In my weekly summaries of Guild Wars 2, I've looked at exploration, combat, and crafting. I've been chasing vistas, leveling slowly, and getting sucked into events as they pop up around me. I've even been cautiously exploring the big, boisterous, overwhelming experience that is world vs world PvP.

In total, I've learned a lot of things about Guild Wars 2. The full, formal review will be coming next week, so for this, my last log, I leave you with a list of all the miscellaneous things I've learned, experienced, and decided in Guild Wars 2 this week.

1.) There are several very kind players in the game who will wander by and resurrect you after you have fallen off a cliff.

1a.) Don't log out standing on the edge of a cliff. You'll pay for it when you log back in.

1b.) Also, if you happen to have a number of combat arts that involve "shadowstep" or other wide, leaping changes in position, don't use them next to a cliff either.

2.) There are jerks in the game who will train a half-dozen over-leveled mobs onto your sorry under-leveled self, and then will not only not help you fight them off, but will in fact stand right next to your corpse and not even toss a revive your way afterward. When this happens almost immediately after encountering kind souls at the bottom of a cliff you have unexpectedly and fatally traversed, the difference is rather jarring.

3.) There's just no good way to do underwater levels. Every game has them. And in every game, they're flawed. I do like that Guild Wars 2 allows players two switchable sets of underwater weapons in addition to two switchable sets of land-based weapons, but neither the spear nor the harpoon gun I have is as elegant and useful as the daggers and pistols I am accustomed to use. The harpoon gun also makes it easy to get in a lot of trouble with adds without meaning to.

Maybe it's just me. In theory I like the freedom of the Z axis but in practice I tend to find it cumbersome and awkward to navigate. And my thief swims so very, very slowly.

4.) I know it's called Lion's Arch, but I will forever call it Tortuga, at least in my head. Also it's my new favorite city. Like, ever. Anywhere. The whole thing is made of ships! Gorgeous ships! I want to live there. No, I don't care how structurally unsound it is.

4a.) There are PIRATES in Tortuga. Actual pirates. I would like all of their clothes now, please and thank you. Can I run away with them later (the pirates, not their clothes)? Oh, I hope so.

5.) It took a while for my character's personal story to get meaty. Now, I'm digging it, but that has a lot to do with the introduction of various world factions. And when given the chance to pick among scholars (the Durmand Priory), soldiers (the Vigil), and spies (the Order of Whispers), it turns out I will pick spies pretty much every time. Although should I ever get my Engineer alt high enough, I can see her as the Priory type.

6.) I only rarely get kicked to overflow now. Tortuga Lion's Arch is always busy, and whenever I hit the plaza with the Asura gates I can count on an overflow message. But aside from just once or twice at peak play times, I haven't gotten dropped in overflow while popping around the world. The combination of early-launch-rush on the player side and ArenaNet working out population loads on their side seems to have hit its balance point.

7.) The queues for World vs World, on the other hand, can be nuts. The first time I decided to go into the Mists, I had a five-minute wait. Tuesday night, I wanted to go in and the queue was so long that when I got the pop-up a half-hour later asking me if I was ready to travel, I had completely forgotten I ever signed up for the queue.

8.) The server-wide World vs World bonuses are really very nice. I am not particularly great at playing through the Borderlands zones; I find them overwhelming, if intriguing. But apparently folks on my server, in general, are. The bonuses applied to the characters I level have just been increasing for the last week, and now sit at the point where I am accustomed to getting four pulls from every harvesting node, and significant XP bonuses for every kill. Should our red and blue rivals (my server is green) sort themselves out anytime soon, I think I will notice the loss of the benefits rather sharply.

9.) The best way to get good screenshots in the Mists is to be dead. It's a surprisingly good vantage point.

I didn't spend very much time dead, honestly; I got fairly good at dodging attacks, and my teammates were lovely about quick revives. (I tried my best to provide the same service in kind.) Hitting F to finish off your opponent, meanwhile, is more satisfying than it probably should be. Sorry, red guys. I really did take joy in your demise. That wasn't very nice of me but, you know, war.

10.) Even the PvP zones need exploring. There are vistas in the Borderlands WvW zones. This means I need to explore them all. Thoroughly. I managed to branch off and grab a few already, but the ones in the heart of enemy territory are going to be... challenging.

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Overall, I am not particularly driven to level quickly, even as more and more of my guild-mates get characters to 80. Guild Wars 2 is encouraging me to take a careful, thorough approach to my playing. I tend to want to bring a map to 100% before I move on to the next, though sometimes I do overlap. (I started exploring Gendarran Fields at level 21, because I like getting in trouble.)

In short, the world is too much fun for me to want to race through it. Sometimes you just need to stop and smell the roses. Or, better yet, go swimming.

Having been in development for so long, the artists behind Guild Wars 2 had literally years to put together an immense volume of images detailing the game's world and inhabitants.

It's all impressive stuff - so impressive it's been featured here on Fine Art multiple times - but tonight we're going to put it all in the one place.

This is The Art of Guild Wars 2, a book that has just a ton of publicly-available pieces of art for the game. It's an impressive collection; where most game art books are full of giant white spaces and pages being dominated by shiny promotional art, from front to back The Art of Guild Wars 2 has nothing but paintings, sketches and everything else you expect (and want) to see when you're interested in the creation of a game, not in how it's sold.

I got a copy last week and absolutely loved it. There's just so much art from one of the most talented teams in the business that it makes my head spin. Topping it all off are brief but informative notes from the artists themselves, a rarity when books like these are often written by a single PR-smoothed representative or editor.

About the only downside is the quality of the book itself; it ships as a paperback, which given its size means it feels more like a thick magazine or Ikea catalogue than a coffee table book.

That should only worry those who give a shit about what's on the outside, though. On the inside, there's enough beautiful imagery and insightful commentary that I really think this is the best video game art book since Half-Life 2's Raising the Bar. Which for fans of the field is certainly something.

You can grab the book here.

UPDATE - No you can't! Clicking through reveals the book has been sold out for, well, a long time. Something I wasn't aware of when thumbing through my review copy, which was shipped last week. Sorry for getting your hopes up!

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

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Massively multiplayer online games have this way of becoming a rush to the top. If a game has 50 levels, 49 of them will end up being considered inconsequential as players float up to the level cap and then stay there. As more and more players reach the limit, more and more of the game ends up focusing around them. Even a game like Diablo III, technically not an MMORPG at all, ends up with endgame woes.

Guild Wars 2 has been out for less than three weeks, but already power-minded players are driving their characters to level 80 in droves. And yet, ArenaNet representatives say on their blog, that's not really where all of the "good" content is, and players may as well slow down and enjoy the process.

"We didn't want the endgame to be something you could only experience after a hundred hours of gameplay or after you reached some arbitrary number," ArenaNet's Mike Zadorojny wrote, "so we've introduced game elements that you'd normally associate with "endgame" at every level and every possible opportunity." The hope is that players will find value in more activities than the traditional top-level gear hunt and raid circuit. Dedication to crafting and exploring each have their own extrinsic rewards, as well as dedication to the fine art of going places and killing stuff.

But will the focus on spreading boss monsters, drama, dungeons, and explorable locations across the entire 1-80 game actually placate players who sped to the top? Sure, "the dynamic events become larger, the battles more spectacular, the circumstances more dire" as players level, but they still remain the same sort of content that players have been poking their noses into from their first tutorial boss.

Eventually, there comes a time where players have simply exhausted their options, and going back to explore low-level content missed along the way up loses its allure. There are promises of "new types of events, new dungeons, new bosses, new rewards, and new places for players to explore" in the works, and based on the first Guild Wars ArenaNet will no doubt deliver regular content additions. Hopefully, players will learn to enjoy the journey and not just the destination.

The Endgame Reimagined [Official Blog]

Oh, dear. I have begun crafting.

I put it off until I reached level 20 with my main, and truth be told it's just as well. I've never yet sold or traded away any of the crafting materials I've come across (though I should really put the ones I can't use into the guild bank), and I still ran out remarkably quickly. Ah, well. One basic set of armor that I didn't need, and a couple of eight-slot bags that I did, and it was back into the field with me to acquire more leather and jute.

Why couldn't I have picked a crafting discipline that relies on easily-mined metals or readily-chopped trees? Silly me. Still, half a decade as an Assassin-Tailor in EverQuest II seems to have prepared me remarkably well for putting in time as a Thief-Leatherworker in Guild Wars 2. In fact, a lot of what I see in GW2 reminds me, pleasantly, of a more streamlined version of EQII.

"Streamlined," though, is the operative word. The "Discoveries" tab is a great addition to crafting, but I'm a particular fan of the "craft all" button that lets a player refine a huge stack of stuff into a smaller stack of more usable stuff almost instantly. That, right there, is a fantastic feature that makes crafting feel almost fun, rather than punishing like I'm used to it being from other games.

I really needed a crafting break for a while too, because group events on the overland maps had been wearing me down. It's one thing to zone from a safe spot in the overflow to the middle of a melee on the "real" server when there are plenty of players at hand. Suddenly to find yourself alone, surrounded by an event appropriate for 5-15 players? I'd like to say that at least I made my deaths count, but I really didn't. Two dozen level 24+ monsters, to one level 19 me? It feels profoundly unfair, and while the penalties for death are at least minimal, I began deeply to resent the incessant, repeated events that made up the war between the Seraph and the centaurs in the Kessex Hills.

Indeed, the repetitive nature of the large overland zones began to get to me this past week. I enjoy collecting vista views and points of interest, and heart quests and skill challenges are worth completing for their rewards. The pattern, though, grows stale fairly quickly, especially given how many of the heart quests I've completed are utterly interchangeable with one another. (Surprise! Whenever a trap needs checking or a rock needs turning over, it'll have an angry creature in it!)

I do now wish that the first available dungeon zone were at level 20 or 25, instead of level 30. While I've settled into a groove that gains me about two levels per day, it's a groove that's in danger of becoming a rut. Exploring the world still motivates me—particularly now that I've been able to walk from my starting area, through a higher-level area, to other races' starting areas—but when a map's uncovered, it's uncovered.

At least the maps I'm uncovering remain beautiful, though, and fun to explore. And once a character hits 20 and has amassed some weapons expertise, skill points, and skill slots, playing a class really starts to come into its own. The ability to swap out my preferred pistol/dagger weapon set for a bow at pretty much any time is enormously useful, particularly when I find myself standing in the midst of a massive event, with attackers drawing in from all sides.

Simon Goinard has been doing freelance work for the past decade, with his art featuring for clients as diverse as Disney, Exxon, Camel and Aston Martin.

He's also done quite a bit of video game work, with an equally-impressive list of employers like Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and Guild Wars developers ArenaNet.

You can see more of Simon's incredible work at his personal site (thanks CAW!)

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

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Guild Wars 2 has some of the medium's finest concept art. And while the actual game engine often struggles to do it justice, the game's environments can still look absolutely beautiful, proving once again that powerful "graphics" are often no match for strong art design.

So, Guild Wars 2 has a lot of cliffs and high ledges in it. Really, a lot of them. Jumping up and climbing and platforming are a significant part of the experience. Unfortunately for players like me, unlike other games it has no safe fall skill you can train up. Falling equals falling damage and, often, falling death.

It also has, particularly in PvP, a bit of a mob rush mentality, for the moment. A wild event appears, and everyone chases it. Perhaps to their detriment (and to their demise).

In fact, the lemmings have more sense than to leap off a cliff unprompted. MMO players? Well, we'll do anything for a lark. So if anyone's mother asks, "Well if all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?" the answer is apparently, "Well, if we're in GW2, then yes."

ArenaNet had shut off their digital sales of Guild Wars 2 a few days after last month's launch, explaining that the demand was simply too high, and existing players' needs needed to be attended to first. Since then, they've gotten the servers sorted out, the trading post online, and (from my experience, at least) significantly reduced the frequency of getting kicked to overflow. So, with the early rush mellowed out, ArenaNet announced that they've re-opened their own digital sales.

They made the announcement by passing around the new official trailer for the game, a more or less completely inexplicable live-action launch trailer that looks more out of The Secret World than Guild Wars 2. Of all the questions it could spur—and there are many—for some reason the one that lingers the most in my mind is: why is that woman's living room underwater?

Hackers armed with email addresses and passwords stolen from other sources are probing Guild Wars 2 accounts to see if they can break in and use the accounts for botting or spamming gold sales, ArenaNet confirmed earlier today. The statement came after many users were notified of attempted logins to their account from locations in China.

"Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts," ArenaNet advised through the Guild Wars official wiki. " To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you've never used anywhere else!"

ArenaNet reminds users that a hacked account is banned and unusable until it can be returned to its rightful owner. "If you login and see the message: 'This account has been permanently banned for a violation of the User Agreement,' and if you're not a gold seller, it's likely that your account was hacked." They ask affected account holders to contact customer service.

"If you see email authentication messages in your inbox asking you to approve a login that you didn't initiate and from someplace you don't recognize, that's a sign that a hacker knows your account name and password, and is only being prevented by the email authentication feature from accessing your account," the publisher continued. "You should immediately change your password to a new, unique password that you've never used anywhere else." (emphasis ours.)

Whether you've been hacked, threatened by a hack or not, this is as good reminder as any to use email authentication for your Guild Wars 2 account, and make sure your password is unique to that account.

Game Status Updates [Guild Wars Wiki; h/t reader N.P.]

My adventures in Guild Wars 2 continue. I've logged in nearly every day for the past few weeks, if only for a few moments. I remain enamored of the art, and in my sessions I nearly always feel like I accomplished something.

I tend to like play sessions about 60 to 90 minutes long, it seems, before I feel fit to wander away. And yet in those hours, I have killed many a beast, earned many a heart, and explored many, many map markers. Still, though, the game offers much I haven't seen—and some things, I'm happy to find absent.

So two weeks in, here are some things I haven't experienced in Guild Wars 2, for good and bad both.

1.) I have not played in a formal group.

Grouping is still a little troubled, a week after launch, but the overflow server situation has improved rather dramatically overall. I'm getting the "you have been moved to overflow" message perhaps a third of the time, on zoning in, rather than seeing it always. Members of my guild have successfully been forming parties, but honestly I just haven't needed to yet. I've certainly fought monsters far too big to bring down on my own, but especially in these early days there are always dozens of people around to work with, and a tab of guild chat to keep me company. Eventually I will join dungeon groups, but that hasn't happened yet in large part because...

2.) I have not hit level 20 with any character.

I do have a favorite: my human thief. She's just barely shy of 16 (my others are all in the single digits) and I'm now ready to move on to the 15-25 maps, having completely finished the Queensdale 1-17 area. Her story quests can be surprisingly difficult, though. I waited until the back half of level 14 to take on her level 11 story instance ("Voices From the Past") and it was a brutal mess that I had to take multiple stabs at. I want to level up in order to see more of the world, but for the time being I'm happy to completely fill out every map as I go and take it all at a slower, somewhat less deadly pace. I'm not sure what end-game could have to offer me that mid-game does not.

3.) I have not completed the 13 daily achievements, ever.

I have come painfully close a number of times. But over the weekend, I finally realized that the "day" resets around 8:00 p.m. EDT. For someone like me, who does most of her playing between 7:00 and 10:00 in the evening, that means the day's accomplishments completely reset in the middle of the average play session. I know any hour would be inconvenient somewhere on earth but man that stinks for us US east coast players. In a game that so starkly quantifies every action the player takes—and issues rewards based on those counts—it feels unfair that I should be unable to make progress because the game's schedule doesn't recognize when my days are.

4.) I have not reported anyone for an offensive name or problem speech.

It's not that I wouldn't, if I had to; I'm not terribly shy about throwing up flags for the really gross stuff that ruins communities. It's that I haven't had to. Local area chat, on my server, is startlingly well-behaved. The only things I've ever seen in /say are strategies for an event, pleas for a rez, or thanks for a timely revive. It's the most polite multiplayer game I've played in a very long time.

5.) I have not yet tried crafting or using the trading post.

It's a little overwhelming, to be honest. After asking some NPCs about what I could learn to make, I settled on making my thief into a leatherworker. I figured, it never hurts to be able to make your own armor upgrades. But learning what needs to be broken down into what parts, or what I need to do to learn to craft useful things from the recipes I seem to magically have, is more complicated. On the one hand I want to take up crafting for both self-sufficiency and for spare income, but on the other hand the game makes it really easy to be lazy, ignore those systems, and just pop around through Asura gates and get credit for vista views and points of interest, instead.

Still, I'm beginning to reach the point of my adventures where freewhiling along is simply no longer going to work. The enemies are getting tougher, the world more wild. Guild Wars 2 spends surprisingly little time holding your hand at all, but even those shy first steps already lie long behind me. Clearly, the time has come to take more initiative. And if that initiative should take the form of learning to sew... well, sometimes, that's just what MMOs are for.