Well, they never gave a time frame (just that it'd be some time today, Pacific time, and after midnight GMT), and late evening updates are kind of standard for them.
It's live now!
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Update-Notes-October-22-2012
Came just as I finished Malchor's Leap - sprinted to the last vista and got it 30 seconds before the game would have autorestarted.
So I bought the bunny ears. And the witch costume. They are so cool.
Also costume brawl is hilarious and has turned Lion's Arch into one huge insane mad free-for-all. We just did that for about an hour and I'm already an 83 time champion 😄 Then we decided to go kill stuff and trick or treat and mine candy corn out in the zones. We're also trying to figure out all of the stuff you can craft with candy corn.
Also sadness, fraps didn't record me talking, just everyone else on vent. Booo.
Done it about five times now, so much fun. Also the end chest is pretty sweet. One of my friends has gotten three exotics out of it, another got Arachnaphobia (the exotic shortbow Halloween skin), and I think GK got an exotic as well.
Also at one point, our group was two mesmers and three necromancers. We had the idea of having the two of us mesmers chain up our Time Warps one after the other, while all three necros were in Lich Form. It was amazing.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/november-2012/
Excited to see what this is and how it's going to turn out.
Also amusing to note is that the person who was the lead designer for this content is a member of my guild. So basically, the second big content update was made by one of my guildies. Kinda awesome 😄
Edit: Also, we now have enough gold saved up that I just purchased the commander book. Awesome 😄
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/11/12/guild-wars-2s-lost-shores-content-primer/
Ascended armor bugs me, as I have one piece left for my second exotic set (I have crafted and now I'm getting the Orrian temple armor)...and it's about to all be obsolete. On the other hand, I hope we get some new skins, because the exotic skins, except for crafted heavy and dungeon skins, are not very good.
New dungeon and new level 80 zone = yay!, though. I can always use a new dungeon to run and I know we'll do it a ton (I may have done 7 dungeon runs this weekend), and somewhere other than Orr to run through would be nice.
BTW, Arah explorable mode is the most brutal thing in this game. Dear god.
The event was...interesting.
One of my friends made this video of the final event...I laughed watching it because several times you can see me lagged out just checking out my greatsword (I'm the sylvari in the pastel blue cultural armor that can be seen pretty frequently - Kaae's one of my guild officers and we were in the same party for part of the event), as well as at one point when a bunch of us went to chill out on a cliff and named it Mount Twit...
And I wound up writing a massive post about it which I'll just link because it's too much to copy over here.
http://thepaletree.net/2012/11/19/drowned-by-ambition-gw2-lost-shores/
Can't wait 😄
Also if anyone is on a NA server, my guild is holding a Wintersday party in-game on Saturday 😊
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/december-2012/
More info!
Looks like our party will be starting out in the Grove before moving to LA 😄
Big thing in there is that they mentioned the game updates - namely the fact that between January and February, those updates will amount to basically a full expansion's worth of stuff. For free.
Yeah but I want to know what's in them!
I am surprised to see the article commenting on consequences for your choices- that's one of the areas GW2 totally failed in for me. Your choices really mean bugger all, and the whole 'home instance' thing, which was supposed to be the place where your choices would be on display, pretty much got abandoned during development, it seems.
Actually. GW2's entire storyline angle was a bit of a failure, which you can kinda see them admitting if you look at the dev posts on it (one of them said that their multi team approach to creating storyline content had 'frankly mixed results'😉. I have a lot I can write about that when I find the time. Luckily, unlike TOR, GW2 wasn't actually betting the game on its storyline, but it's still a shame and it's killed the interest of some of my friends in it.
I've recently been redoing dungeon story modes (one of my friends I play with has been doing them with his work friends and whenever they need a fifth person I join in, as well as going through them on my level ~50 thief), and one thing I really wish was that Destiny's Edge wasn't solely part of the dungeon stories and that's it.
There are points where what you picked makes a difference though! Whatever you told the Pale Tree your biggest fear was during the vision of Orr quest decides a later story arc, and whichever race you picked during the orders arc returns to help you towards the end.
There's a lot of differences between the racial storylines, though
Sylvari is amazing, charr is great, asura and norn are okay, and human just sucks. Also I got annoyed that Trahearne didn't remember me at all, and that half your character creation selections don't get used.
Yes, your choices dictate your next set of stories, but those stories don't do anything beyond that mission choice. I blew a lot of effort into rescuing my sister as a human, which was one of my character creation choices, and it literally achieved nothing- I spoke two lines to her when I found her, then she was never seen or heard of again. I just went onto the next story step as I would have done no matter what my choice was. (This was at least more meaningful than my choice of God I was blessed by, which did literally bugger all) There's no growth, there's no persistence- in short, no actual effect in any choice you make. You might as well have just had a 'pick your next mission' tree. That's not genuine consequence of choice. Your race you helped makes a barely discernible impact on anything. You end up at the same place doing the same things with the same people. No-one is dead or alive, nowhere is destroyed or saved, no relationships are any different based on anything you do. They said the personal storyline would be the place where what you do has consequences- and it doesn't. Your home instance never changes, and very soon you abandon it forever. It's all meaningless, and most of the missions aren't actually very good. And this is before we get onto the appalling mess that is Trahearne, and the inexplicable idiocy of forcing the last 'personal' story step to be a 5-man Dungeon run.
About the only choice which does have a lingering effect is your choice of Order, but that is quickly forgotten too and in the end just gives you an armour choice (that you will probably not want) and a level of convenience in getting to Orr, which is arbitrary. That's a huge disappointment, as I thought the Order you joined would make a significant difference in how you were going to take on Zhaitan.
I don't get why people dislike Trahearne so much. Maybe my view is skewed, as playing a sylvari means you meet him very early on, but the only thing about him that bugged me is that I want his sword! I got to use Caladbolg during a story quest and it is awesome and looks so cool. People say he's a glory-hog but he isn't- he straight up states that defeating Zhaitan is YOUR victory, not his. He takes no credit for any of it.
And of course Zhaitan was going to be a dungeon; how else could itnhave been done? Soloing an elder dragon is ridiculous, but it had to be indtanced. It's an extremely easy story mode dungeon, at that.
