Hunter's Insight – A Guild Wars 2 Blog

The Doctor Nick

At one point in Aika, I had gotten a little sick of the absolute silence. Very rarely did I see anyone talking casually, and my own attempts were completely ignored. This happens often enough in online games that I tend to go crazy from solitude, and this being far from the first time I’ve encountered the problem I’ve developed a technique for dealing with it.

Make a complete ass out of myself and talk to every person I come across. Inspired originally by Dr Riviera on The Simpsons, this is my opening tactic for provoking conversation. “Hi Everybody!”

I don’t think you’d be surprised how many people completely ignore this. So I inquired about people’s Prans. I asked about where they got the name for their Pran, why their Pran name was so boring as to be the same name (what is the point?) as their character, what quests they were on, polite questions or juvenile comments, I tried it all.

Aika is a bit of a tough nut to crack. Out of the 8 or so quest groups I joined to knock off some of the bigger grinds, I think 2 actually had someone reply to my questions or greetings. Normally in any game, if you get invited to a party to complete a quest, they’ll say something to you. Not Aika.

What I find works is taking the time to say someones name. If you stop and actually call out “Hi legolas!”, about half the people you speak to will take the time to say hi back. Unfortunately, that’s all they’ll say.

Kooky, goofy, dumb jokes can sometimes provoke a response, usually my next step. I didn’t get that far. Finding no footing to get a conversation going, and discovering nothing but mindless automatons wandering around, I gave up on all attempts to communicate with others.

That is until I actually needed to talk to someone.

I couldn’t find a boss. I’d been told to kill a boss, I had no other quests, I’d searched the entire area but had never seen him. The quest giver gives fairly bad directions to his location. I asked people at the quest hub. For about 20 minutes. Then I gave up.

Five minutes later, while I was watching tv, I heard combat and checked my surroundings. Someone had run into the quest hub trailing 5 Kubari and looked as though they were about to die. I peeled off two, together we killed them all, and then stunningly without provocation I read “Thank You”. Pouncing on the opportunity to speak to someone I immediately asked where to find Guantanimo, or whatever his name was.

I had a short conversation with someone. And people say MMO’s don’t have any challenge in them any more.

Combat Baby

Getting to level 20 in Aika is a bit of a job. The best way to do it, it looks like, is to grind out this repeatable quest for lizards or goblin like creatures. I would have to kill around 100-140 of these guys. Much preferable to the slightly higher level bud-worm type creatures, which I’d have to kill around 300 of.

I already went back to the repeatable quest and did it twice, and just couldn’t bear it. I logged out immediately afterward.

It’s not so much having to grind all the way to 20, that’s part of it, but the combat system is very irritating. I’ve got access to 7 or 8 skills at this point, and in general you can strategically use them together. For instance, on my Warlock, start with the Mana Shield for protection, hit a target with Hellfire, which stuns for about 3 seconds. Hit them with lightning orb, which slows them for 4 seconds, then throw the DOT on them Enervate, and by the time they make it to your position, depending on how far away they were when you attacked them, they should be mostly dead. Finish them off with Fireball, and you’re done. Aggro more than one mob, throw Polymorph on one and it’ll be a rabbit for the next 22 seconds.

Pretty simple and straight forward. Almost boring actually. No, come to think of it, very boring. That’s not even what I find boring though. Because you can do all that, if you want, but, all you really need to do is Fireball.

Hit Fireball, and it will automatically fire each time it is ready. It is always ready. Start far enough away and Fireball will have your mob nearly as dead as if you had used all the strategy as above. At the rate you regain mana and health, even if you take another couple hits, the difference is minor.

The result is, I click on a mob, hit my 1 button once, and stand there until the mob is dead.

I’m only level 19, and haven’t really got a chance to use some of the upper level skills, so I’m no doubt being slightly unfair. There are another 10 skills I’ve never had access to. They look like AoE’s and multiple target spells, more powerful versions of the skills you start with. Nothing particularly innovative.

Their skill system does have a saving grace. You can also reset your skills for a fee. 10k gold at my level, affordable. Not all games do that. Runes of Magic will charge you real live money for the privilege, if you can’t figure out a way to do it with gold anyway.

My goal of actually getting to 20 may not be completed. At this point I’m just not seeing a reason.

Getting TAikanical

You just don’t know how hard it is to use Aika in a pun! It’s hard! I’m doing the best I can! I did my best! *tears* I did my best!

I’m getting pretty close to dropping Aika. At level 19 I’ve run out of quests again. My own fault, truly. Skipping those dungeons because I got cold feet about joining PUG’s may have saved me a whole lot of aggravation, but getting stuck without enough experience to level twice now has really soured me on the game. That’s not the whole reason but I’ll post about that later.

Getting to some of my technical quibbles, I can’t add friends unless they’re online. This is a problem in many games I find, and jesus does it ever annoy the shit out of me. I’m not talking just MMO’s, but in what universe is this helpful to anyone? You should be able to add people any time. Basic.

I also never really figured out to join and play with my friend on another Nation. Honestly if you’re going to have everyone playing on the same server A La Guild Wars, but seperate them by districts or nations, then you should allow them to group up despite faction differences. There’s an NPC that allows you to travel to allied nations, but my nation has no allies at the moment, and I haven’t had the chance to try it.

I ran out of room in my Blocked list twice. Each time I log in I have to block about 5 or 6 people. When it’s full, you scroll back, unblock the ones at the top of the list, since the newest are at the bottom. When I do this though, I have to unblock about 10 people. Why? Because they still haven’t banned the people at the top of the list! They’re still there spamming! So I’ll unblock someone only to block them 30 seconds later. Great. At least you can block around 50 people.

Kudos to them on one technical aspect though. After logging in, and entering my password or whatnot, at my character selection screen I am again asked to add my 4 digit number code. It’s on a number pad that I have to use my mouse for. Another layer of security in an MMORPG is becoming an absolute must. I wish more games had something like this, and I believe Runes of Magic had a secondary password as well, although I can’t remember how often I had to use it. Guild Wars recently added a security feature where you have to name at least one of your characters at the log in screen. Another good reason to pick simple names and not XXXX133t5auceXXXX.

I like the variety of chat options, general chat that can only be heard nearby, world chat, alliance chat, nation chat, guild chat, party chat. The best chat in a game I ever played let you make your own chat rooms in addition to private messages, public chat, and the pvp faction chat of whatever side you were on. I could be in 10 chat rooms, talking with various groups of friends at the same time.

Oh, and I bought a new dress for Cringer, Tight Khaki Mini-skirt. In the description it says “Tight mini-skirt that will add hotness”.

I figure I’ve got about one or two play sessions left before I give up. Maybe I’ll make it to level 20, maybe I won’t, I’m definitely not going to try to get Cringer to level 20, she’s almost level 9, which would mean I’d have to level to about 45 to get her to her Teen phase. I just wish I had some meaningless quests to keep me busy. Even the worst games usually have that.