Guild Wars: Hmm...

Okay, just check out Clamatius's place because he's apparently installed electronic listening devices inside the ArenaNet offices. He's got the goods on the latest reports from the Community Day from the always excellent Billiard (Some interesting stuff. Especially the news that by the way developers measure things, the game is growing. I'm a bit wary of any such internal crowing unless I see some actual numbers. But amidst the doom and gloom and talk of the candle flickering in the past few days, it's important to recognize that this game is still a success and on very good footing. All I'm trying to say is it could be even better still and I hope that's not too presumptuous of me. Though, as Clamatius says, nothing that's exactly going to rock your world.).

And he was quick to point out that the latest skill update hit a little early. I'm going to take a pass on talking about it because, you know, I'm on a break and all – logged in a bit earlier to get the update out of the way (Because, you know, those thirty seconds of files loading and decompressing is just too much to bear when I want to play. I'm serious.) but it's mostly the tweaks from last week with a little bit of number tweaking and some surprises thrown in – like the out-of-nowhere rebalance to the almighty Gale. I'm sorry but until the make it read “Target foe is knocked down for 1/4 seconds. You will disconnect after 30 seconds and your .dat file will be corrupted. Chance of failure: 90% with Air Magic 16 or less. This skill causes exhaustion and genital warts. Surgeon General's Warning: Pregnant women and children should not use Gale.” it's still the best skill you ever put in the game and I will continue to treat it as such.

I'm going to bang the old drum here and say, nice and all but it would have been nice to see these changes in advance. Sure, you can have some last minute tweaks and all but letting everyone know a week or a day in advance what's in the pipeline gives everyone more time to think about the changes and how they'll interact and you'll likely get better feedback when they actually go live. And that list is still huge. Now, before I play tonight I'm either going to have to pour over all the changes to see what might bite me (Ah, you say what happened to Shield of Absorption? Shame, I was just learning to like it.) or just head in game and be clueless. I was, you know, expecting this tomorrow, not today. And, of course, the game exists solely for my own benefit so I'm rather put out by this lack of common courtesy on the part of the developers.

And, of course, there's the news the automated tournaments aren't going to be around for another two months, at the earliest, and we're in for another silly season. First, just....le sigh. Second, a silly season sounds good and that it'll be a Swiss Tourney thing (just look further down in that thread Clamatius links to. Gaile's got more to say than just an announcement.) sounds promising. Along with the feedback from the community day, it sounds like they're going to be doing more with prizes than the Wintergreen folly of last season. Which, you know, good. If there's one thing PvP needs it's more things like what came out of the Snowball Fights – tangible PvE rewards for PvPing. I don't know about the rest of you but those 300 wins I did got me a fat stash of candy cane shards that I'm slowly but surely turning into real profit (One word: presents. Though I'm not doing much at the moment as I'm waiting a few months for the market to really mature.). That's the sort of thing that rewards someone like me who likes to do both and can even draw in people who might not PvP otherwise. It doesn't have to be something imbalancing, it just has to be something tangible so that just like time spent getting unlocks helps you in PvP, time spent PvPing isn't costing you what you'd get for spending the equivalent in PvE. It's, you know, as simple as prestige things like the championship trophies and cape skins – just a lot easier to get. If players could unlock, say, better armor skins for their PvP characters or fancy gadgets at their guild halls, say, by spending faction that wouldn't be a big carrot?