GW2: Random Fun and Adventures in WvW

Lemme just state something up front. I find very little point in blogging about who took what keep on what hour of which day, or how many loot bags so-and-so has dropped, or which guild or server is all that or sucks. You can read that sort of stuff everywhere else.

To me, it’s a cycle. Some days you win, some days you lose. I prefer to keep at least a modicum of respect for my opponents, regardless of their behavior. And it all resets to begin over the next week anyway, even if the scores are recorded and it’s fun to play to increase it and improve oneself.

What I really enjoy in WvW, besides the improving oneself and seeing others work together and better alongside you aspect, is the fun, crazy, never to be replicated in quite exactly the same way shared memories of the players participating.

To pull a random example from another team game I played the heck out of, I remember reading a Natural Selection dev discussing their map design, how they tried to make corridors and elevators that would encourage the Marine players of one team to be walking together beside each other, facing the same camera direction and sharing that similar “Oh shit” sinking feeling when they see a giant Alien Onos player stomp around the corner and charge them. The goal was shared emotions and a feeling of camaraderie.

And I’d like to share a random collection of fun and funny stuff that’s happened while I was running around WvWing, in the hope you enjoy it too.

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The featured pic at the very top of the post is the fireworks meme that seems to have been going around lately in our server. Some guy keeps dropping loads of fireworks, and you know other players can’t resist picking them up and playing with them. I like to think of the above shot as “Quick, use these fireworks to camouflage our trebs so they won’t know we are here!” “Sure!” “…Ohh wait…”

And you know that reputation Tarnished Coast has for being full of ERP? (You can look up the term elsewhere if it’s not familiar to you.)

This was the unexpected view I had when logging back into the game on my Asura, getting ready to go into WvW after previously logging off the day before from the Super Adventure Box. Dat portal exit…

I see there are perks to being short.

For some reason, our commanders seem to love us getting all up close and personal with them…

No homophobes allowed on Tarnished Coast.

The biggest killer of Tarnished Coasters also appears to be gravity. We are beginning to suspect the commanders have a betting pool on how many they can get killed jumping off a cliff. Our reigning champion so far:

I stand by what my asura said. “Lemmings.”

The exact scenario went somewhat like this: Endeavoring to maneuver around another enemy zerg, the commander looked down the cliff at the river and said “Quick, everyone over here, jump down into the water, hmm, does that river look deep enough?” Except one or two others had already leapt by that time, and the commander decided that meant it was safe and followed.

Being of suspicious and paranoid nature, and no doubt, it also looked bloody high for my miniature asura, I found a two part jump/slope that got me down safely. One of a few. Phew. Hooray for rezzing.

We have extra liftoff!

Today’s reset was incredibly fun, the highlight an hours-long three way battle in the KNBL garrison. I’m sure there’s footage of it elsewhere, but I found this serendipitously amusing.

It so happened I got on the front-row seat superior ballista (that’s also asking for being the immediate target if our opponents got their way in, of course) and you know, you’re just targeting -any- enemy in which direction you want to fire it and keeping those bolts flying. Check out random asura’s guild name – some internet meme or other, no doubt. Here, lemme help you with MOAR liftoff with this ballista bolt!

We had a close call with the bay keep mid garrison fight. An FA guild team was spotted trying to catapult the water gate, and those that weren’t in garrison and were in bay had our attention occupied with taking out their catapults. Being, as I’ve often said, of very paranoid nature, I couldn’t help but stare at the crossed swords ticking down on the keep and think what if there were more somewhere else masked by this?

So I went to check on the northwest gate near the veteran wurm while the others were cleaning up, and to my horror, saw it in the far distance sitting wide open with a flame ram visible beyond. Now my graphics settings aren’t the best and it was foggy up there so I wasn’t 100% sure I could believe my eyes, but I reported it anyway and did a 180 towards the nearest inner gate to check. Sure enough, a KN WM ninja team was in the midst of ramming down the door and had it at 40%.

A number of TC came back to respond to the bay attack, and that pulled a sufficient number of us out of garrison that FA was able to cap it. Shortly after the bay attack was cleaned up, we were back to knocking on the gates of garrison and managed to cap it ourselves.

Some time after, I chanced by the garrison’s southwest wall and nearly died laughing at the guild banner hanging from it:

Er, hi there.

I’m afraid I’m not too conversant with all the guild insignias on Tarnished Coast as yet, so I dunno which guild this was. But it was so hilariously unexpected.

Late into the night when things were less hectic, there was some time for crazy shenanigans like a blue dorito train:

Need moar tags.

It’s, um, practising a strategy for when there’s a dedicated commander assassin around. Yep… That’s it…

The perpetrators of this atrocity were made to line up and shot to death by firing squad.

They are so leet, they don’t even render on my computer. I hear there were yak transformations and stuff.

Folks were in pretty high spirits today, there was siege overkill on an innocent gate:

NEED MOAR TREB

And one of our commanders was even spotted RPing, though I think everyone else needed a Babelfish:

For Gondor! Oh wait, wrong game.

Extra nerd points if you recognize the reference. I didn’t, but it’s not at all one of my favorite series.

In more curious conjunctions of serendipity, I had an exotic trident drop for me in WvW today. Which is crazy luck for me.

Except it was the cheapest valued lvl 79 rampager trident of something or other that was only worth a little over a gold or so. Which is murphy’s law playing its usual part for me.

I’d normally TP it, but I was feeling a little rich today, so I thought, since the tridents are so cheap and I hear Mystic Forging exotics have better precursor drop rates, instead of earning 1 gold, I’d waste an extra 3 gold on a gamble. So I bought three more.

The tridents had mysteriously arranged themselves into some kind of voodoo pattern around a sigil from a rare I’d salvaged.

I’m sure the logical explanation would have been I was selling blues and greens, salvaging rares and depositing all collectibles just before my mystic forge try, but it was kinda spooky to see the tridents like that in my inventory.

Then I forged them, expecting nothing but another exotic trident worth another gold or so to cut my losses, and hoping a higher valued trident might pop:

It’s official. I used up all my luck in this game.

Enter crazy luck lightning strike number 2.

Along with murphy’s law smack number 2 – of all the precursors, an underwater trident. It’s only worth 22 some gold on the TP, something I could actually afford if I dug into my current gold stores.

I think I’ll bank it and work on it much much later. Kraitkin doesn’t look half bad to me. And I’m not allergic to water combat as much as most GW2 players appear to be. (But I kinda still have half my heart set on the legendary torch, though its use and show-offiness factor is almost just as limited as an underwater weapon. And meh, that kinda goal drives a person into bankruptcy, so it’s still not my primary drive for now.)

The last hilarity before I logged off, I accidentally clicked the Guild Bank vendor while looking for the personal Bank one and ended up rofl’ing too:

Somebody’s not happy…