Spontaneous Monotony

 EDIT: Forgot my most important tip; MAKE SURE YOU LOG IN TO THE GAME HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THE APPEARANCE. Even when the servers work during these events, there is usually very serious lag which may prevent you from connecting if you leave it any later. Just connect, zone to your district of choice and then go do something else for 25 minutes.

The showpiece grand finale of this year’s Wintersday festival in Guild Wars is almost upon us. For those of you who weren’t playing the game last year (or had better, alcohol-related, things to do on New Year’s Day :P) I’ll give a brief rundown of how it works.

The finale happens in the ‘primary’ towns of Tyria and Elona - Lion’s Arch and Kamadan respectively (well, when Prophecies was simply known as ‘Guild Wars’, Droknar’s Forge was actually the primary town but that’s another story). Sorry Factions users, but you get the Dragon Festival instead of Wintersday. Anyway, the appearances are the usual every three hours starting from 8am GMT. The two gods (Grenth and Dwayna) hang around giving out presents - the ’special event’ items you probably have a zillion of from event quests and games anyway - for about 25 minutes, then they give out a hat. The difference between Wintersday and (for example) Halloween is that the type of hat you are given will depend on the god who ‘wins’ your district of the town by having the most followers gathered around them. To remove the unfair randomness, and ensure that people are able to get the hats they want, players have a tradition of making odd-numbered districts Grenth and even-numbered districts Dwayna ones.

Remember that if you are in a high-numbered district, server lag/staging can mean the event doesn’t start right on time (sometimes as much as 10 - 15 minutes later). Don’t worry about this, it is entirely normal and will not make you ‘miss’ the event. In fact, if you are lucky enough to get into a lower-numbered district, you can even use this to your advantage by ‘zoning’ to a higher numbered district which gives out a different hat as soon as you get your first one, and get two hats in one outing. I did this last year entirely by accident (was zoning to Kamadan to see a guildie, who was in d53).

Also remember that LA and Kamadan give out different hats - last year the former gave out the traditional santa hats/antlers (Dwayna/Grenth respectively) while the latter gave out Freezie Crowns and Jester Caps. So if you want to get all the possible hats you will have to attend four events - unless you use the zoning trick.

Useful links

• Wintersday finale appearance times (official wiki)
  
• Guild Wars network news - ArenaNet haven’t run even the smaller events (like the Dragon Festival) this year without massive server issues, and Wintersday is bigger than any of those. Leave yourself an extra event slot or two spare in case their network goes toes-up again.

BT have never really had ‘fans’, being the former monopoly telecoms provider and generally charging more than competitors for their internet service (in between making questionable use of their near-monopoly against said competitors). However, until recently their saving grace has been that the internet service is generally fast and reliable. Unfortunately it has been deteriorating rapidly in recent times. Many BT IP addresses are listed on spam blocklists (I’ve had quite a few ‘email not sent’ messages to this effect from my mailserver), and in the past week or so BT’s network has simply stopped connecting anyone to NCSoft’s network (their websites, as well as the Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa games). Perhaps it is in fact the reverse - due to the aforementioned spamlistings, servers in between BT and the destination are discarding connections due to security concerns? Either way, BT’s fault.

Problems with the distance from the telephone exchange, or with the weather, are understandable if irritating. What isn’t acceptable though is for the actual service - connecting the paying customer’s computer with whatever servers he or she wishes to access - to be so indefensibly dire.

It seems that the Guild Wars minipet promo isn’t as fantastic as I originally thought. Instead of everyone getting a code (as with previous magazine-minipet promos) and certain codes getting one of the rarer pets (as happens with the automated ‘character birthday’ presents), there are in fact only 1,000 codes in total per magazine. Your copy might have a code, or it might not. Given the average circulation of games magazines (over 40,000 for PC Gamer, for example - the link is to a PDF by the way, but it’s only 53kB). Original credit for this story goes to a guildie of mine, but I can’t link because it’s a private guild forum.

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?

As far as PvP in Guild Wars goes, Alliance Battles are up there with the best. Two teams of twelve (the most in any PvP gametype, I might add) fight to capture control points which spawn NPCs and give victory points. The problem is that a few months back, the way victory points are counted changed. Previously, using ‘4-4-4′ tactics (which means that the team splits into three sets of four players) to capture points as quickly as possible, without bothering whether they get retaken by the opposition or not, was the accepted tactic. Unfortunately the changes to the points system means that it you now gain more victory points by holding map locations (ie defending them for a significant time) rather than constant-capping.

This means that ‘mobbing’ (the entire team of twelve fighting as one mass) is now the most effective tactic by a long way. Most Luxon players seem to have worked this out, but Kurzicks haven’t. Even questioning the 4-4-4 God gets you called a noob and worse. Put simply, unless you’re up against a similarly uninformed Luxon team, AB just isn’t fun to play as the Kurzicks any more. I’ve gone back to CM, where (because only PvP characters and advanced PvE characters can access it) most people at least have a clue about how to play the fucking game. Sorry for the profanity, but I thought I’d seen the most brainless of the Guild Wars playerbase in my pre-heroes PUG days. I was wrong.