Psst, over here! Just in case, you know, you’re taking a break from the game– I’m here to distract you from work, er, chat about Guild Wars 2! Or specifically, headstart. The game’s off to an interesting start so far. I say ‘interesting’ because– let’s face it– not everyone has been pleased with their headstart experience. Despite ArenaNet managing to pull up the servers exactly when they said they probably would, it seems the servers had a hard time keeping up with the player load, and produced quite a large number of issues and game lockups.

Over the course of the weekend, players have experienced issues with logging in, staying logged in, account validation, guilds/guild membership disappearing, the trading post, the Black Lion Trading Company, HoM deliveries, WvWvW, and more. At the same time, not everyone experienced every issue, and in fact, quite a few players experienced a weekend of worry-free gaming. Some players were able to put in about seven hours of stable playtime before problems arose, and for the most part, those same players were able to log in a couple hours later. Not bad, right? Perhaps. But let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?

I want to start with a bit of a confession.  I’m a cooking junkie.  Cooking is always my tradeskill of choice in any game that it is available.  I’m a fan of cooking because I love the idea of creating consumables as a tradeskill, as there is always a built in demand due to their limited use.  Other tradeskills must compete with world drops, but Cooks have only a very small amount of competition in this regard.  Further exacerbating the competition factor in Guild Wars 2 is the fact that the Trading Post operates across all servers, and while all crafting disciplines will undoubtedly experience increased competition as a result of this, the built in continuous demand for consumables should help to keep the chefs of Tyria profitable.

Today, Venturebeat.com published an article with their opinion of Guild Wars 2:

During my beta adventures I only scratched the surface of Guild Wars 2. The amount of content and gameplay options, combined with the lack of a monthly subscription fee, makes this a very compelling product. It should appeal to most MMO players and even to fans of single-player RPGs like Bethesda’s multi-million selling The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.

Guild Wars 2 does a much better job than its predecessor of offering interesting content for solo players and creating the feeling of a dynamic, live game world. I got to do cool things quickly with minimal amounts of irritation and confusion. Though I focused on the firearms-wielding and turrets-building engineer, the seven other character classes seem equally interesting.

Make sure you check out the rest of their preview in the link above and see if your agree with their assessment of how GW2 is challenging the MMORPG market with their subscription-less method.