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At Saturday noon the big Winter Party event started. It took place at netpama, an internet cafe in Brighton, and NCsoft had rented the whole thing for the whole day so we had three floors filled with computers for our pleasure. My assumption is that there had been around 50 people or so, mostly winners of the contest plus some other guests like European fanwebsite admins.
What most people did was to go in there, grab a chair, log in and play Guild Wars. Whole day. To be honest I had not been too happy about the fact it went like it went because there is not much sense in spending several hundreds of bucks and travelling several hundreds of kilometers just to go into an internet cafe and play the same game you play all day at home. I tried not to stay all time in front of the computer but to walk around and find somebody to chat with. Once in a while I managed to get into some very nice conversations with NCsoft employees and even some very friendly Guild Wars fans (hello GuildCast!) but most regular attendees had been too busy with playing Guild Wars to start a decent conversation. Geeks. Like totally.
Concerning special activities: the present PvP fans spend most of their time with playing a sealed deck tournament, organized by Alex Weeks. At the end of the day with PvP ala "in Sealed Deck you mostly play with a skill bar full of crap" (quote by Izzy) that tournament was won by the guys and gals of Black Emperor, or better to say "the competition was annihilated by them". Which is no wonder since they are one of the best German PvP guilds and somehow got some special invite to the event. On the PvE part NCsoft tried to organize some "3 high level Nightfall missions time attack tournament" which even might have eventually been some test for the so called "hard mode" there had been rumors flying around in the official game update notes at the whole "Protector of Continent" vs "Chaplain of Continent" thingie. Unfortunately among the 16 players taking part in that tournament (4 teams with 4 players each) several didn't have Nightfall and didn't have played very long and so at the end we played a "3 mid level Prophecies missions time attack tournament on normal difficulty". The choosen missions had been Nolany Academy, D'Alessio Seaboard and The Wilds and Kronos, hexe and me had been in one of the competing teams. Our fourth player had been a level 18 W/E from Italy who started playing Guild Wars Prophecies two months ago. He had been the guest of an contest winner who then was not able to come himself at the end. Wicked story but didn't matter, he had been a very friendly guy who used "Sprint" (yay!) and "Fireball" (d'oh!) a lot. Didn't matter, we had awesome fun, ran the missions in decent times, made Mr Italian Stallion wonder a bit ("didn't thought you can play that mission that fast") and at the end of the day our team had the smallest sum of mission times. Yippieh, four Nightfall collector's editions in different languages had been ours! In addition to that we got four of that rare blue Guild Wars t-shirts plus four black Nightfall baseball caps. Great loot I'd say.
After the intended Dodgeball PvP tournament got canceled due to technical difficulties the event proceeded to the raffle of 1 of only 15 ever made, oh-so-wanted Guild Wars branded iPod Nanos. Some English guy got very lucky that day. Afterwards there had been some "official" Q&A with the special quest of the event: Izzy, the big skill balance guy of Guild Wars. He came from Seattle over to England for the weekend and had been hanging around all day at the event, being asked questions by the PvP nerds for the whole day. Anyway, time to get it a bit "official" and so we had been standing there and asked stuff. "no questions about Chapter 4, hair dressers or auction houses" was the warning given by Alex Weeks beforehand which caused some serious laughter among the crowd. Anyway, the PvP horde again began to ask questions and based on the fact that most of them speak in abbrevations and acronyms and based on the fact that I am not that much of a PvP player I fear I didn't understand half of what was spoken. What I did catch was that they (ArenaNet) want to change the "Victory or Death" scenario in guild vs guild battles. They already changed a lot of details like pathing of the NPCs but they do not want to remove it or alter it completely because all in all they consider it the right measure to avoid endless guild battle matches (...and if I did misunderstood that, too, I hereby accept public humiliation by Alex Weeks himself). If Izzy would not have been at the Winterparty they would have enabled those details already that weekend but he wants to observe it very closely when it goes online so it will come the next weeks. Personally Izzy prefers 8 vs 8 gameplay and he balances the game according to 8 vs 8 gameplay but he can even see the arguments for smaller party sizes. According to him he starts looking into things when the players start telling him about imbalanced and broken skills or things and "...they are quite good at that". Laughter that caused. Huge whinefests everybody remembered. Funny guy Izzy is.
After quite some time he noticed the large amount of PvP questions and he suggested that there should be some PvE questions being asked, too. I couldn't resist and ask "do you know where Gwen is?" and he firmly answered "yes". Despite my question being completely answered already he added that ArenaNet got some skilled story writers and that he is sure that they will find some interesting outcome for that issue. Another question was about Favor of the Gods and access to areas like Underworld and Fissure of Woe. Izzy confirmed that they are not completely happy with the current situation but didn't yet find a good solution where that access is neither too difficult nor too easy - they want those areas to remain something special. When asked about guild storage he gave a very lengthy and detailed explanation why it was announced but still isn't implemented yet: mostly it has something to do with data size, data storage, data flow and the truly global game system of Guild Wars. According to him it is about math and mass of data and they tried out a lot but whenever they thought they got it something else broke. That whole issue of guild storage turned out way more difficult than expected and would take a huge amount of time to do it. At the moment they invest that time on other things on the "to be improved" list and wait till somebody has the big genius idea how it can be done the absolute perfect way without breaking anything else. Basically it is the same for e.x. improvements of the friends list and it was the same for the famous reconnect feature: that one didn't come for a long time because it caused serious headaches concerning cheating and dupeing but at some point it made 'click' in the head of some clever guy and they finally got it done. Last but not least some miscellaneous infos: hero pet naming probably not, hero pet changing maybe yes, China got Guild Wars by now but they play on a completely different system separated from the rest of the Guild Wars world.
Outside of that Q&A we got some other info from some undisclosed but trustworthy source: yes, ArenaNet and/or NCsoft do have people that hunt, observe and ban bots on a daily basis. It's just that they do not tell anybody about the outcome. The community might get the impression that nothing is done because new bot accounts come as fast as existing ones are banned, mostly because the whole "gold farming, gold selling" business is so lucrative for the gold traders. Everybody can find out what Guild Wars gold is worth in reallife cash on the black market and can do the math afterwards: there is some "breakeven of costs" and it seems that one single bot account is "alive" long enough to reach that breakeven so the farmers simply buy a new account as soon as the existing one is banned. Sad reality of online gaming. But to be honest I can sleep a little bit better after I personally heared that from somebody who should know.
Finally a hint for all German Guild Wars fans: Kronos, the lead admin of www.guild-wars.info, and AmunRa, the lead admin of www.wartower.de, the two German elite Guild Wars fansites, did receive huge bunches of those special numbered and limited Guild Wars winter greeting cards and I simply can not imagine that they keep them all for themselves! Have a look at both websites every once a while to catch one of those 1000 very special cards signed by plenty ArenaNet employees. Noteworthy info is that those two persons come along well with each other, despite their fansite communities being quite harsh to each other sometimes. People, just have a look at the picture, two happily smiling men they are, can't you just be like them?!
At about 10:00 pm the event ended and most people proceeded to the next activity of the day...
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