Guild Wars: More Ways to Earn Points!

The highly modular design of Guild Wars is meant to create less grind than World of Warcraft, but some of its progression tracks still encourage a very limited set of extremely repetitive tasks. It’s not that I’m too lazy to improve my characters (My primary warrior is already a Legendary Sunspear in Nightfall and a Legendary Delver in Eye of the North.), it’s just that I’d like more ways to improve my characters.

I’ve lost count of the thousands upon thousands of convicts I’ve systematically executed in the Jade Arena just to earn Luxon ranks in Factions. I can still see their faces when I close my eyes, and they’re all the same.

That’s why I heave a sigh of relief as ArenaNet introduces a whole bunch of new ways to earn points in various title tracks across Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North. Further expanding a game mechanic introduced in the Bonus Mission Pack, they’ve also implemented storybooks across all campaigns.

It’s a long, long list of changes, but it’s all good for those of us who want a little more variety in our quests for self-improvement. Check out the full changelog at the Guild Wars wiki.

Friendster Down. Who Cares?

Five million Filipinos can’t find their friends this morning, because Friendster is down. Jim Ayson’s contact at the social networking service says the downtime is due to a power outage at Friendster’s US data center.

To be fair, Friendster is trying to engage the local blogosphere in a key geographic market. Most of their users are in the Philippines, where I also happen to be based. They invited me to a roundtable with their marketing guy the other day, but I was too busy to come. Nevertheless, all the marketing in the world cannot make up for service outages.

Of course, Facebook is now the world’s number one social network, so we’ve still got that to keep up with our friends. I’m going to watch the traffic stats on this post to see if anyone still cares about Friendster.