Hopefully, next time, we’ll get to the more persistent world changing events when the five starting areas begin to converge.

There isn’t really a distinction between melee and ranged in GW2, since every class is able to do both, including the heavy armor classes: warriors and guardians. The melee problem only arises if you try to stand toe to toe with a powerful mob and trade blows – you can’t do that and survive:

People haven’t yet quite absorbed what Arenanet meant about losing the trinity; and will need to get used to a style of play with much more movement, evading and skill synergy than previous games.

Perhaps because I spend most of my time on a Jedi Knight, I have not quite experienced the disconnect you’re talking about here. At the peak of his powers, while acknowledged as one of the best single combatants in the galaxy, he is still something of a factotum for the Jedi Council. While I’m not (yet) adequately familiar with the Inquisitor storyline, I could imagine those types being subtle and employing guises to take care of things personally. Wasn’t Palps a senator from backwater Naboo, pretending to bow and scrape to politicians while already the Dark Lord?

As for beta testing, the bigger problem is players treating it like a free trial when it’s an unfinished product, resulting in a game that attempts to please everyone and pleases no one. I don’t want people who won’t be playing a game to influence the direction it takes. Sure they can just filter out all the surveys with 1s (or 5s for that matter) across the board but I like that they took this route to weed out the potential trolls an open beta otherwise attracts. I never saw it as a reward for pre-purchase, and the D3 pre-purchase didn’t even grant that from my understanding.

Obviously it’s a marketing strategy but it makes more sense from a business and creative standpoint than open beta, which probably had a hand in undermining past game releases.

Yes. Digital Edition… sold out.

Call me cynical, but how the hell does a digital version of the software run out?

I’ll answer that… when they need more people to buy the collector’s edition.

I might end up buying it, but I suspect it won’t be any time soon not for any reason other than I have Diablo 3 coming out soon and that will occupy me well enough.

Pre-purchase to get into beta?

What the heck is the industry coming to where beta testing is a reward?

Sitting on voice coms listening to things, the gank fleets were clearly targeting only freighters carrying valuable items. So lots of people came and went with no issue. I sat there in a rookie ship for hours and nobody bothered me. But for a couple dozen freighter pilots, things went bad. One guy was hauling PLEX according to the kill mail.

A lot of the activity was the battles between the Save Jita and Burn Jita fleets. People who had no interesting in ganking people showed up for the fleet fights. So declaring war on the Goons, thus making combat free of CONCORD interference, increased participation in the whole thing.

It reminds me, oddly, of Guild Wars 1 in that I like the ideas they’ve come up with, it’s just the implementation of said ideas has been so pedestrian that I wonder if someone else could have done something far more interesting with it all.

I’m going to play it but I’m also going to have doubts about the opinion of anyone who points to it as a second coming.