For many would-be-legendary-heroes, the doors to Tyria opened for the first time on April 27-th. A momentary culmination of sorts, marking years of quiet dedication to the franchise from GW devotees or a chance to exhale all their built-up anticipation for the newly-found fans, who hastily piled their MMO hopes on the GW2 hype wagon that swept through yours, mine and, well, everybody’s village these past months...

Or let’s just say it like it was - we played some Guild Wars 2 Beta some weeks ago and loved the *!@# out of it.

If you are indeed one of those lovers then this article is not aimed at you (though go on, go on, I need to establish a readership). Come launch we both know where I will find you. Instead, this article wishes to appeal to all the sceptics. Those who kept a cool head faced with Tyria’s beauty, raised their voices in criticism (and not just to troll) and who thought it is unrealistic that three dozen future dragon slayers will line up in a farmstead’s backyard, knee-deep in cow dung, to pat Betsy (even if it is a well know fact that cows given affection produce better milk).

I try to stay GW informed and as such, I heard them mention the things below on podcasts, read them in impressions or personally know players who:
- were not charmed by the scaling Dynamic Events system
- stated a ghost run is still better than a downed state
- balked at having just five weapon skills when their mouse alone has over a dozen buttons.
My heart’s wish is to mock the members of the first two groups from the high-horse of my fanboi-dom, but what stops me is personal ties to and my respect for some nay-sayers who happen to be my friends. As such, I must treat Tyri-atheism (coining it!) as a real thing that affects otherwise good, capable of thinking-for-themselves players.

To all those afflicted, I say this: You missed out on some of the real magic, but it was not your fault! It happened something like this:

The premise of this article, how I possibly came to know a Higher Truth about Guild Wars 2 and why I am probably right, which is always good.

I, who faithfully keystroked the present wall of text for your consideration, played in TWO beta events (do not strike me down, NDA gods). One of those, in March, I shared with some mere couple of thousands of other players, making it a downright exclusive experience. Both times I played a little more than what I am told is healthy, to lvl 30, including crafting, the Mists and Ascalon Catacombs. Being an insightful fellow by my own (and my mother’s) admission, I sat down, evaluated both experiences side to side and decided on the following: April beta participants were shorthanded on the heroic experience, mostly because of everybody's wild excitement.

First off, let's agree - on that fateful Friday, the doors of Tyria did not open to everyone without some serious banging and even then, they were squeaky. It is to Arena.net’s credit that Saturday and Sunday saw little lag, much smoother connection and very few dropped sessions. With the servers fortified against the unbridled enthusiasm of GW2 fans, it fell to the actual gameplay to deliver - and here, the dynamic events, scaling as they might be, were not all prepared for the army of heroes that washed over them like a tidal wave. You must have felt it too. Everywhere you turned there were players running amok, drinking in the beauty of the world, flinging themselves against every New Event Nearby, demolishing enemies under a fine mist of spell animations and generally putting the wild- and monster-life in the endangered species book.

My experience with the same events was sometimes radically different between betas. They, especially some of the more involved, tougher ones, tend to scale and play perfectly with only a couple of players; your standard party of five or fewer. In fact, where many are solo-able, even if a little challenging, GW2 celebrates you playing with others. There are combo fields, boons, trading places in the line of fire, coming to the rescue of a downed player, and all the while an increase of the challenge the PvE content gives you; those things not only make the combat as dynamic as the events themselves, but they play as a proper heroic experience. The kind of experience you actually read of in your common fare of high-fantasy novels. This same flow of gaming in PvE holds one of the biggest selling points of this MMO and a tremendous achievement for the developer - ANET have taken the triviality of player versus environment everyday grind and imbued it with the potential to create a lasting emotional memory! The same kind that is normally reserved for your end-game, instanced, 20-30-40 man raid.

<insert applause>

Let me explain.

The first time you beat a very hard dynamic event by the skin of your teeth, you will get it. Beat it with few enough helpers that a large piece of the hero-credit-pie falls to you and beat it with enough drama to fill a tense few minutes of exaggerated story telling“... and they were already down, I was the last one standing, dodged three frickin’ one-shots in a row, got the wurm and shadow fiend cds back up, summoned, blinded with Haunt, managed to get Laida up before they died, he dropped a turret, I went shadow form and feared, we got Jrrandell together and then we finished... frickin’ awesome battle!). And you'll get it and want to talk about it too.

In fact, I found myself in a similar situation more than once and fought the desire to announce my fantastic feat of gameplay to the local chat, the world chat, the guild chat... call my mom even! What stops you, or at least should, is the realization that this sort of thing is probably happening to thousands of players in hundreds of events all over the place at the same time. It is not exclusive content. It is just perfectly legendary.

That same feeling of sometimes just wishing to give yourself a pat on the back is built into GW2’s PvP system as well. I have discussed (somewhere on GW2fans as well) how beautiful a gameplay without a “best” build is. It seems to me this is one of the few games, in which you can talk about how the meta will develop and keep a straight face. On one side you have tactical gameplay. Be it in WvW or structured matches, you get to decide where to attack, who with and how to counter what the enemy is doing. On the other hand, the deceptively simple skill-pool of weapon skills, utility and traits is actually quite deep. Not just up to your ankles deep, but more you better be a good swimmer, buddy deep. If you build for dps, you are weak to conditions. Build for conditions and you are weak to a heavy removal/boon build, which in turn should fall to pure dps. Go with a jack of all trades build and it will keep you on your toes and reduce the game to skill and best decisions. If you triumph in GW2 PvP when players get good at the game, then this is something to be genuinely proud of in your gaming career.

Some of the maybe-sayers, including those around me, are worried about what happens when you have experienced it ALL. "Well", I said, "when that moment comes, I will high-five you." Then probably ask for an invite to your personal instance, because it will be a place will be pure gaming magic. Teeth and claw trophies stacked up to the ceiling like your grandparents’ attic (you have strange grandparents, Bookah). NPCs retelling the story of when you saved their kitten from a mutant fire drake. A nice view and some flowers. A troubadour on the corner singing of your greatest heroics. It will be a place that says You Did It! and the antithesis of idling in the capital waiting for the approval of a random "Wow, look at your sword, what drops it?". Something, which is my sincere hope, will be a thing of the past. Other players will just give you that knowing nod. You have all had your own epic adventure and can now breath easy. Until the content upgrade next month.

Guild Wars 2 is a game that offers you a mountain-pile of involved gaming that will take you months to get through, a game that prioritizes your fun over your time (just look at fast crafting queues and instanced nodes!), erects a legend about your character (you know that personal story is only going to scale in epicness!) and then continues on churning content. All the while offering some of the best MMO action-oriented PvP combat. I am guessing it is probably a good game.

Understatement aside, this is what I am trying to say: go play some more Beta, find yourself a little off the beaten path story and experience your heroic moment. It is in there, in the first 20-30 levels of gaming, with less than 15% of the map revealed and hardly even explored. Zergs will die out and Tyria (and Betsy) will still need heroes. So if you are serious about fun and games, trust me on this - Guild Wars 2 is some of the best of both. For I am a cynical bastard who secretly loves to hope, but I don't need to - I saw and played it myself for some 70 hours and I plan to do it again, for a few thousand more.

We're proud to announce the 2nd anniversary of GW2Fans.com next week, on the 18th of May!
To celebrate, we gave our entire website a facelift, as our age was starting to show. We felt a brigther, more modern and above all more functional website was needed to secure a more enjoyable browsing experience on our site.

One of our nifty updates include a brand new shoutbox on our homepage and forum's sidebar on which every registered user can post. This is a great way for our users to have a quick chat with eachother as well as to spread news in just a few clicks.


Overall, we managed to get rid of a lot of bugs that were present on our previous design.
If you would stumble upon any imperfection on the current design, please let me know so I can go ahead and fix it.

This might also be a great opportunity to announce our newest staffmembers: AugustusLongeye, Jrrandell, Kail & Lakvar! With these fantastic 4 added to the team we hope to bring you more custom content and better coverage during the upcoming beta events. Welcome!

We hope you'll all enjoy these updates, we'll make sure these won't be the last you'll see. We have plenty more in store, and are of course always open for suggestions!

Thanks again to every visitor and registered user of our website, we're very glad how you've all stuck with us these past 2 years. We hope to continue to provide a welcoming community for all the Guild Wars 2 Fans out there.


PS. For those interested, we currently attract 4x more visitors than 6 months ago. A sweeet improvement I must add.

It's on Facebook, it's on community sites, it's on blogs and it's on twitter, but if you somehow slept through it all, here's the scoop:

This Monday, from 8PM till about 3AM (GMT+1) into Tuesday, you will get to spend some more quality time in Tyria as part of the second Stress Test open to all those who pre-purchased the game.

If you're located in the Americas, are unemployed or plan on skipping school (as every gw2 fan should do given the circumstances), then that's
As stated by ANET, your beta characters will be there, struggling with abandonment issues. Let's own up to it - you missed them too!

So in closing, I leave you with this: don't even think on skipping this one - your stress added to my stress is what will make our next beta experience better, fix the overflow, raise employment, lower the retiring age and promote world peace. Besides, 7 hours of GW2 is nothing to scoff at and if the last stress test was any indication, it was very playable. I will take that over no GW2 at all.

UPDATE: You can now read a new blogpost by Mike O´Brien on the Guild Wars 2 stress test on the ArenaNet website.

and yes...

We've chosen the European server Underworld as our home for the upcoming Beta Weekend(s). We'll be creating a GW2Fans community guild for anyone to join, just talk to any admin ingame for your invite.

We would also like to remind you the following initiative:

For more information: http://www.gw2fans.com/guild-wars-2-...am-legacy.html

Our TeamSpeak 3 server will be open for public as well, although not that well structured nor guided as Team Legacy's server will be ^^. If you feel like joining, you can connect by entering "gw2fans.com" as address or use the IP 95.211.160.79

The server can hold 500 users and we allow guilds to create their own channels as well. Just PM me if you'd like to have your own channels within our server. We are also willing to give other communities or fansites a place on the server, just get in touch.