Last Week in Guild Wars 2

*links fixed, sorry about that

Every week on Friday, GuildMag.com rounds up all the community articles into one big post on their site. Here on my site I like to pick out my favourite articles of the week to share with you and add in a couple of my own links. This week this post is coming late due to my internet outage, thus, I call it Last Week in Guild Wars 2. There are some great articles this week which I have linked below.

I got a virtual "high five" from Raphia at GuildMag for this series of posts.

I like the co-operative nature of this process: I do the rough-hewing by gathering everything I can, and Phil selects the ones he likes the best and polishes them. It's like teamwork without needing to be on a team.

I am glad Raphia feels that way, as I too enjoy the process of going through the post on GuildMag every week and pulling out my favourites and giving you guys a brief on those articles. Raphia does a great job pulling the community together and deserves tons of respect for the work he does. I find out about all kinds of new sites and news through this weekly post. It is an invaluable resource in the community that everyone should be checking out!

ZAM.com and MMORPG.com Interview with Colin Johanson

There were two interviews with Colin Johanson. The first was done by Jarimor, aka Scott Hawkes, was posted to his site ZAM.com. In part one of the interview they discuss guesting, raiding, party size, boss mechanics, personal story, to name the major topics. In part two, they mainly discuss PvP and WvW, but there are some other gems hidden in there as well.

I already mentioned MMORPG.com's interview with Colin Johanson here before. It is a good interview and you should check it out if you haven't already. In the video a bunch of other MMO news is covered and Colin is present the entire time giving his feedback. It was cool to see him outside the GW2 world. The GW2 stuff starts at 18:00 into the video. Dulfy has a transcript up here. In this video Colin talks about improvements coming to WvW with respect to the culling (more about that below), balance issues, WvW progression, the new laurel system, guesting, changes to Orr, and some player Q&A.

Upcoming GW2Guru State of the Game

Also, while we are on the topic of interviews, GW2Guru has announced that the third edition of their monthly State of the Game stream will be on February 7th, 2013 @ noon PST. Attending will be some competitive players as well as Arena Net developers Jonathan Sharp and Jon Peters. The show will be streamed live on twitch.tv. For all the details check the GW2Guru page.

Habib Loew on WvW Culling

The WvW developer, Habib Loew, took to the forums to explain the upcoming changes, in the Jan 28th patch, to the culling system. The post is detailed but can be summed up quickly. Firstly, the engine will start using "fallback models." Essentially, these fallback models are less detailed version of the player models currently used. Habib says, "there is a distinct fallback model for each race/gender/armor-class combination". Loading this fallback model will mainly help lower end machines. This should help fix some of the problems. 

Also, they will be switching back to the December culling trial. What this means is that enemies and allies will be "culled" separately  Currently, for example, you see the nearest 20 players to you. That means if there are a large number of allies near you, and a group of enemies comes into range, you may not see the enemies at all because your allies are using all the culling slots. With this change, that was tested in December, the game will be sure to load a minimum of the nearest enemies too you as well as the nearest allies. This distinction should help some of the silliness currently seen in large WvW fights. Check out Habib's post for more details.

ArenaNet SoundCloud Page

Regina Buenaobra posted on the forums a link to Arena Net's SoundCloud page. It has archived music from the holiday events and some outtakes. My favourite bit was the little "undead hunter" jingle in the outtakes. If you are really into the music of GW2 or up for a couple laughs then you should definitely check this page out.

GW2 Hub Crafting Guides

Crafting has never been my favourite thing to do in any MMO. I do not like fiddling around with all the ingredients and figuring out what I need to level up. I particularly do not like thinking that I have wasted silver. That is why I usually look for a guide to help me make the choices that I do not find fun. GW2 Hub has recently posted articles just like this for five of the crafting disciplines, with more to come I am sure. For now they have weapon smith, huntsman, jeweler, artificer, and chef. The guides are simple and straight forward guiding you through levels 1 to 400. I particularly like that they show you what you can expect it to cost and what you can expect to recoup through sales through the levelling process.

On another note, crafting guides like these are a great thing to look at for items to flip for potential profits. Typically a crafter will "buy now" and "sell now" just to get the crafting and levelling done. Watch the markets around the items mentioned in these guides and look for opportunities.

Inventory Full on Alts and GW2

Bhagpuss at Inventory Full has an article discussing his experiences levelling up alts in Guild Wars 2. This article is my favourite this week as it touches on something I have been feeling lately too. Bhagpuss has just got his fifth character to 80 and discusses why he is moving on to his sixth right away. These are similar thoughts that went through my head when I got my Elementalist to 80 just recently. Although I geared the toon up (with yellows) and ran some dungeons, I have already pushed the character to the side and moved on to a Mesmer. Personally, I have a more optimistic view of the future, but it is interesting reading someone else's take on the game.

Black Lions Profit 10 markets in 10 days

In a similar vein to Markco at Guild Wars 2 Trading Post, Black Lions Profit has started a series of X markets in X days. Black Lion has decided to tackle 10 markets, and is already up to market nine as of the writing of this article. These series are a great way of highlighting markets with potential for flipping and bringing a readers attention to markets they may not have thought of before. I have also thought about doing a series like this, but guys like Black Lion and Markco have this down so I will focus more on ways to make silver while playing the game, like my series on converting skill points to silver.

GuildCast Episode 58

Gary is back this week for an extra long two hour GuildCast over on Gamebreaker. I try to catch this every week as it is a fun review of the weeks Guild Wars 2 news and events. If you haven't been watching this show I highly recommend it. Gary, the shows host, loves to speculate on everything Guild Wars and always keeps the show entertaining.

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I hope you have found something hear that you haven't seen yet. Don't forget to head over to GuildMag.com  for the full list of community articles this week.