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If not for the outage, would I have played Guild Wars today? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. Yet, because the Guild Wars servers were down, I got a little curious. I actually tried to log into Guild Wars twice today – once this morning and once this afternoon. The first attempt was unsuccessful. The second attempt worked. I logged into game, fought through the Fort Ranik mission and everything seemed fine.

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It’s the end of the world of Tyria, for about a day. An unprecedented outage is planned for Guild Wars. Starting in the wee hours of August 10, 2010, the game could be down for almost 24 hours. In the 5+ years that the game has been running, I’ve never seen an outage this long. It certainly does make me wonder. How long will Guild Wars keep going? Although, with a quick look at my guild’s roster, some players have been inactive for weeks and months. There are probably plenty of players that haven’t played for years. If Guild Wars was shut down forever, would you miss it?

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It’s hot up here in New York City — the headquarters of Photics — and I’ve been pretty busy with other projects too. But in all the heat and busyness, Guild Wars caught my attention. Ah… it’s the annual “Wintersday in July” event. That seemed like the perfect reason to bring my Ranger out of pre-searing territory. Just a quick run through the “Ascalon Academy” and I’d be in snowy territory. I don’t like to see the human homelands in ruins. It’s depressing, but Wintersday helps to ease the transition.

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This RSS Feed thing is nice. This morning I woke up to news about the next Guild Wars 2 profession – The Warrior. In my discussions about the sequel, it wasn’t clear if the meat shield would even be included. Well, the latest information from ArenaNet removes all doubt. It’s just not an MMORPG without a Warrior. Many of you might be excited by this new information. The videos posted on the official Guild Wars 2 website look stunning. Me, I’m still a bit underwhelmed. Not because of the graphics, but because of the audio. More specifically, the words.

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It must be coincidence. I was just working on another mobile app when I heard my Thunderbird alert sound. I was a bit groggy. The physics on my next game are a bit tougher than I imagined. So, I switched over to my PC and I checked my messages. There were two hits from the NCsoft North American Job Feed. One was a listing for a Software Engineer (for the Web). Cool, but those jobs are expected. But the other one, that was a bit surprising to me – Mobile Application Developer. It seems that Guild Wars and their other franchise buddies are venturing into iPhone land.

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Not too long ago, I was in Gunnar’s Hold. That’s nothing new. I’m there a lot. What was unusual was the dialogue. The outpost was filled with conversation about Guild Wars 2. Some of it was negative. If I remember correctly, I saw the word “Vaporware” used to describe the sequel. Who knows? Maybe GW2 will join Duke Nukem in a series of indefinite postponements. But a quick glance of the ArenaNet job listings makes me highly skeptical of such a possibility. Just last week, two new “contract” jobs were posted… Character Artist and Junior Writer/Editor. Not only is this an excellent opportunity for an aspiring game developer, this is reassurance that ArenaNet is working hard on the sequel.

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