Guild Wars 2: One week and 80 levels later *SPOILERS*

Grimclaw the Slayer - it's nice when characer names can contain spaces

So I've hit the level cap on Saturday, one week after headstart launch. Could have done it about two days earlier if it wasn't for my hardware problems, but now that that's finally fixed... well, yay.

I'm sure you're expecting a certain amount of bitching on my end now, since that's what I usually do. And don't worry - we'll get to that. For the most part, though, completing the storyline has been fucking epic and proved to be an experience unlike any other recent MMO. Considering I didn't really wanna touch any other games of this kind again, that's probably saying quite a mouthful. More importantly, I'm still highly motivated to keep on playing, earn those extra sexy pieces of armor I want and help friends and family through their individual story.

Despite all my praise, it has been a bit of a bumpy ride. Once I got to the level 50 areas, many public events would glitch out one way or another. The vital NPCs for escort missions would sit around and refuse to move. A monster would glitch out during a defense event and become invulnerable, making it impossible to finish the event. During other events, the attacking monsters would simply refuse to spawn or they'd spawn an infinite amount of times, but the progress bar would refuse to move. That said, even with the many broken and glitched events I have encountered on my way to the level cap, the level curve never felt too steep, so making progress was never too frustrating or tedious and with whole event chains going on everyhwere around me, having a few broken ones was annoying, but hardly ever game-breaking.

Hardly? Well, unfortunately a glitch in my story quest prevented me from progressing through that particular part of the game for two days, until Arenanet fixed the problem. These things can happen, especially just a few days after launch, but it's never really fun when you're on the receiving end of that crap. Friends of mine, who play on different servers, have reported little to no broken events, so it seems that stuff can break down locally and simply lacks some kind of a fail-safe, i.e. an event reset if nothing happens for a given amount of time. Most of these issues will probably be history in the near future.

Fighting my way through the final dungeon

The story itself is entertaining, but not as dramatic or moving as SW:ToR, let alone singleplayer titles like Mass Effect (I know ME3 has added multiplayer, fuck off). When the game told me that one of my former warband buddies had fallen, I didn't even know who they were talking about in that cutscene. Turned out it was some guy you briefly run into during the tutorial. Eventually, you get to fight a zombie version of him, which doesn't feel particularly shocking or horrible in any way. Later on you end up losing so many soldiers and comrades and other briefly-introduced NPCs you barely even know, it's difficult to give a crap. It does set the stage - you're at war, people die, nobody gets spared. But you won't care for the people who die. You're doing this for phat loot, but not for the sake of these bleak characters.

The story also assumes that you finish each dungeon at the appropriate level, which I didn't. All actual story missions, with the exception of the very last mission, are soloable. When I skipped dungeons, the solo cutscenes would introduce new characters to me and treat them as though my character was already acquainted with them. I had one cutscene, where a character had no voiceover at all, in another cutscene my charr character had a human voice. I'm nitpicking here, this is all minor stuff, but it's there.

A bigger issue lies in the difficulty and the AI buddies. I had missions where the game would send me half a dozen soldiers to make things easier and these guys just blindly stormed into the nearest enemy and got themselves killed in seconds. Reviving them would only result in them repeating the very same idiotic thing, so I had to do the whole thing alone and entirely without help. At its worst moments, the story would send twenty enemies at me and all my AI companions would be dead. This issue has been brought up by many players and I'm sure it will be resolved in due time, but right now the AI buddies are about as useful as a shit-flavoured lollipop (assuming you dislike the idea of shit-flavoured lollipops, otherwise replace it with something you don't find very desirable). And when characers like Rytlock Brimstone, who come across all powerful and mighty in the storyline, get killed 250 times like retarded lemmings in every dungeon, something just doesn't seem right. On the plus side, many story quests can be played with friends, which is incredibly fun. Do yourself a favour - play this stuff with your friends!

Grimclaw and the guys from 'Destiny's Edge'

So why am I skipping the dungeons? Because they're no fun, especially when you put your skill and trait points into melee. They're not completely awful. In fact, they're better than the dungeons you see in many other MMOs. But they're far from great. The vast majority of enemies will just one-shot you in melee, so people usually go full ranged. And while it is true that you can beat every dungeon with just about any combination of classes, people are stuck in the old trinity mindset, so you'll end up with the usual LFM messages: "Looking for Warrior, Guardian and Mesmer for instance X!"

When you die, you pick a respawn point inside the dungeon and run back. Bosses don't reset or regenerate, so the less talented, less experienced parties tend to just respawn-run at bosses over and over again like lemmings until all the bad guys are finally dead. The battles are big and spectacular, the story is nice, the loot is fun and all, but turning the whole thing into an infinite rez and respawn and making ranged attacks the only viable option simply doesn't make things very enjoyable to me. When I found myself a group to beat the final dungeon in order to finish my story, the dungeon glitched out after the third boss and our group had to start over.

After defeating the final boss in cutscenes and a crappy airship cannon sequence, where the bad guy doesn't even fight back

What's worse, I feel cheated out of my final boss encounter. Yes, I get to kill tons of bosses on the way to face the elder dragon Zhaitan. I get to see him in epic cutscenes, I get to hang out on the airship that destroys him and I even get to finish him off with a cannon. But there is no actual battle against him. Nothing. He's the final fucking boss! The final cutscene reminds me there are still many more elder dragons (i.e. future expansions) on the horizon. So future endgame bosses might be harder to kill. But in a game that makes me fight an epic world boss at level 1, I was expecting a little more than a scripted event "boss battle" at the very end.

To be fair, you don't actually need any dungeons, raids or even the story to have fun with Guild Wars 2. There are so many events, where you start off with a harmless little escort or you kill a few monsters and suddenly you find yourself following dozens of players as they raid and wipe out monster camps, fight massive world bosses and loot ridiculously epic treasure chests. I've looted the most massive sword after fighting a dragon world boss and there hasn't been a single day where people haven't sent me messages asking where I got that awesome weapon!

Another thing I really enjoy is the community. Because they're friendly. Not because they're all better than the average WoW player or because of "server pride" or imaginary bullshit like that. But because the trolls are scared. Arenanet have a very strict policy against insults, racism and general dipshittery and punish first time offenders with a harsh 3 day ban. I'm pretty sure I'll get my ass banned at some point, but I like things that way. The atmosphere on most MMOs has become insufferable and it's about time somebody starts punishing people for being dicks.

One might argue that a community isn't really nice when they only behave out of fear of getting caught, but let's remain realistic here: The fact I don't beat you up and take all of your stuff is not related to the kindness of my heart. I just don't wanna get locked up for it. And that same 12 year old that calls me a homo on Call of Duty would do the same thing IRL if he didn't know I'd beat the shit out of him. People are assholes and they need to be stopped by fear of consequences, plain and simple.

Speaking of assholes: Goldspam and account hacks have begun plaguing Tyria. Interestingly enough, the gold spammers charge considerably more than Arenanet's legit ingame gold shop, but I'm sure there's still plenty of stupid people who fall for that kinda crap. What's worse, the security around Arenanet accounts is practically nonexistent. Claire's mother got hacked today, they changed her login name and she no longer has access to her account at all. Ironically, she got an email telling her that her GW2 account is now using a new email address after the hacker changed it. No possibility to undo it, no link to report a hack, no nothing. Just, "Guess what, your GW2 now uses another email", that's it. Why the hell it wouldn't at least ask for a confirmation that she has really requested a change in the first pace, is entirely beyond me.
Even crappy F2P games like Star Trek Online now send you authentication emails whenever there's unusual activity. Somebody trying to log on to your account from a foreign IP? Here's an email with an authentication code - you cann't log on until you type it in. GW2 does no such thing, you just log on, change the email to whatever you want, do a password reset and that's that. Authenticator? Email confirmation? Security questions? Nothing AT ALL!

Will the future bring better boss battles and hacking security?

We'll be playing without Claire's mother tonight. We might even see her account logged on, see somebody advertise goldselling websites with her character or level her toons in wvw for more loot to sell. I've created a brand new email address to re-register my account and I'm still feeling somewhat paranoid. I'm having lots of fun with this game and I've greatly enjoyed playing it with friends and family. Two of them have been hacked now, one of them considers giving up on the game for good. Sure, these things happen. Claire and I got hacked on WoW multiple times until we got authenticators. Claire got hacked on MSN and Facebook and I get login attempts from China on my Gmail account all the time. But I can't help but feel that Anet is making it too easy for these guys right now.

It gets better: When you do manage to get your account back, you may find yourself having to send another ticket, because the hacker got you banned. Stolen items may or may not be restored, but gold and collectibles remain gone.

I hope they can fix things. I hope they'll improve their security before this gets out of hand. I really like this game. A lot! But such crap doesn't do anything to help the game's reputation and it doesn't make it any more enjoyable to me or my friends.

-Cat