Nuggetty Goodness

I don't play Guild Wars for any sort of social interaction. If any social interaction happens, it's completely incidental. I play Guild Wars because single-player RPGs are very hard to find on the PC nowadays, and the funny part is that even taken as a purely single-player RPG, Guild Wars (starting with Nightfall) is still better than 99% of single-player RPGs made in the past ten years. I'm still debating if that's because Guild Wars is so good, or because other RPGs made suck just that much.

That said, the Companion system (as it was proposed) was going to have little impact on grouping. They don't take party slots, so they don't discourage it. The removal does, however, negatively impact soloing in its complexity. For all the focus on how easy soloing will be in GW2, someone seems to have forgotten how *fun* it should be. I've played the "one character spams attack skills on one monster until someone falls down" game in MMOs before many times. If you've leveled up in one MMO, you've done it on all of them, and there's only so much you can do to that formula to make it interesting for any extended period of time. AI Companions would have been a big change in keeping things interesting and adding that extra level of tactical choice in combats.

It sounds like they're removing everything that made the Guild Wars series special and replacing it with flashy things that won't matter in the long run. Seriously, no one is going to care about environmental weapons two weeks in the game. Either that, or they'll over-use it like Blizz did with vehicles and annoy everyone with it.

Neatly sums up my impressions so far.

Oh yes it's very beautiful. Is that enough?

Sacred 2 was very beautiful. -_- And it was also a crappy game that utterly failed to live up to its predecessor. Oh wells. Cross the juicy chicken fingers I guess.

Cluebot: If they’re not willing to group with you and help you take advantage of Recruit a Friend to get you to max level so you can play with them… well, they’re not really a fgood riend, understand? They’re just people you know that said, “Hey, why not pick up the game and join us, it’ll be cool dude.” No, this is more about you wanting to get yourself to max level so you will be worthy of joining them in what they’re doing. Friends are usually at least a teensy bit interested in spending time with you, no matter the level, especially if it’ll help you get to play with them and their max level characters faster. 

Ah baar, you are so wise. And yet, you forget, environments change people. :( The Stanford Prison Experiment isn't just a university experiment.

"One of the primary reasons I stopped playing was that I felt like so much of what made raiding interesting and fun was that elite end of the game where you have access to content that only a few people every get to see," Doug Thomas, Associate Professor at USC and co-author of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, said. "Systematically, I felt what Blizzard has done is taken their high-end game content and made it increasingly accessible to larger group of players."

"Even if you couldn't get the high-end Epics, you could get something that was pretty much equivalent through token systems. That kind of thing kind of eroded one of the core dynamics about what was fun about the game for me."

Translation: There are always more people who would rather wave their peens in other people's faces, rather than get better at using those peens privately.

Thus, if you remove the option to have the rarest, biggest, purplest pixellated peen, those peeners would then rather quit than continue.

...what do you mean the sex is the fun part?

This is so incredibly, awesomely cute. Also, all the people look like penises. XD

Defence is not 1:1 with damage - it's 1:1 with ATTACK.

That means that if your opponent has 2000 atk and 3000 bonus damage (5k total), and you have 900 def, the base damage will be 4100 AND THEN masteries/resistances/wrath will apply.
And that means that , in your example, the damage recieved with 900 defence and 500 resistance would actually be 2050, not 1400.
But let's not forget that there are tons of variables. For example: how exactly does resistance work? Does it subtract from the opponent's mastery or from the damage output? And thus, if the opponent has 0 mastery, does that mean that 500 resistance will reduce damage by 50% or will it not have ANY effect at all.

Bottomline: Defence would be a good stat to gem-soccet/refine/id IF solarflares and ragefires, bonuses, base stats etc offered the 2 stats in a 1:1 ratio, or at least close (like with acc-eva) but since both atk and defence effects are buchered down a lot by wrath, and since def is very low compaired to atk+bonus dmg to begin with... It's not really worth it in PVP.
But in PVE there is no wrath effects. Moreover, instead of 1-2 players hitting for much there are many mobs hitting for little, so defence's effect is multiplied. Thus, it's an excelent PVE stat.

Because this makes perfect sense, tallies with my own experience, and I'm sick of people spouting stuff that they obviously don't understand, with an utter disregard for context.

For some reason, this seems to me totally like a scene out of an MMO or adventure game. O.o

Though cute in concept and execution, I can't help but wonder what the point of this site is.

Just to get FB posts/likes and Tweets? How does that help anyone?

Mebbe I just don't grok social media at all, because it all seems awfully pointless to me.

Don't get me wrong - if my KPI is to get more social shit like Tweets and FB posts/likes, I will quite happily orchestrate it (or attempt to) by gaming the system - as gamers love to do. But at the end of the day, I don't see the point (well KPIs aside).

These 'give a shits' aren't even bound to any charities or donations that I can tell. It's not as if you have to donate at least 10 cents before you can be said to give a shit about something.

It just looks like yet another social media wankfest.

I mean, if they at least bound it to donations of time (volunteerism) or easier (money), however small... then sure, there's a point.

But right now, this site exemplarises the 'Yay! Click this and feel like you did something when you did nothing' mentality.

For my daily fix of that, I'd rather play a rat pellet MMO, thanks.