Over the weekend, Guild Wars pushed out a few micro-mini patches. They never tell us what the patches are for, just that terse “new patch is available … GET OUT AND GET IT” message. Not that I need to know, but I’m a curious sort.

Anyhow, I know from the loyal Slashdot readers at AFK Gamer that the terse message means: get out and patch or continue to be annoyed by patch spam every few seconds.

Cool, a patch, thought I. Don’t get that every day in Warcraft, not even every month. heh.

Big problem — patch introduced this universal crash bug somethingorother … hard lockup whenever the character moves. So I rebooted, and headed over to the Guild Wars site to see what’s up and if there’s an ETA (there’s never an ETA, but it could happen someday in some game.) I hadn’t spent too much time exploring their site before, OBVIOUSLY, or else I would have known that they don’t have message boards, just some knowledge base.

Has anybody anywhere ever gotten a solid answer to their question in any knowledge base in under 30 minutes? Those systems have the worst fucking search function on the planet; it would be faster to google.

I know why some gaming houses choose not to run a message board system — I just think it’s horseshit. They may sponsor some “official” fansite to run a system that they’ll occasionally “officially” post on, but what the fuck ever, because everyone knows it’s just a budget decision and the perfect cover for dodging questions.

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So Day Two arrived in Guild Wars (Day One for you non-preordering types, ha!), and we continue our assault on max level in the least amount of time possible. This is the only way to actually win an online game … reduce the nuisance of it all to the minimum time.

Thank whatever god is this game’s diety for instant city travel. If I had to run all over the countryside backtracking as some of these quests expect me to do, I’d be plenty pissed. The instant travel is the bomb –> best … feature … ever. Guild Wars, no matter how brief my stay in this virtual world, will always have a special place in my heart for instant travel.

Here’s something else that’s great: the place is lousy with instances so escaping the unwashed gaming masses is as simple as stepping across a swirly portal thing. My /ignore list is already thankful, and refreshingly light so far with only two additions! I have to insta-travel back to town to sell off my crap loot, and there’s a dogpile of characters dancing by the main gate (WHY?? WHY??). Naturally, they’re filling the public channel with their unsolicited opinions about fucking everything, so much so that I can’t even keep up with tells from guildmates … zap! into an instance away from the madding crowd.

There. Two things that I like. I even said so in TeamSpeak and everyone else agreed … insta-travel and instances to escape the general population are two very good things.

The End.

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