I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.

• Norn Week Begins — The first post to kick off “Norn Week” on the ArenaNet blog.
• Player reactions to the Dervish update in Guild Wars. I’ve certainly noticed a lot more Dervishes around in-game this week, especially in PvP areas.
• Next post on the Norn: Legend and Legacy. The voices of the Norn, with some insight into why they act the way they do. (I find the samples to be a bit too modern, but perhaps that’s just my personal preference.)
• Norn Week post 3: Go Big or Go Home. The sheer scale of the Norn and their works.
• Eurogamer speculates on Mesmers and Assassins in Guild Wars 2. My own take: Mesmers are explicitly mentioned in the 2nd Guild Wars 2 novel, so they’re in. Assassins are not mentioned, but one of the key characters in the novel has a set of skills that seem remarkably similar to GW assassins.
• A player’s response to the GW Dervish updates and how they’ve changed the playing experience.
• Norn Week: Designing and Redesigning Events.
• ArenaNet’s plans for PAX East, including a new demo featuring the Norn starting area.
• Updates and additions to the official web site’s Norn page.
• Views to admire: Relics of Orr posts the list of must-see places in Guild Wars.
• Norn Week: A Spirit of Legend

I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.

• GuildMag has an article on the revelations from the military forces of Kryta post last week.
• Closed Alpha and Beta for 2011: More information/speculation about the recently announced closed alpha and closed beta programs for later this year.
• Rounding up “Humanity Week”: Rubi rounds up last week’s information from ArenaNet on humans.
• An ode to love in Tyria.
• Inside the Quality Assurance group at ArenaNet.
• Rumour of a GW2 team working on “console” development. Expect this to be quashed by ArenaNet soon: UI changes between PC and various consoles alone would make this a very difficult addition to their existing plans. (Later: Regina Buenaobra had apparently already posted this message to dispel these rumours: “I just want to reiterate that the development team is fully focused on making GW2 the best PC MMO ever released. We have a very small team exploring the possibility of console, but there are no definite plans for a console version at this time. The core of Guild Wars 2 development is fully focused on delivering a fantastic PC MMORPG experience.”)
• The promised Guild Wars Dervish update has been released. This is, as promised, a major revision to many Dervish skills. I expect to have to rebuild all my Derv’s builds, eventually. It’ll take a while to absorb the scale of all the changes.
• Developer notes on the Dervish update.
• If you liked “Humanity Week”, you’ll probably be very happy to hear that next week is going to be “Norn Week“

I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. It just occurred to me that some of my blog audience might also be interested:

• Last Saturday, the official Guild Wars 2 Twitter account posted this teaser:
  “Next week, we’re taking a closer look at the human race in #GuildWars2 ! Keep an eye on the blog and GuildWars2.com! Happy weekend everyone!”
• http://bloogum.net/guildwars/ If you like looking at the great scenery in Guild Wars, this site is for you. It’s a huge gallery of screen shots of places in GW . . . over 6000 of them.
• Kill Ten Rats speculates that the new GW2 demo for PAX East may herald a wider (dare we say “open”?) availability.
• http://www.guildmag.com/plotting-more-than-depth Speculation on the upcoming Winds of Change content in Cantha: “if we go back to the same thing too many times, we’re going to end up with Mursaat being the equivalent of Daleks, only without the goofy and endearing qualities.”
• http://www.arena.net/blog/oh-the-humanity-human-week-begins Start of a week of posts on the Arenanet blog about humans in GW2.
• Are long-running events a good thing or a bad thing?
• Against the Wall: Humanity in Guild Wars 2
• Designing Humans The next post in Humanity Week is about the graphics (comparing humans in GW with their descendants in GW2).
• Responses to some of the questions generated by the voices of GW2 clips.
• Canthan New Year – the best bits Looking back on Canthan New Year.
• Updated info on Humans at the GW2 official site. My dogs “sang along” with the music on the Kryta video clip. (HD version of the clip here)
• Details of the GW update for the Dervish. It’s pretty significant: 90% of Dervish skills have been updated or changed.
• The Line of Duty What should be the final “Humanity Week” posting: the Three Military Orders of Kryta.
• I’ve also seen multiple references to a November 2011 release date. No confirmation of that from Arenanet, of course. (Also, the Guild Wars 2 FAQ has been updated with this little snippet: ‘We will be conducting small closed alpha and beta tests in 2011.’ )

I’ve only played Guild Wars, so it was a huge surprise to me to hear that other MMORPGs had a lot of problems with getting players to co-operate. From this article, it’s clear that Guild Wars 2 will have the same useful mechanism to encourage co-operative play:

In Guild Wars 2 we’re fully committed to the concept of rewarding players individually. This is more or less a quick way of saying that we don’t want to design a system where players argue over loot settings, turn to external “out of game” systems to decide who gets what upon downing a boss, or risk spending hours in a dungeon with nothing to show for it due to bad rolls or a ninja looter that hijacked all their treasure.

In the case of distributing general monster loot or opening dungeon end-chests, this principle means that each player gets their own roll, so it’s alright if you are soloing and someone begins fighting alongside you. This won’t cause the loot you would receive to degrade in any way, as long as you actively participate in that combat. Likewise, when you get to the end of that big dungeon with your group, you each get to individually open the chest and receive your own personal reward.

In the case of gathering materials from things like ore nodes, plants, and the like, this means that when you gather from that resource you use it up for yourself, but not for others. In Guild Wars 2 there is no need to race to beat other people to the same resource node. Take your time ripping that bear’s head off, because no one can walk up and steal that copper node in the back of its cave from you. You may be helping others in your world reach that copper safely, but rest assured that you’re not just clearing a path for a node ganker.

I could go on and on with the examples of how we employ this philosophy, but really what I’m getting at is that our overall goal is for players in your world to be seen as a boon to you to help you overcome bigger challenges and larger foes, and therefore earn greater spoils for your time spent in the game. We’d much rather that everyone in the same world felt a common bond in their shared land and saw each other as potential allies. If players find themselves with leftover aggression that they would normally take out on node gankers or ninja looters, we’d recommend they step into World vs. World and kick themselves some otherworldly player butt.

Arenanet had the first live demo of Guild Wars 2 at the Gamescom event in Germany this weekend. Rubi Beyer couldn’t attend, but still feels that she’s getting plenty of information about the upcoming release:

I did not go to Gamescom. I was kind of not anticipating last week at all, because I envisioned it as a week of me looking at all the wonderful things I couldn’t have, much like a starving orphan outside a bakery (or maybe a homeless orphan in some player’s home instance). I figured it would be very un-fun.

In fact, the opposite was true. Sure, I couldn’t play hands-on, but I enjoyed all the Guild Wars 2 news flooding out of Gamescom just the same. I imagine being there would have made it impossible to take in all of these details from every direction — it just would have been too overwhelming.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not sour grapes. I would have loved to be there! But since I couldn’t, I’m really enjoying my bird’s-eye view, so to speak. Even from this point of view, the amount of new information we have is nearly impossible to keep track of, so for Flameseeker Chronicles this week, I thought I’d take all that we’ve heard this week and try to distill it into a guide on where you can find information.

It’s felt a bit like trying to take an octopus and 15 of his closest friends and convince them all to fit comfortably in one small sandwich baggie, but I’ve done my best. Follow along after the jump to see where you can find the latest and greatest from Guild Wars 2 at Gamescom.