Guilded Lilies

Stafford Gold: On Paying for a Game Education

I have been working on getting all my financial aid details in order this week to pay for school, and I am amazed at just how abstract this whole process is.  I have found that Stafford loans are just like game gold, and I have to remind myself that this is real-world money from time to time to keep the whole process in focus.  I have a special online account through school to receive my Stafford loans - the money goes into my virtual bank account, sits there beyond my reach, and then is deducted out to pay my tuition.  No trips to the bank, no checks to sign, no sensation of anything real about this money as it passes through my virtual hands.  It reminds me of my stash of Guild Wars gold, and I keep thinking that if I don't have enough money from the Stafford loans to pay for everything I can just go out and farm for a while to refill the coffers.  If only.

Imagine making your fortune in Second Life selling virtual real estate, and then using your Linden Dollars to pay off your student loans.  Or what would really be wonderful for me is to be able to pay for some of my tuition with Guild Wars gold - since otherwise I will just spend it on over-priced armor or those special Green weapons that never seem to drop for me.  For those of you who spend most of your free time accumulating wealth in Azeroth, wouldn't it be great to be able to send off some of that hard earned gold to the bursar once the semester starts up?  The exchange rate for virtual gold would have to be watched over by some kind of Wall Street-ish virtual currency trading market - but since the financial future is likely brighter in these online worlds than in the current real-world economy the market is sure to be bullish.  Besides, everyone knows that gold is a solid investment in time of economic uncertainty: Just ask the folks at IGE.

Who better to appreciate the value of virtual gold than a digital game school?  If any educational institution should appreciate the value of game gold it is these specialty schools.  Time spent accumulating virtual wealth is time spent better understanding the structure of the game worlds, and in my experience it is the wealthiest players that seem to understand best how things work in these worlds.  Surely these are qualities to be appreciated by the schools set up to educate the next generation of game makers.  So is it that much of a stretch to think they might also reward students with accumulated game gold?  Well, of course it is, but the fact is it is more fun to think about this than the reality of taking on so much real-world debt, which is exactly what I must get back to doing.

WTB(orrow): 10K at prime + 0.50%.  Good credit rating - whisper if interested.

Holiday! Celebrate! : Guild Wars Factions Dragon Festival

Arena Net knows how to throw a party, and the extended weekend Guild Wars Factions' bash known as the Dragon Festival was no exception.  The format was similar to other Guild Wars celebrations, with specifically themed quests and special holiday resources to gather leading up to the main festival that took place on July 4th, but the Dragon Festival exceeded previous Guild War Prophecy campaign parties on many levels.

I particularly enjoyed the mini-games included in the five day festival, including games of chance and a Guild Wars version of the arcade classic Whac-a-Mole that involved tagging worm hatchlings as they randomly emerged from the ground.  The mini-games designed as part of the July 4th festival itself were also well designed, and culminated with beautiful fireworks and the appearance of festival presents to gather. Additionally, players who gathered enough Jade Wind Orbs over the course of the event were awarded a Dragon Festival mask for their characters.   

There were moments when you could feel the presence of the 2 million plus subscribers through temporary game lagg, but otherwise the Dragon Festival was a blast.  It is the detail and thought that Arena Net puts into events like this, as well as the beautiful aesthetic of the world design, that keep me hooked on this game after over a year of playing.

Here are some more screens of the event:

Guild Wars Factions: Coconuts

In anticipation of the release of Guild Wars: Factions, I was thinking about buying the Prima game guide to go with the new game so I went to check it out on Amazon:

And for some reason this song (as sung by Monty Python) popped into my head:

"I've got a lo-ve-ly bunch of coconuts (They're lovely!)
There they are a standing in a row.
(One, two, three, four)
Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head
(And bigger)
Give 'em a twist, a flick of the wrist, thats what the showman said."

Huh!  I wonder why?

UPDATE 4/28/06:  Now YOU can sing along too!

 

Guild Wars Factions Weekend

The Guild Wars Factions Preview Weekend Event is underway!  Here are a few screens from the new Factions world. It's great to see all this architecture in the game world, and it provides a very different atmosphere for the game.

Click on images for larger versions.

More information about the free preview can be found on the Guild Wars website HERE.

Guild Wars: Wearin' O' The Green

Here's a few screens taken this morning of some Guild Wars characters dressed in the spirit of St. Patrick's Day:

So dye your armor green for the day and then ask a Mesmer to step dance for you!

Beannachtai na Féile Pádraig fellow Tyrians!

Click images for larger versions.  By the way, the seated ranger's name is Lucky Shot Pat.

The Guild Wars Law Of Inverse Proportion

The armor designs that are part of the Guild Wars game posses an interesting property. As your character advances through the game there are several choices of styles per character class and gender for increased protection.  What I find to be a curious bit of logic is that the less armor there is covering the character's body the more protection it offers (and the more in game gold is costs to buy).  I have dubbed this phenomenon The Guild Wars Law of Inverse Proportion.

In mathematics an inverse proportion is defined this way:

"Two quantities, A and B, are in inverse proportion if by whatever factor A changes, B changes by the multiplicative inverse, or reciprocal, of that factor."

Although the actual algorithms used to calculate armor stats during combat may not adhere to this mathematical definition, a few minutes capturing screen shots at Marhan's Grotto offers up some compelling anecdotal evidence.  Marhan's is one of the sources for what is know as 15K armor, due to the price of 15,000 gold per armor piece. These 15K armors are not all so revealing, but they do offer some of the skimpier options in the Guild Wars universe in damage protection.

How do they keep from catching an arrow in that long expanse of a midriff?

There is an amusing piece on Wonderland addressing a similar issue in WoW, which was presented in conjunction with an original post on The Geeky Feminist entitled "I Blame the Patriarchy".  The later was written in response to the plethora of female Elementalist characters dancing in the towns with nothing but their undies on.

Just in case you think it is only female characters running around in the buff in Tyria, here's a few parting images:

How Old Are You Now?: Growing Old Online

I recently discovered that there is a command in Guild Wars that tells you how long you have been playing the game.  Not without trepidation I typed /age and received this message:

"You have played this character for 424 hours 3 minutes over the past 8 months.  Across all characters, you have played for 510 hours 23 minutes over the past 8 months."

Two initial thoughts came to me: First, I had no idea I had spent that much time playing this game, and second, no wonder I like this character so much, we have spent a lot of time together!  Then of course, I couldn't resist, so I pulled out the calculator.  Eight months is roughly 240 days or 5760 hours.  I have spent 21 ¼ full days in the last 8 months playing Guild Wars, or 9% of my time.  If you just count waking hours in the day, then it is closer to 32 days.  So basically I spend one waking hour in eight playing this game.

It took me a while to digest this statistical analysis.  Rather than dwell on all the things I might have done without Guild Wars in my life (because I'm realistic enough to know that if it wasn't Guild Wars it would have just been some other game) I decided to try and put these figures into perspective.  One of the joys of statistics is their malleability, so in classic Mark Twain style (remember his three kind of lies - "lies, damned lies, and statistics"?) I decided to make this bit of information work for me.

I began by putting my numbers in context with other Guild Wars players.  In an impromptu and highly unscientific survey with the members of my guild I found that among those who had been playing for about the same lengyh of time (7 to 8 months) I had spent the least amount of hours playing.  Not only had I spent less time, but I had spent considerably less time, with my guild mates out pacing me by 2 or 3 times the number of hours, with the most dedicated member of my guild having played 5 times as many hours as me in the same 8 month period.

What about the amount of time people spend on other sedentary recreations, such as watching television?  I took a trip over to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website and looked at the figures from 2004 (the most recent available) from the American Time Use Survey.  I found that on average men say they spend 20 hours a week watching TV and women say they spend 17 hours a week.  My 10 ½ hours of game time is looking pretty good in comparison.

Does this mean I think that playing computer games is a waste of time?  Not in the least.  That attitude is everywhere, though, so it is difficult to avoid feeling compelled to justify time spent playing games.  I don't think people generally consider that time spent gaming isn't so much time spent not being a useful member of society as it is time spent away from other types of recreational entertainment.  More importantly for me, as long as Coca Cola doesn't figure out how to do product placement in the Land of Tyria, it means time spent not being bombarded by the unrelenting onslaught of commercial advertising.  According to this Wikipedia entry, a typical hour of US television consists of 18 - 24 minutes of commercial time.  If you do the math you find out that the typical television watcher spends 5½ to 7½ hours a week watching  TV commercials. How unproductive is that?

I may be growing old online as the hours tick by on my /age counter, but at least I don't have to sit through another commercial for toilet paper while doing it.