James Phinney on Guild Wars 2. [via]
“(With Guild Wars) we made a choice to not build a game around time-sinks and inconvenience … we wanted the sequel to stay true to this tradition.”

Elitist girls.
As previously noted, avatar gender is no indicator of player gender. This isn’t about elitist female players; this is about elitist players. Some commenters make a good point when they note players who dictate builds are simply being cautious and pragmatic. But the flipside of that is some unimaginative players do not seem capable of appreciating there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Van Hemlock vs. Shiro.
“It was as if the Level Design Team had waited until the QA Team had gone home one night, and then rummaged around in the ‘Don’t Be Stupid!’ bin for all the crumpled up monster abilities that had been rejected for being ridiculously overpowered, unfair and unbalanced, dug them all out, and given them all to Shiro!” Been there, felt that.

50,000,000 XP.
WTF or FTW? You decide.

Cliches and tropes.
I don’t mind the cliches and tropes so much as the numerous pop culture callouts. I sometimes wonder if players are going to remember the writing in Guild Wars primarily for its references to series, movies, singers and other games.

Mini Mania Contest.
There seems to be a typo in the announcement. They obviously meant “Go to hell, rest of the world” when they wrote “North American players, rejoice!”

All-Mesmer team clears FoW.
I’ve got to join one of these all-Mesmer events.

Xfire user stats show decline in MMOGing.
“Guild Wars showing a 13 per cent drop … One of the likely main reasons for the drop is the end of the summer holidays for schools and colleges across Europe and the US.”