Returning to the MMO Space: Guild Wars 2 and my Experience of the Previous Week

Resuming play of an MMO can be met with a number of reasons; social circles and renewed interest from your peers; lack of interest from current titles available to the player; new content via an internal patch or external expansion would name a few.  For me, I’ve experienced a mixture of these factors alongside keeping up to date via YouTube channels and livestreams via Twitch and in short, this last week has been really enjoyable for me getting back into the world of Tyria.  The new areas create an interest mix of verticality and meta-events and although the most recent story arc (Season 2 Living World) has come to its conclusion as of January 2015, I’m looking to set aside some time to go through it all sometime in the next couple of weeks.  With all this being said, my observation of the playtime I’ve had has brought up a number of topics I’ve discussed previously that I want to bring up in a retrospective manner. 

Initial playtime: Exploration

After getting to grips with the changes made to the UI, I travelled to the new areas of the Maguuma wastes which feature heavily in season 2 of the living world.  I first entered the Silver wastes, not knowing much about the zone and roaming around getting an eye on the environment; being quickly met with a cavalcade of events situated at a fort in the south / south-eastern part of the map.  For the next hour or so, my gameplay was exploration through combat which felt frantic but natural in the journey, leading to a boss battle similar to the marionette event of season one where I had previously stopped playing.  In this short period, I had re-learnt my favoured profession (Engineer) to a workable fashion and explored the entire zone reinforcing my desire to keep playing and see what was next. 
Dry top (the second new zone to explore) for me was an unguided journey through the vast verticality that the zone presented, much to the enjoyment of myself.  Exploration and finding new stuff has always been a draw for many players of MMOs (and all types of games to a certain extent) and for me this is no exception.  Seeing a distant treasure or high platform and figuring out the path to take up there without a guide can be an experience met with both enjoyment and frustration but for me it’s all a part of that casual sense of seeing where the road takes you.  I still need to explore the entirety of this area, but I’m looking forward to seeing what it has to offer. 

Mid-week playtime Experiencing Content and Changes

After a couple days playing in the PVE world, I rocked up into the PVP content of both structured PVP (sPVP) and world vs world (WvW) to see how I would fair in such an environment.  I had previously partaken in these game modes in a casual sense with a desire to try different builds and see how they worked, but had an mind-set of being a responsive player in terms of the play/counter play.  To go back to our spectrum from last week, I was moving from the ‘casual’ sense of initial exploration into a more centred position in which I wanted to perform well.  My first couple games went very well with very few deaths and good contributions through kills and capping, but as I met more skilled players my lack of current experience showed.  That being said, I do have a feeling that I would want to get better and maybe in the future be involved in an organised pvp team.  Whether reality will allow that is another thing (as the last time I was massively involved in pvp was WoW some 7-8 years ago, when I was in my teens) but there is definitely a view of mine not just to use pvp as a means to get rewards and grab achievements. 

Mid-late week playtime: Achievement Points and a dip into min-maxing

When I was playing last year, I had a sizeable achievement point score that very few of my guild mates had.  At that point, it was a combination of playing since the 3 day head-start and purposely hunting specific achievements to improve my score but if you were to say I was ‘hard-core’ into something that was the closest I got to.  Now I have returned, my point score is naturally far behind those who kept playing so there is pretty much no way in which I can compete with people who have double my score.  That being said, achievements in a sense of completing challenges set in specific areas or gameplay modes still interest me so I have been slowly racking up the points getting around 500-600 in a week (which is close to what I averaged in a month depending on the content).  This is of course bloated due to a number of ‘fluff’ achievements that I’ve got this past week, but I would say that this is my ‘endgame’ in a roundabout way. 
I have done a small amount of min-maxing in terms of ‘if I’m in zone x and achievement y is here I should do it’ but I’m not going out of my way to make sure this happens.  Where I currently sit is positioning my alts in specific areas to gather materials and the likes on a daily rotation while I continue to have the bulk of my playtime on my main characters (which are currently my engineer and warrior).  However, I am using the warrior rather than resource gathering to get a couple weapon and enemy type kill achievements so in a roundabout way I’m still min-maxing but it’s through natural play and not specifically choosing an area that gets the job done in the fastest way possible. 

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my time in Guild War 2 over the past week and as long as it keeps my interest level at this point I can see myself playing for the foreseeable future.  If I have something to learn from my original playtime, I would say that I should take on a wider range of the spectrum between ‘casual’ and ‘hard-core’ as a means to not burn-out on content as well as being involved in what the world has to offer.  My week of playtime has featured this range of play style and taught me a little about my gaming habits from a teenager into an adult so here’s to future and finding more weird architectural theory crossovers to talk about.