I turned 30 this year. I haven’t pulled an all nighter in years and I haven’t been to a midnight opening in prolly as long. It was fun to brew coffee and jump into the game at the first possible moment.

I won’t be able to play for extended periods of time until this time next week when internship is finished. I still need to find a job and finish my dissertation, so it’s not like I have all kinds of free time. Still, I want to write a longer post about my thoughts so far. That will come some time next week or so. Some things have been great, some slightly disappointing, and some are just, well, they’ll take some getting used to.

For now, I’m going to call it a night. I got Belzan up to level 12 today, completed all of Rata Sum, and got to play around with crafting a little bit.

I hope you enjoy the headstart access! More to come later!

Anyway, here’s the video that made me squee:

Belzan: GW2 Necro

Belzan the asuran elementalist

I had less time to play this last BWE than I thought, so I spent much of that time with the character creation process. I decided to go ahead and make all my characters. I liked playing with the bioluminescence of the sylvari. Also, I made some changes to some of my characters as a result of playing with the character creator.

I will stick with 8 characters after all (instead of 10). I don’t need a second engineer (my norn female) and I wasn’t terribly excited with the female charr. Also, I was very excited about female asura, so I decided to mix and match. Rather than have either my charr thief or my asura ranger (second ranger), I am opting for a female asura thief. Her name is Nicha and I’ll write a story for her later when I have some free time.

I also really enjoyed playing a warrior over the weekend. I was surprised by this, to be honest. I was never impressed by the tank role and every time I played a warrior, this is what people expected of me. I had so much fun playing Belzan as a N/W Meleemancer. I like the up close and personal nature of the warrior in GW2 and there are so many options as far as the weapons. It was a lot of fun and I didn’t even get to unlock all the weapons.

I hope everyone else had fun with the BWE. I unfortunately have a laptop with a subpar graphics chipset, so it was kind of shaky, even running on the lowest setting (still a great improvement over crash-mageddon from BWE1). Jumping puzzles were fun, but also maddening.

I’m looking forward to playing for reals very soon. There might be a delay for personal reasons (I’m months from graduating with my PsyD and I must finish my dissertation and find a job ASAP), but I will make all my characters and play a bit before launch (headstart FTW!)

Chronicles of Tyria (click!)

A blog after my own heart. CoT seeks to do globally what I do here on my own: Tell Stories. It looks to be a nice place to write and share fan fiction, character stories, and just talk about the avatar you will be devoting lots and lots of your personal time on. I intend to take part in CoT’s mission, but I haven’t totally decided if I will post Belzan stuff there. It will certainly be an outlet for at least one of my characters. That just gave me another nifty idea… Put a pin in that one for later

Adventure Awaits (click!)

The blog of Ameranth, who is also this Ameranth, and of no relation to this Amaranth. The inclusion of Ameranth as an NPC in GW2 is just plain cool, but not nearly as cool as the original story of walking from Maine to California with a very cute dog. The story is quite inspirational and epic. I would like to do something equally epic, but for now I’ll have to settle on more academic achievements and training for an eventual marathon.

I hope you enjoy these blogs as much as you do mine. I am of the opinion that a blog is a place to tell a story. Some are epic. Some are fun and curious. Some are more for yourself than for others. Whatever the case, find a blog or two (or a dozen) you like and subscribe. Feel free to start with mine

And it was deep snow.

History Lesson

I started this blog for GW because once upon a time a guild leader (who shall not be named) /ragequit his guild and banned people from the forums, thus cutting me off from pages of fan fiction and character stories that I worked hard on and naively stored only on the forum.

Lesson learned.

I kept a personal blog on livejournal, but it didn’t have the capability I wanted for a character-centric blog. Also, like myspace before it, people were leaving livejournal and going other places. So I followed.

If you’re a new blogger, check out the Newbie Blogger Initiative site. Mind the mess and watch where you step, it’s a new site and there are ads everywhere right now. I expect the site will be much prettier in weeks/months to come and as more and more “veteran bloggers” or “sponsors” make their way to the site, there will be more and more useful content to help people just starting out.

Advice from Belzan about blogging

Two pieces of advice today and prolly more down the road.

1. Find a site that meets your needs. WordPress was recommended to me by a friend, but there are lots and lots and lots of blog sites out there. I of course recommend WordPress, but Blogger, Xanga, and LiveJournal are all good places to start. The biggest question early on is: how serious are you? I’m a casual blogger and I use WordPress to host my site. You can generally do that for free, but you can also pay a small fee to host your own site. You get a lot more options that way. For now though, I recommend finding a site you like, posting, and tinkering with your options. If you’re really starting from scratch, do a Google Search. There are lots of quality how-to guides out there.

2. Share! Post! Comment! While I believe I write quality material from time to time, I wouldn’t have half the traffic or followers I do now if it weren’t for fellow bloggers. Hunter paved the road to my site in a big way back when GW2 was first announced. I stumbled upon his site and liked what he had to say, so I started following him and commenting. Soon he started following me. Then people started noticing he followed me and were like “cool, Hunter thinks this site is worth following, maybe I’ll check it out.”

Lather. Rinse. Repeat folks. Make connections and people will read your blog. Every time I find a blog I like I add it to my blogroll <–. I also write for Talk Tyria and people follow the breadcrumbs from that site to mine. The blogging community is just that–a community.

Why Blog?

ArenaNet’s take on the Guild Wars 2 community will change the status quo of Guild Wars fandom. Hundreds of fansites cropped up around Guild Wars covering every topic imaginable. With ANet’s official GW2 forum and official wiki, many of the fansites of old are likely to go the way of the dodo. A blog is a great way to offer your unique perspective on the game and on your interests. My interest is writing fan fiction and creating detailed character stories for roleplaying. And occasionally screaming from high atop a soapbox…. I write my blog because I feel like there are at least a few people out there who enjoy reading my stories. I write my blog because it is a place where I can write freely about what I want. I write my blog because I like to connect and communicate with others who are interested in the same things I am.

So feel free to start a blog and claim your slice of the internet. Share your interests. And explore other blogs. Sites like Newbie Blogger Initiative and events like GuildMag’s Blog Carnival will help you get started and help put eyeballs on your site. It’s up to you to make your blog interesting. Now there’s the challenge

After crash.

Character creation works just fine, so I have done lots of that. I’ve also made it through the tutorial for each race and killed some critters, but that’s as far as I got. I was logged in for between <1 minute to ~10 minutes. I enjoyed what I played, but I want to play more. The most play time I have had so far has been with my elementalist. I did my best to create Harry Dresden as a norn and made him into a fire ele. I had some fun, but it was frequently short-lived.

ANet’s been pretty good about working on crashing issues, but mine haven’t been resolved, sadly. It’s beta though, so I expected to encounter problems.

That being said, I want to take a minute to rant at those people who are whining about beta…

Seriously folks. It’s beta. You haven’t wasted your money if beta has problems. It’s beta. It’s going to have problems. Are there more issues than expected? Perhaps. But you didn’t pre-purchase the beta, you pre-purchased the game. If the game comes out and has these problems, then you can complain. Until then, learn some patience or find another game.

So yeah, I plan on kicking ass and taking names in future betas. For now, I’ll peruse the videos and pics on the new GW2guru and read the beta forums.

Belzan in BWE1