Regarding Mike's thoughts about adding fast-travel to WoW: Long flights do kind of suck, but they also underscore that each continent is one gigantic land mass. My friend, who has only played Conan, finds that to be mind-blowing.

Now, they should add the option to jump off the bird, for sure. And if they wanted to enable fast travel at a certain level (maybe when you get a flying mount), I'd be okay with that. But I'm fine with them leaving it as it is. A cohesive, congruent Azeroth is one of WoW's highlights imho. Not that fast travel would remove that, but it might lessen the impact.

I think I'm going to start up a new character to get back into the game. Keep trying a Prophecies character, but the start is so slow.

Alright, well, since I already had the original GW and Factions, I went ahead and picked up Nightfall. Yay wasted money on a game that's likely to go dark in less than a year!

Prophecies was quite slow in how much xp a quest/mission gave you, and your character was fairly slow to progress, but it was hard to be overwhelmed by enemies early on if you paid attention. Factions was quite fast in throwing xp at you, but fast at throwing challenges at you. Nightfall seems to have the best balance between learning curve and keeping it exciting.

Nine GW2 Follow Up Questions with Eric Flannum

By Regina Buenaobra May 5th, 2010

We dropped a lot of Guild Wars 2 info on you last week. From details about the Guild Wars 2 combat system, to the introduction of the Elementalist, to studio head Mike O’Brien’s MMO Manifesto, there was a lot of new stuff to absorb. As we expected, you had questions.

We scoured the Internet to find the most commonly asked community questions about Guild Wars 2, and then we bugged Lead Designer Eric Flannum for some answers. Here’s what we found out!

Q: We’ve read some concerns about limitations of a 10-slot skill bar. Some players feel that it’s inflexible and doesn’t allow for enough creativity in making a build. What say you?

Eric: Think of it this way: You’ve got 5 slots that you can slot freely, with the caveat that you have to bring one heal and one elite skill. Your other 5 skills are determined by the weapon set you bring. Most professions can equip two weapon sets and switch freely between them in combat, even stringing together combinations of attacks between them. That means you have access to 15 skills at any given time and you make a minimum of 7 choices (9 at most) to determine what those skills are. Yes, we do restrict some of your choices to particular categories, but there is still a lot of choice there.

If you use the CCG paradigm to explain our skill system, we went from a system with almost no deck building restrictions in Guild Wars to one that has some necessary and sane deck building restrictions in Guild Wars 2. The new system is much friendlier to new players and to those players who either aren’t interested in the deck building aspect (or are just not that good at it), but it still allows advanced players to come up with literally hundreds of combinations to trash their opponents with. One of our designers did the math and the possible number of combinations is in the millions. This system also allows us to more easily balance the game and maintain that balance.

Q: We know that players who choose to play norn will be able to shapeshift using a skill. So, when you shape change, the skill bar changes to reflect the form you shape changed into?

Eric: Absolutely, yes.

Q: Let’s clear up this whole “anti-social” gaming thing that players read on Kotaku and IGN. Is Guild Wars 2 an anti-social game?

Eric: “Anti-social” is a bit of a mischaracterization. The systems in Guild Wars 2 don’t make the game less social; they actually make it more social. As Mike stated in his blog post, you can still group and join guilds, and you can still go off and play by yourself if you desire. However, Guild Wars 2 offers another social approach: you can just choose to play with the people who happen to be around you while you’re out adventuring. This is made possible through shared goals, dynamic content scaling, and more forgiving rules on loot and XP distribution.

Q: Speaking of loot and XP, there were a lot of questions about XP distribution among players who participate in a dynamic event in Guild Wars 2. Will this system reward leeches? How do you determine whether someone gets credit for participating in an event?

Eric: Because all events are different, each event has its own criteria for determining participation that gauges who actually made a decent effort at participating. It’s designed to give no credit or lower credit to players who were AFK during an event or just did a fly-by, using only a few skills and moved on.

Q: So you won’t be able to skip in, tag mobs for minimal damage, have someone else kill it, and still get significant XP?

Eric: Well, that really depends on what you mean by minimal damage, but the short answer is no. The intention of the system is to encourage players to participate in fights. We don’t define participation as either idling and doing nothing, or using one skill and simply tagging a monster.

Q: Guild Wars 2 is a big, persistent MMO. Some players out there have expressed concerns about the loss of instancing, since this means that there may be negative people in public areas.

Eric: There are always going to be negative people in public areas, which is something we’re well aware of. However, with its more social gameplay, Guild Wars 2 takes away most of the ways that other players can negatively impact your play experience. Shared goals means that “mob ownership” issues are almost non-existent. More forgiving loot and XP rules make kill-stealing a thing of the past. Of course, there are many ways players can find to disrupt each other’s play experiences, and it is our goal to limit those types of interactions wherever they occur. These are just some of the things that we’re doing to ensure that playing Guild Wars 2 is as enjoyable and grief-free an experience as possible.

Q: Can you comment on the “companion” system that we discussed very early in the development of Guild Wars 2?

Eric: Early in the development stage, we worked on the concept of a single “companion” NPC who would accompany the player, but we soon determined that it wasn’t necessary. We’ve developed Guild Wars 2 so that it’s a completely soloable experience due to our profession design, dynamically scaling content, and the social approach to events. And, since Guild Wars 2 is a persistent world, we can’t really let each character run around with a full party of NPCs in tow.

We’ve designed the eight professions to be self-sufficient; everyone has some form of self-healing and they all have a wide range of skills that allow them to play solo. Our events scale dynamically, so we can accommodate solo play as well as a multiple parties who want to participate in the same content. Plus, the social framework of the game encourages group play and casual grouping.

Because of these factors, we decided that we didn’t need the companion system and could focus our efforts on making the professions that do use pets very distinctive and cool. We’ll be talking more about that as we further reveal the GW2 professions.

Q: Will there be non-combat activities in Guild Wars 2 such as crafting, cooking, fishing, etc?

Eric: There’s more to Guild Wars 2 than our combat system – we have a wide variety of non-combat activities in the game. All of the major cities in Guild Wars 2 will feature games and activities that people can play regardless of their level. You can slug it out in a bar brawl, test your aim in a shooting gallery, or ride the Smash ‘Em Ups at the carnival.

Q: Will players be able to change their profession after character creation, or will they need to create a new character to change professions?

Eric: Players will be unable to change professions in Guild Wars 2. We’ve designed each profession in the game to be very distinct and different from each other, and many of our game systems take that into account. Because of this, it’s not easy for us to change the profession of a character once they’ve been created.

Thanks, Eric, for taking the time to answer these questions!

Picked up the original games on steam for 20 bucks. Anyone goodjers still play?