#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.

Rules:

You must be following shitgw2playerssay. Yes, we will check. If you're reblogging to a side blog but following from your main, put your main Tumblr in the tags so we can find you.

Be sure to have your Inbox turned on so we can mail/message you. We’ll message you if you win.

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]

[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.

[ascalonianlightbringer]

Mesmers are my favorite class (both in GW1 and GW2, though they're quite different in each game!) and I've always especially enjoyed the more damage-oriented mesmers. I loved playing Domination Magic-focused GW1 mesmers with Backfire, Empathy, Power Spike, Energy Surge, Cry of Frustration, etc (I actually learned how to play GW1 on a Domination mesmer, which was ... a steep learning curve, but a blast once I got the hang of it). In GW2, before the Mirage specialization got nerfed to hell, I loved my Condition Damage mesmer/Mirage, and Power builds + greatsword are always really fun on core mesmers and chronomancers.

(I can't speak to Virtuoso—I've heard great things but I can't bring myself to give up my emotional support clones.)

My main, Gwen Velazquez, originally went from a very damage-oriented core mesmer to a sword-based Power chronomancer—fun in groups, but squishy in solo play unless she manages to kill everything first.

However. My family has played the GW games together since Prophecies and my mother's main is an even squishier Power elementalist who does huge amounts of damage but often dies. So I was trying to think of ways Gwen could help my mother's character survive—and then, after all these years of ArenaNet nerfing the originally superb support/defense chronomancer into oblivion, they buffed the defensively-oriented chronomancer back into effectiveness. This was months ago now, but I was working on my dissertation and only recently got the chance to really try playing Gwen as a chronomancer built around defense and support rather than strike damage.

Holy shit, it's so fun.

Yeah, it takes her a lot longer to kill things, but now she can afford to pick fights with much harder foes all by herself. She's gone from glass cannon to regularly soloing champions if I'm even somewhat paying attention to what she's doing (and chronomancer is a complicated enough class that I'm usually paying attention).

Another player showed up to one of the champion fights I was soloing and advised me to stop using ranged attacks (all that Gwen has now) because those also would reflect back to me, and I didn't have the heart to say it made zero difference because it wasn't getting through Gwen's blocks and she hadn't even needed to heal yet. She's using scepter/shield + staff and it's just like block, block, dodge, block, set down her AOEs, get a chaos aura by teleporting out, oh look her blocks are back and she's got her healing and stability mantras for emergencies.

I gather that the rifle chrono is even better, but defense with a Chaos/Inspiration/Chronomancer build actually being good again makes the scepter/shield+staff chrono feel incredible. Love playing a light armor chaos mage as an unkillable god.

[shitgw2playerssay]

[dualumina]

[moth-tea-merchant]

[northwest-cryptid]

yoo I'm so excited to binge the gw2 ost I happened to find One song from discovery but since I'm migrating my Spotify likes I haven't been focusing on finding new music.

also hell yeah pso2!! haven't played that ever since New Genesis rlly but man I really had fun playing it

I'm a big fan of GW2's ost though I won't say which ones (for fear of being stoned in the streets) I do think there's a few tracks that are a bit overrated which I normally wouldn't bring up because I hate just being like, negative about shit. However the reason I say that is because I believe personally that while those songs are good and all they overshadow every other really impactful and good song in the ost because they're the big popular ones everyone focuses on.

and yea! PSO2 is one of my like, 2 or 3 favorite MMOs. The music, the aesthetic, and even the gameplay are always just so much fun to come back to. I don't think NG is nearly as bad as people make it out to be, and I do enjoy certain aspects of it; but I fully admit that it feels lacking compared to the base game.

I think a big part of that comes from how the classes are handled in NG, with most only having a small handful of skills, PAs, and Techs that aren't actually very interesting. It leads to most players only using even fewer of their PAs and Techs because the bulk of the ones they have either aren't very useful or don't mesh well with the available skills. It's certainly fun to try to figure out proper combos but the game basically becomes spamming one or two PAs to win unless you play Force in which case you get literally just 1 single target and 1 AoE version of each element and your skills sort of give you a bit of extra variety? I mostly play Force in NG because what it sacrifices in fun movement it makes up for in fun variety. I mostly stick with the classic PSO2 mode though because nothing will beat the gameplay variety and skill combinations present in that game. I enjoy that while Hero, Phantom, Etoile, and Luster are the end game super classes; they can easily be matched by a half decent player using any of the base classes so long as they actually care about their build and weapons.

My one gripe that's sort of omnipresent in PSO2 is just how much of a grind the game is. I've gotten too cozy with Mabinogi's progression system being very lax about it's pacing and it results in feeling like PSO2 wanting me to constantly, literally; grind my weapons, find more of the same weapons to upgrade my weapons, then grind the skills on my weapons, then upgrade the element on my weapons, now do it all over again for each of the three pieces of armor, now do all the skill point side quests so you can get this 3% damage bonus from this skill which you need because there are only two modes for the story; Little Baby Gamer's First MMO Mode which will have you literally 1 shot every enemy and you never get to really enjoy any of the mechanics or boss encounters, or Your Ass Is Grass Mode where everything is max level and assumes you've poured countless thousands of hours into this game and now YOU get 1 shot by everything. That being said I love just playing with friends and hanging out.

[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