Spontaneous Monotony

Heads-up for European Guild Wars players! ArenaNet has launched another European minipet promo. Yes, it’s the long-awaited second source for the Asian minipets: Grawl, Naga Raincaller, Oni etc. There is also a very small chance of getting a Miniature Vizu!

As with previous promos, the minipets are obtained by buying one of a list of magazines:

• UK: PC Gamer 180 (27th September) and PC Zone 187 (11th October)
• Spain: Micromania 152 - 154 (31st August, 1st October, 31st October)
• Italy: The Games Machine 226 (15th September)
• Germany: Gamestar ‘Offical Guild Wars Magazine’ (28th September)
• France: PC Jeux ‘Official Guild Wars Magazine’ (no date given - same as the above?)
• Sweden: Super Play and PC Gamer (no issue numbers, but 25th September and 2nd October respectively)
• Netherlands: PC Gameplay 167 - 168 (28th August and 27th September)

The full list of minipets (not in order of rarity as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t say anything apart from Vizu being really, really rare):

• Grawl
• Longhair Yeti
• Naga Raincaller
• Oni
• Vizu
• Shiroken Assassin
• Zhed Shadowhoof

EDIT: Alas, it turns out that this isn’t a straightforward giveaway but rather a small chance of a code being inside a magazine. Wonder how that operates with the funny gambling laws that force companies to include a pointless question on phone-in quizzes?

It seems that over the past week or so the European Guild Wars servers have been randomly lagspiking, and even disonnecting entire towns of players. In spectacular Anet style, their attempts at fixing the problem have resulted in it becoming twice as worse, and affecting more people than ever before (I can personally attest to the latter).

I’ve suggested on Guru forums that Anet should pull the entire GW:EN project team on to fixing this. Let’s look at it simply: if European players can’t actually play Guild Wars at all (this is n’t just normal lag as with the Dragon Festival, it’s unplayably poor) then they won’t buy GW:EN however brilliant it looks like being. Delaying GW:EN by a week/month/however long it takes to fix this, is less harmful to Anet’s profits than not fixing the problem, and having nobody in Europe buy GW:EN. Let me put it this way: it’s making a since-release Guild Wars player check how much the dark side is on Play.

A while ago I posted a fairly upbeat post about the sorts of changes needed to make Guild Wars 2 a success. Despite several abominable screwups on Arenanet’s part, I made an attempt to defend them. Not any more. Their latest scam totally-non-exploitative marketing proposal is to create a new mission pack (with four missions covering the Guild Wars backstory) only available to those who spend £17 or more in the ingame store.

In other words, those who buy GW:EN online instead of paying less money to an online store for more product (game + printed manual + other stuff in box) than Anet provide (just the game). This will probably prove to be the most ridiculous marketing move Anet have ever made, the screwup upon screwups that finally killed off any lingering support they had from the Guild Wars fanbase. Anet have two choices: they either make this pack available to anyone who wants to buy it (instead of a cartel-like bundling deal with other products), or they lose a very significant proportion of the Guild Wars playerbase (77-page complaint thread on Gwonline, Guru has crashed under the weight of people) . Put simply, they either fix this or Guild Wars 2 will sink like a stone.