The last couple beta weekends, I just played the game and enjoyed it.  This weekend I am going to be a little more focused with launch day in mind.  Here are a few things I am going to do this upcoming beta weekend to help me come launch day.

Premake Characters

I have a few names I want to nab come opening night.  While none of them are book names, I am competing against a large amount of people and I probably won't get them all.  The faster I make my characters, the better odds I have of getting them.  Here is what I am going to do:

• Pick a Race and Gender for each of my characters
• Use notebook paper to write down each of my choices in terms of looks (sliders, face selection, etc)
• Spend time getting the skin / hair / color / choices I want and write them all down.
• In all, I plan to have one notebook page per character that I can quickly use to make my characters at launch time.
• I will brainstorm second and third string names for each character in case my first choice is taken.  (Note: I am not going to actually name any of my BWE characters these names...  If I do that, then someone may prioritize them as the first name they make)
• I will then arrange my characters in the order I most want to get my names and start my highest priority names and end with my second tier... etc.

Find Locations for Crafting Nodes / Recipes / Maps in All Newbie areas

I think the first few days will be the ideal time to focus on crafting, sell excess items and then buy gems from people who are trying to jump start their accounts.  I think a lot of people will buy a bunch of gems (Anet will probably have a prerelease bulk special), and then dump them on the market to give themselves and initial coin advantage.  That means that gems will most likely be the cheapest they are ever going to be at launch.   I also predict the hotest selling items to be crafting materials as a lot of people initially level up crafting.  That means I am going to focus the first week or two of launch on  leveling up crafting and then selling excess materials.  I will then take any money I make and buy gems from other player.  After that I will focus more on PvP, WvWvW and Dungeons.  Here is what I plan to do to help speed up my (and our guilds') early crafting.

• Print out a copy of each starter map.
• Make a note of vendors that sell things like harvesting tools, salvage kits, recipes, crafting components etc.
• Make a note of where nodes are in each zone
• Make a note of creatures that drop fine crafting materials, salvagable components and crafting componet bags
• I then plan on making digital copies of these maps with flash or paint and posting them on the guild forums as a guide.

very nice ideas there ill do some of em too but unfortanly i dont have a printer so ill just copy and paste the marks

http://www.gaiscioch.com/tavern/guildwars_guides/ Made a couple of Mining routes as well as Fine material zone maps in the guide section. Although these guides only have the nodes and materials I needed to progress my weaponsmithing.

» Edited on: 2012-07-12 07:24:25

Nice job on those! I was thinking of doing something similar, but with wood and leather / jute / cooking farms too. Did you find the respawn quick enough for continuous farming of those nodes? I'd heard some cooking nodes were on a 23 hour spawn timer. The ore is on a half hour then?

My priorities are much like yours with regard to premaking characters. Also I'm going to craft a lot this time as I didn't get a chance the last two betas.

» Edited on: 2012-07-12 16:53:18

I was just wondering, if you make a character, name it, and then don't like the hair or something, can you then delete the character and make a new one with that name? or does the name become unusable for a period of time? If you can just delete and remake with same name straight away then a fast way to get all your names saved would be to just make them quickly at launch, and then come back to each one when you are ready to properly design it.

Those ideas sound great! I will have to write some of those down. As far as the names Raighan I was wondering the same thing. If we could just create a toon to kind of be a place holder for the name. I was also wondering if can use special charaters in our names like accent marks Examples

» Edited on: 2012-07-13 08:00:25

» Edited on: 2012-07-13 08:01:50

I would like ANet to answer that too Raighan as that would make a huge difference to how I approach CC on the 25th. During the betas I was able to delete characters and have the names immediately available again, the caveat being that the servers had to be stable. I had a couple of instances when the world and lobby serves were up and down when I had trouble with names.

» Edited on: 2012-07-13 09:41:46

» Edited on: 2012-07-13 09:42:09

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Character_creation#Name In the English language version, a character's name must be 3 to 19 characters long and must be comprised entirely of the 26 letters of the English language and may include optional spaces. The German language version also allows the usage of Ä, Ö and Ü; [verification requested] the requirements for other languages are currently unknown. In Guild Wars, names are reserved for at least 24 hours after a character is deleted, however ArenaNet has not confirmed whether the same system will be in place for Guild Wars 2. During beta testing, names were reserved for at least four hours and less than thirty.

Interesting. If it allows you to reserve characters... it may be better just to create them as fast as possible and then delete them and remake. What are the chances of this working do you think?

I remember rushing for names on Rift, too. It's a drag to wait almost a year and a half to get a barbershop to fix a hastily-formed character. :( The rush for names -- names being unique across all worlds -- intense!!

Jerich, I think your chances are good, (depending on how stable the servers are). This is how it works for GW and I've tested it several times during the GW2 betas. The names are reserved for at least 24 hours but not as long as 30 hours (this was the timer during the betas). This is how I will approach names at launch.

» Edited on: 2012-07-14 13:16:59

I think that will be my plan then. I am going to just hit random and make the character as fast as possible as many times as it takes to get the names I am after. I hope they allow us to add characters to our account pre-launch. It would be nice to have one of each class.

Are we sure what server we will be rolling on yet because I rolled on another server before joining the family... :( Or is Fog holding off on that atm???

Jerich... According to this thread adding character slots is one of the cheapest ways to maximize storage... ;) http://www.gaiscioch.com/tavern/guildwars_discussion/post_32754.html

» Edited on: 2012-07-15 06:22:16 Duh YOU made that post... :P So I'm sure you know about it... :D

» Edited on: 2012-07-15 06:24:28

I really like your idea of getting a notebook page for each character and having it ready with the various cosmetics to make sure you expedite creation to get your character names.