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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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Yesterday, I found a new toy to play with. Thanks to a software update from Apple, my iPod Touch is now able to use iBooks. This app allows me to read books and magazines in PDF and ebook formats… but what does that have to do about Guild Wars? Well, naturally, I grabbed the latest issue of my Guild Wars fanzine to test it out. It was pretty awesome… slow… but awesome. I was reading about Guild Wars, and looking at the pretty pictures, on my iPod Touch.

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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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Today is the last Monday in May. That means it’s Memorial Day in the United States. It’s quite a significant occasion. In addition to being the the unofficial start of Summer — and a national holiday — Memorial Day is a time to honor and remember Americans who died in war. When I stopped to reflect about the significant of the day, Guild Wars popped into my head. ArenaNet has made a game about War. Is there an in-game event to mark the significance of the day? I checked the announcement window, but there were no events listed for today. I began to ponder the situation – should there be a Guild Wars event for Memorial day?

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