#shit gw2 players say

[shitgw2playerssay]

As is tradition...

We're giving away some gems in celebration of Guild Wars 2's anniversary and the new expansion!

Stuff up for grabs:

Two 2000 Gem Codes (two winners)

200 Gold (one winner)

How to Enter:

One reblog, and one heart on this post will each count as an entry. Only one reblog will count per account.

We’ll stop taking entries at server reset on Friday, August 23rd. A random number generator will be used to choose winners.

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You will have THREE DAYS from the time that we message you to respond, or we will reroll and give your prize to someone else. If we can’t message you on Tumblr, we’ll reroll.

You must feel comfortable with giving us your in-game name if you win the gold.

No giveaway blogs.

Good luck, everyone! There should be some anniversary sales coming up soon!

[dualumina]

[moth-tea-merchant]

Shit gets wild sometimes

[woozyintyria]

a small collection

[littlefoxgw2]

get screenshotted lol

[evampire1]

[ichiwi]

The new maps go wild

[soulbeastdragon]

[shitgw2playerssay]

[dualumina]

[moth-tea-merchant]

[blackjackkent]

Here is the thing that bothers me, as someone who works in tech, about the whole ChatGPT explosion.

The thing that bothers me is that ChatGPT, from a purely abstract point of view, is really fucking cool.

Some of the things it can produce are fucking wild to me; it blows my mind that a piece of technology is able to produce such detailed, varied responses that on the whole fit the prompts they are given. It blows my mind that it has come so far so fast. It is, on an abstract level, SO FUCKING COOL that a computer can make the advanced leaps of logic (because that's all it is, very complex programmed logic, not intelligence in any human sense) required to produce output "in the style of Jane Austen" or "about the care and feeding of prawns" or "in the form of a limerick" or whatever the hell else people dream up for it to do. And fast, too! It's incredible on a technical level, and if it existed in a vacuum I would be so excited to watch it unfold and tinker with it all damn day.

The problem, as it so often is, is that cool stuff does not exist in a vacuum. In this case, it is a computer that (despite the moniker of "artificial intelligence") has no emotional awareness or ethical reasoning capabilities, being used by the whole great tide of humanity, a force that is notoriously complex, notoriously flawed, and more so in bulk.

-----

During my first experiment with a proper ChatGPT interface, I asked it (because I am currently obsessed with GW2) if it could explain HAM tanking to me in an instructional manner. It wrote me a long explanatory chunk of text, explaining that HAM stood for "Heavy Armor Masteries" and telling me how I should go about training and preparing a character with them. It was a very authoritative sounding discussion, with lots of bullet points and even an occasional wiki link Iirc.

The problem of course ("of course", although the GW2 folks who follow me have already spotted it) is that the whole explanation was nonsense. HAM in GW2 player parlance stands for "Heal Alacrity Mechanist". As near as I've been able to discover, "Heavy Armor Masteries" aren't even a thing, in GW2 or anywhere else - although both "Heavy Armor" and "Masteries" are independent concepts in the game.

Fundamentally, I thought, this is VERY bad. People have started relying on ChatGPT for answers to their questions. People are susceptible to authoritative-sounding answers like this. People under the right circumstances would have no reason not to take this as truth when it is not.

But at the same time... how wild, how cool, is it that, given the prompt "HAM tanking" and having no idea what it was except that it involves GW2, the parser was able to formulate a plausible-sounding acronym expansion out of whole cloth? That's extraordinary! If you don't think that's the tightest shit, get out of my face.

----

The problem, I think, is ultimately twofold: capitalism and phrasing.

The phrasing part is simple. Why do we call this "artificial intelligence"? It's a misnomer - there is no intelligence behind the results from ChatGPT. It is ultimately a VERY advanced and complicated search engine, using a vast quantity of source data to calculate an output from an input. Referring to that as "intelligence" gives it credit for an agency, an ability to judge whether its output is appropriate, that it simply does not possess. And given how quickly people are coming to rely on it as a source of truth, that's... irresponsible at best.

The capitalism part...

You hear further stories of the abuses of ChatGPT every day. People, human people with creative minds and things to say and contribute, being squeezed out of roles in favor of a ChatGPT implementation that can sufficiently ("sufficiently" by corporate standards) imitate soul without possessing it. This is not acceptible; the promise of technology is to facilitate the capabilities and happiness of humanity, not to replace it. Companies see the ability to expand their profit margins at the expense of the quality of their output and the humanity of it. They absorb and regurgitate in lesser form the existing work of creators who often didn't consent to contribute to such a system anyway.

Consequently, the more I hear about AI lately, the more hopeful I am that the thing does go bankrupt and collapse, that the ruling goes through where they have to obliterate their data stores and start over from scratch. I think "AI" as a concept needs to be taken away from us until we are responsible enough to use it.

But goddamn. I would love to live in a world where we could just marvel at it, at the things it is able to do *well* and the elegant beauty even of its mistakes.

[koko-online]

On GW2's narratives

I maintain that the reason GW2's stories always fall flat (though some more than others cough SotO cough) is that we have almost no villains.

What parts of the story do people remember most fondly? LW1, PoF, and LW4 almost universally. Y'know, the parts that came to life because of Scarlet Briar, Balthazar, and Palawa Joko. I´d also add the tearjerker at the end of EoD and saying goodbye to Aurene, but that's not relevant to the point I'm going to make.

Remember in like 8th grade English class, when your teacher talked about conflicts in storytelling? It was probably something like this.

GW2 has opted almost universally for the bottom-right quadrant : Person vs. Nature. There's nothing wrong with that type of conflict. The dragons are a force of nature more than independent living things, and the Kryptis and Titans are about the same after all was said and done with them.

But those kinds of stories are almost antithetical to the power fantasy that most MMORPGs, including GW2, rely on. The only time in the history of this game where anything felt actively hostile was in HoT's open world. So we're just left there reacting to a quasi-mindless threat with no motivations, goals, or real personality, who we know for sure we're going to defeat because it's a video game designed to be beaten with minimal effort. If we wanted to call the antagonistic forces a "natural disaster", they would be the equivalent of a pretty mild rainshower. Not exactly a compelling story.

Before I move into villains, I want to address why Society and Self would also make uninteresting conflicts in this case. In both cases, it requires ANET to define our character's personality, goals, and convictions more than they already have. This leaves players feeling disconnected from any sort of potential narrative roleplay. Additionally, in the former's case, it would require ANET to make a profound political message, which I don´t think they are capable of.

That leaves us with Person vs. Person. Here's where villains come in.

Villain-centric stories are almost a cheat code for MMORPGs. Look at Lilith from FFXI, Shiro Tagachi and Khilbron from GW1, the Lich King from WoW, Emet Selch (everyone's favourite sexy grampa) and Zenos from FFXIV.

They allow you to tell a full and complete character-driven story without writing our characters for us or having to write them as cartoons so that they stand out (literally every one of our main party members in GW2). You're forced to define your character in comparison or contrast to the villain's aims, means, and/or convictions.

We found out later that Scarlet Briar was an agent of Modremoth, but at the time, we thought she was some batshit genius! We saw and reacted to the shit she was doing through the lens of trying to understand her. It made the world feel big and fragile and mysterious.

We met Balthazar as he deceived us, and we had to reckon with a god's view of life vs. our own.

Palawa Joko, I mean, nuff said, he's the best character writing we've ever had in this game and he was taken out of GW1. And he was played half for laughs!

When we don´t have strong antagonist writing, we're left with just a beige sea of allies who have no real philosophical underpinnings. Of course they're against the threat, it's killing them, what else? I don´t even know any of the SotO characters names because I can´t care about them. They're faceless randoms who simply act as agents of Isgarren. Okay. Who cares?

I am 1000000% certain that the writing team at ANET follows my inane tumblr blog closely, so please, take my advice and give us a mirror.

[littlefoxgw2]

i glanced over in chat to see "having this amount of green directly injected into my eyeballs is very soothing" then turned around to see this magnificent creature radiating the very essence of the colour green lol

[evampire1]

[ichiwi]

I have been playing a lot of strikes/ raids recently and either everyone or no one wants to play support