think You Missed One! : Realms Online

In that way things have of coming together sometimes, Zubon at Kill Ten Rats posted something recently about Salem, an MMO known in so far is it is known at all for its aspiration to permadeath. He came to hear of the game via Heartless, who had posted about it along with two other in-development MMOs, Otherlands and Dominus. Heartless headed his piece "The 3 MMOs you ARE NOT paying attention to but should be", somewhat ironically since one of the three, Dominus, had gone dark only a day or two earlier.

Zubon not only hadn't been paying attention to these titles but as he clarified he'd "stopped actively paying attention to game development years ago". Meanwhile, SynCaine had a busy discussion popping under the post he'd evocatively and provocatively titled "I Miss Massively". In the course of that thread Saucelah observed of Massively that " most of their stories are just write-ups of PR releases", an inarguable truism about which I observed that it was precisely as an aggregator of press releases that I found Massively most useful.

I do like to know what's going on. Even if I have no plans ever to play a particular MMO I still like to keep an eye on its progress. For heaven's sake, I still drop in and lurk on the Alganon forums once in a while! Massively's feed sits in my blog reader and I scan the headlines daily. If I spot an MMO that I don't recognize I'll click through and read the whole article. I'd been vaguely following the development of Dominus, Salem and Otherlands that way for months.

I have (had in the case of the now-defunct Dominus) no great interest in the first two but Otherlands is an MMO I mean to play so I sat up when they recently invited applications to alpha-test. I'm broadly in favor of beta-testing MMOs but I'm more ambivalent about alphas. I'm interested in giving feedback on gameplay but not so much in doing unpaid work to ensure the server architecture is solid and the game engine functions.

There are exceptions. I am quite hyped for the upcoming City of Steam alpha, scheduled to begin sometime in July. I'm hoping for an invite to that one not only because I very much like what I've seen of the game so far but also because Mechanist Games' idea of an alpha test looks rather like some other developers' picture of a game that's fit to launch.

There's been much discussion of late on the pros and cons of paying to beta-test. Gamigo, producers of Otherlands, aren't asking for your money yet but they've found another way to twist your arm. They've combined the publicity hype over winning a place in their alpha with an application process that makes it clear that all you'll win is the opportunity to do some serious work for no pay. I read the application form and decided to pass on their generous offer. I'll wait til open beta or launch, thanks all the same.

So I knew about these MMOs and many more from scanning the headlines, which is how I ran across Realms Online. Or Regnum. Same game, two names. When I noticed this news release a couple of weeks back it piqued my interest. Mrs Bhagpuss had been asking if there were any MMOs we hadn't played that have animal races and I hadn't been able to find any. Then up pop these Lamai, looking something like bushbabies waving swords.

Off I went to the website to look at this new MMO. Only it isn't. New, that is. Realms Online is about to celebrate its fifth anniversary in less than three weeks' time. So much for me having my finger on the pulse of MMO development. Or indeed my eye on the ball.

More surprising than my ignorance (pretty much anything would be) Realms Online appears to be something a lot of people seem to have been asking for - a Dark Age of Camelot clone. Out for five years, servers on three continents, known under two names, filling a gaping three-way RVR market hole, how did I miss it? Was it just me? Did you all play it years ago and now you've all moved on, leaving me to step out of character creation into the snow just as the servers merge? For the love of Mike, it's Argentina's most successful MMO! Oh, wait a moment...

Anyway, I've found it now. It's downloaded and I've played it and so far I like it. It's very old-school, feels like an MMO from quite a while before WoW and I very much doubt I shall ever give it a shake you'd call fair. Too many MMOs, too little time. Especially if new old ones keep creeping out of the undergrowth to ambush me like this.

Still, whenever I feel the urge to be a viking bushbaby with a sword, Realms Online will be my go-to game. And who among us can honestly say that's an urge they'll never have?

A Cow Bunga : GW2

Let me tell you some things about the Charr.

"The charr race was forged in the merciless crucible of war. It is all they know. War defines them...Their culture has developed into a military state where they are raised as warriors from birth"

Source: GW2 Official Wiki

Words not enough? Go see for yourself.

How odd, then, that last Sunday morning my Charr Ranger found himself sitting down beside a Lonely Cow to cheer her up before bowing to a Dignified Cow to enhance her sense of self-worth. All this after catching wasps in a jar and feeding them to a cow who Wanted Something.

The opening Charr tutorial zone is manic in the extreme, all martial commands and chaos culminating in a hectic fight with a powerful undead Duke. The level 1 to 10 zone around the spectacularly militarized city, The Black Citadel, is torn by war from end to end. As you'd expect.

Then comes Diessa Plateau, the next zone over. They do a lot of farming there. Charr are giant cats, after all. They eat meat. A lot of meat. It has to come from somewhere. So the Charr raise cattle. I don't have a problem with that. It's how they raise them...

Cows, huh, yeah! What are they good for?

Almost as soon as I stepped out onto the plateau someone warned me there was a farm where boviculture had taken an odd turn. Listen to him. Odd scarcely covers it. This farmer, by reputation the finest on the plateau, feeds his cows on insects and runs them in races. When you meet him you find he also segregates his cows by emotional state. Naturally he wants your help. I imagine it's hard to find agricultural workers up to his exacting standards.

Leaving aside the question of how, given that all Charr are supposedly under military discipline and orders at all times, my ranger is free to come and go wherever he pleases ad lib and ad infinitum (a question which deserves no more consideration in an MMO than "How can I swim in this full suit of steel plate armor?") we come to the less-easily brushed aside question of whimsy.

Sunbathing after dark. In a bikini and boots. Whimsy or a cry for help?

All MMOs have some but how much is too much? GW2 has a lot. I have a very high tolerance for whimsy indeed but even I found myself questioning just exactly what I was doing chasing wasps with a Mason Jar so I could feed them to a cow.

No such qualms disturbed the equilibrium of the truly inspired cow-launching event, which to me exemplified everything ArenaNet are claiming on behalf of their world. Alright, not everything. I couldn't swear it was "dynamic". But I did stumble upon it and become caught up in the jaw-dropping insanity for fifteen or twenty glorious, disbelieving minutes.

I won't spoil the whole thing. Just go watch this. It's short, we'll wait.

There, don't you want to go do the whole event now? That is Charr-appopriate whimsy. In spades. The Meatoberfest I alluded to in an earlier post is another example of something amusing and unserious that still fits what we think we know about the Charr.

Charr butcher likes to work naked. Gonna argue?

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the farm-related tasks. For me as a player they were entertaining enough to spend half an hour on, although I doubt it's content I'd go out of my way to revisit. The twinfold problem seemed to be that the basic tasks (farm labor) were too mundane to be of concern either to me or my Charr avatar and that, realizing this, the developer had perhaps gone into whimsy overdrive trying to gussy them up into something less...Farmville.

I'm up for whimsy. When the Asura show their handlebar-eared faces I'm expecting plenty but I think the Charr sense of humor should be a tad more robust (although come to think of it the Asura are about as funny as a cabbage patch doll stuffed with broken glass when you get to know them).

How much whimsy is too much may come down to a matter of taste. The line between what's whimsical and what's plain daft may change with the light. I wouldn't like to see a halfling prang a live cow two hundred yards into the sky over the Shire but my only concern as a Charr would be the waste of all that meat. On the other hand sitting next to a cow to cheer her up sounds like quite right and proper behavior for a halfling.

Let's remember who we're supposed to be and try to get all our whimsical ducks in a line, shall we?

How The Bhagpuss Came To Be: NBI

The New(bie) Blogger Initiative requires three things of me: 

1. An Introduction, 
2. Some Advice 
3. A Conclusion.

I'm good with Number One and Syp is going to provide Number Three. It's Number Two I'm not so sure about.

I first thought of starting a blog back in February 2010. Look here and you can see how far I got! I found a host (Blogger) and came up with a name. Here's my first piece of advice:

The Name of the Blog

Check if someone else thought of the amazingly clever, original blog name you just came up with before you commit to it emotionally or practically. Gosh! Who'd ever have thought it? There's another Inventory Full and they're still above me on a Google search! That said, I've not noticed any confusion or animosity between us since I camped on their lawn so it probably doesn't matter all that much...

I came up with the look and layout for Inventory Full in a couple of hours and then took about a year and a half to come up with my first real post. Why so long? Fear. Second piece of advice:

Don't Be Afraid

It won't be anything like as scary as you think it's going to be. My main concern was harsh feedback. It is to laugh! I got one comment on that first post, and that took ten days. (Thanks, Fluff Factor, now known as CRT Musings). If you end up being Tobold or SynCaine then being abused by complete strangers will become meat and drink to you but it's much more likely the only voices you'll hear will be friendly ones because people who don't like your blog won't waste a nanosecond reading it, far less stop by just to say something snide.

Inventory Full is my first and so far only blog, but I come from a very long background of writing for relatively small, obsessive, responsive audiences. I co-published my first fanzine back in the punk wars in the late '70s, moved to co-publishing a comics fanzine in the early '80s and went on to contribute to many more comiczines in the U.K. and U.S.A. throughout that decade. I was also heavily involved in the APAzine scene right through to the late 1990s.

Then I discovered Everquest and all that stopped, replaced by endless posting on countless forums, primarily EQ's long-gone but never-forgotten original TNZ. I used to post under a different name but sometime in the mid-noughties, for some reason I now forget I needed a new identity. I was sitting at work listening to the radio and two news items came on in quick succession, one about the Oliver Postgate children's TV character Bagpuss and another a report about something terrible going on in Bhagdad. Which brings me to my third piece of advice:

Think About How You Want To Be Known

If your blog gains any traction at all you'll be stuck with whatever you decided to call both it and yourself for the foreseeable future so make sure you can live with it indefinitely. Do you think I imagined I'd be going by the name of Bhagpuss, possibly for the rest of my life? If I'd thought it through, don't you think I'd have come up with something, well, cooler and less demented?

So, I'd named myself and made my blog but I was too nervous to step out into traffic and use it. Yet at the same time I was posting wildly, profligately, and often irrelevantly on a hundred other blogs and forums. Next piece of advice:

Get Your Name Out There Even Before You Start

If you want to give yourself at least a fighting chance of having someone read your first blog, try to build up a subliminal awareness of your existence in your potential audience. Comment on blogs you read and try to comment appositely, relevantly and intelligently. (Do not, however, follow my example and feel that you have to comment on every post because not to do so would be rude. This is a hangover from my apazine days, where to leave anyone's zine uncommented on was tantamount to a direct insult. Blog comment threads don't work that way, as I eventually worked out after Zubon from Kill Ten Rats banned me from commenting on his posts there due to the disruptive effect of my completely irrelevant pontifications. A much needed lesson, thanks Zubon, although one which I can only claim partly to have learned even now...)

In the end I largely embarrassed myself into getting my blog off the ground. Not infrequently my comments on various blogs were longer then the original post. A couple of bloggers pulled my name and/or comment out and used it in the title or body of their own posts. While the attention was great, it was starting to feel unseemly, taking up all that space on other peoples' blogs while not offering any means to reciprocate. Which brings me to my final piece of advice and more importantly encouragement.

Just Do It

Really. Just do it. For the love of all that's holy I do not want to invoke Richard Branson here (or anywhere, unless perhaps there's a large wicker structure standing by) but really, just do it. If you don't like it you can stop but at least then you'll know whether you like it or not. And you probably will, at least for a while. It's fun. Sort of. Sometimes. When it works.

Go on, give it a shot. I've added all the blogs that have outed themselves on the NBI forums
in a Blogroll to the right. If yours isn't on there it's because your URL didn't work - link in the comments and I'll add you. Some of the blogs on there get more traffic than I do and I think calling them "New" might be a stretch but hey, I haven't been doing this for a year yet and here I am handing out advice so if they want to be "New" then they're New. For this month at least.

I haven't had time to visit all of them yet. I will keep the sidebar up for the whole of May and then I plan on merging my current "Places We Go" list into that much superior updating format while winnowing out the places I don't in fact go from both of them. If you've read this far you probably have the time and stamina to go visit some of the links. If you do, tell em who sent you!

Newbie Blogger Initiative

So, I get this email a few weeks back from Syp of Bio Break and Massively fame and since I don't get so many emails from other bloggers straight out of the blue I am naturally intrigued and reply right away. It turns out he has this project going to bring bloggers and would-be bloggers together in a species of kaffeeklatsch only without the coffee, sad to say.

Well, I am flattered to be asked which goes without saying, and all the more when I see who else is in the gang. Around sixty, which is a lot of bloggers and in that three score there are plenty of names I know and plenty of blogs I read, too. Some time this month we are all going to write about how we came to this blogging game, which is a story I am looking forward to hearing from some of the names on that list and that is for sure. There's a list right down at the bottom (borrowed from  MMOQuests without permission! Thanks Stargrace!). If you haven't visited any of these fine sites before then here's your chance!.

Anyway, it seems the point of all this hard work on Syp's part is to encourage anyone that has  been thinking of starting their own blog to take the plunge and to set up some place where they can get advice and feedback and bounce ideas around. On that account he has set up a forum and invited anyone that is interested to take a look-see and maybe throw in their hat.

Until then, if anyone has any questions, other than why I seem to be channeling the ghost of Damon Runyon or maybe Bill Kotzwinkle, the  

Newbie Blogger Initiative is over here

So if you are wondering whether this blogging thing could be for you come over and hang out! Ask questions, get advice, share ideas.There's never going to be a better time to get started. Just remember, there is no coffee. Or cake.


NBI Sponsor Blogs: Games and Geekery, The Wild Boar Inn, MMO Fallout, Tastes Like Battle Chicken, Grimnir’s Grudge, Roll One Hundred, Dragonchasers, Ardwulf’s Lair, Inventory Full,Jaded Alt, Ark’s Ark, Tremayne’s Law, Blog de la Burro, Just One MMOre, DocHoliday’s MMO Saloon, High Latency Life, MMO Gamer Chick, Skycandy, Nomnom.info, Hunter’s Insight, Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle, Berath’s Brain Burps, Epic Slant, Bullet Points, Professor Beej,Journeys with Jaye, Screaming Monkeys, Welcome to Spinksville, Vicarious Existence, Casual is as Casual Does, Star Shadow, I Have Touched The Sky, The Ancient Gaming Noob, Just One More Unlock, A Ding World, Yeebo Fernbottom’s MMO Love In, Stropp’s World, Kill Ten Rats, The Jedi Gambit, Beau Hindman, Blue Kae, Gankalicious, Live Like a Nerd, Casual Stroll to Mordor, Tish Tosh Tesh, Casting a Shaddoe, A Green Mushroom, ALT:ernative, Parallel Context, ETCmmo, Avatars of Steel, Tales of the Aggronaut, West Karana, Contains Moderate Peril, The Stories of O, Levelcapped, LOTRO Fashion, Mr. Meh’s Supplication, Malchome’s Mind/Restokin, Nerdy Bookahs, T.R. Red Skies, MMOQuests

Plink Plink Fizz... GW2

Playing a ranger is a known quantity in most MMOs. You can expect to wear Medium armor, have the help of an animal companion and shoot things with a bow. You can call yourself a ranger or a hunter or a scout but in the end it comes to much the same thing.

Ranger isn't my favorite class but I've played more than a few. Usually I'll test drive new MMO with whatever passes for the bog-standard Warrior but I was apprehensive about some of the things I'd read about GW2's "action combat" so I went with a class that could stand off a ways and see what was going on.

I've been throwing my thoughts about this onto various threads in my brief spells out of game over the weekend, particularly at Hardcore Casual and Kill Ten Rats, where some lively exchanges took place. It does seem that my experience of combat has been at variance to what others have found.

Gina on the comments to my First Impressions piece described her frustration withthe difficulty of combat and I've seen advice all over the place about the need to bind Dodge keys, weapon swap, learn combos, circle strafe, never stop moving - any number of things supposedly essential if you aren't going to spend most of your time looking at a black and white world from a very low perspective.

This is variously reported as happening at level five, or ten or maybe it's not until after level 20. I was trying to get as high as I could to find the point where the unavoidable action gameplay kicked in but I didn't manage to find it in the time available. Be warned that I only managed to get to a shade short of 19th and that I can only speak from the perspective of a Charr ranger. Other classes and races may have a much harder time of it than I did. Check KTR for a picture of how different things are for melee classes, for example.

Soloing a Charr ranger is, if you want it to be, identical to soloing a ranger in any other MMO. You wander about the countryside looking for prey. When you see something you fancy you make sure he doesn't have more friends than you can handle, send your pet in to grab agro and plink away with your bow. If your target comes off the pet and runs at you you backpedal and keep firing, having of course ensured that there's nothing behind you which will object to being barged into by a ranger in reverse gear.

Do this correctly and you won't even get hit before the mob dies. I found it as straightforward to do in GW2 as anywhere. Mostly, though, I didn't even need to take all that trouble. Usually all I did was plink the mob to get its attention, let it come to me and tank it while the pet chewed away from behind. Fancy kiting tactics only came into play on mobs more than two levels above me and even then not always.

I moved to the level 15 - 25 areas when I dinged 13 and roamed around leveling up on mobs between 2 and four levels higher than me for most of Sunday. I successfully joined in lots of events, some alone or with one other wandering woodsman, some with lots of people. I only trained up Longbow until a good Shortbow dropped when I was 17 so there was little weapon-swapping. I wore gear I made myself runed with runes I made myself.

I had an absolutely wonderful time playing exactly as I am used to playing. I didn't have to adjust any more than I did moving from, say, EQ2 to Rift. Less than when learning to play Fallen Earth and far, far less than DCUO.

I would contend that this is a Good Thing. Not because I plan on stubbornly insisting on playing GW2 as though it was EQ. I will learn all the new techniques and tricks - I'm looking forward to it. No, the good thing is that I can learn them after I'm comfortable with who my character is and what his place is in the world. The time to learn new mechanics is once I'm settled in, not right at the very start. If other classes don't have this leeway, I know now that I can come to them once I am comfortably established with a character and class that I understand and can play effectively enough for my own purposes.

I would encourage anyone who found the whole action combat hype too daunting to make a Charr ranger next beta, take up leatherworking and go hunt drakes until you have enough leather for a full suit of crafted, runed armor and enough action points to buy Troll Unguent and  Signet of the Wild. which together will let your pet tank pretty much anything you're likely to want to solo. Make sure you don't pull any mob that "reflects projectiles", stand back and plink plink plink ! It's a classic and classics never go out of style.

Burning Down The House: GW2

" Enter the living world of Guild Wars 2 - filled with thousands of dynamic events that ebb and flow through the course of your adventures. One day there may be a thriving village filled with vendors and townspeople, the next day that village may be a smoking ruin overrun by centaurs.
Dynamic events evolve and cascade across the world in response to how you, the player, interact with them, leaving persistent effects in the game world. Will you save that village or let it burn? The choice rests with you and your fellow players. "

That's the theory, as detailed on the official GW2 website. I'd read that a while back but I'd forgotten until I went there today to borrow it for this blog just how brave and bold a claim ArenaNet were making. No wonder some folks have been expecting so much. And no wonder some are already feeling disappointed or let-down even before the game's been given an official release date.

One of the many things I liked about this Beta weekend was the pop-up window that appeared every time an Event completed. The last question on the form was always something along the lines of "How much did this event change the world?" On a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (I don't think we're in Kansas anymore) Usually I had to give a "1". I couldn't see any changes.

That's not to say there were no changes. The form just appeared far too quickly after the event for me to tell. I joined an event, victory conditions were given in the top right corner of the screen, they were either met or missed, I got a grade on my contribution (Bronze, Silver or Gold), some xp, some Karma, some cash. I got a reward regardless of whether we won or lost and the size of the reward seemed to relate more to the size of my contribution than the success of the operation.

Whether the world changed I would only know if I stuck around to see. Mostly I moved on almost immediately. When I did hang about or passed by later on I would frequently see the same event again. And again. In the Charr starter area the Fire Shaman, Tar Goo, Venerable Skale and Workshop Attack events played out as though on a continuous loop. Farther out as I criss-crossed the level 15 - 25 area the same events flipped on and off my screen countless times.

GW2 has a much more immersive way of letting you know something's going down than just flashing up a quest box, though. Wherever you go NPCs charge up to you, grab you by the shoulder-guards and yell in your face.

 " SOMETHING BAD is happening RIGHT NOW! YOU need to DO SOMETHING about it! Yes YOU!! "

This is great in theory but in practice I soon began to react to these hysterics as I might to a particularly obnoxious chugger on the high street, with a glower and a shrug. I helped last time. And the time before that. Don't you remember asking me? Find someone else pal, it's not my problem!

Traveling far and wide across the map I was importuned every time I came close to any kind of population center. Just to use a public road was to be pounced on repeatedly to clear mines (don't I need training for that?), escort caravans or collect eggs. It's no wonder i spent so much of the weekend out in the wilderness - it's the only place i could get any peace!

I loved it, really. It seemed an ideal compromise between static and dynamic environments. Often I allowed myself to be distracted from what I'd meant to do, instead finding myself collecting worm eggs from very unwilling worms for the Meatoberfest (it's a Charr thing - you really don't want to know) or holding off harpies while a crazed veteran launched live cows into the sky. More of that anon.

How much any of this changed the world even short-term I find it hard to say but one very definite and meaningful effect I did notice was the loss of use of certain Waypoints. Waypoints in GW2 are instant teleports. You have to visit each one in person the first time to open it up, a mechanism I love, but thereafter you can use all the ones you've opened just by clicking on your map and paying a fee. Several times when I wanted to return to one that I'd opened I found it marked "Contested" on the map, making it unusable.

The Waypoint in a fortified town in Diessa Plateau was "Contested" more often than it was open. For a long time a Giant was stomping around inside staging his own one-giant raid. After he left the town came under attack by separatists. Whether the latter event was a consequence of the conclusion of the former I have no idea, but either way the town was largely out of action for most of the day.

In another example, a road I'd traveled safely once was impassable the second time because Jotun were holding a key bridge. I cleared them off with the help of the Lionguard and rendered the road useable again. That I was able to do alone, while the events with the giant and the separatists didn't seem to scale down at all regardless of there being very few players attempting to deal with them.

I think it will be impossible to tell how significant this "dynamism" is until the game is Live and we are able to live in the world. At the moment all we see are snapshots. The prospect of not knowing when you log in whether you will be able to go to the same place you were hunting yesterday is appealing and I can see now how this could happen. I hope it does. If it leaves places people want to go in a state that prevents them from going there without letting them do much about it, though, that might not be quite as much fun.