Dailies make me a manipulative cow

What dailies do to me.

I have to admit that in a lot of ways I am a very lazy player, the daily achievements are easy enough to do yet still I don't get them done every day I'm on, there's always items to flip or RP to be had and I'm easily swayed by these distractions.

When I do get around around to my daily achievements I've noticed that some of the new tasks they've added changes my behaviour while playing as I try to get my 100% as quickly as possible. The first big change is the days 'Daily Healer' crops up.

See those fine upstanding villagers getting savaged by a wolf? Ordinarily I'd be all over that, saving the day and whatnot like a good adventurer. But today is Daily Healer day, I need to revive some people so I stand twiddling my thumbs, orchestrating their downfall.

After they fall prone I sweep in, fight the bad guys (or if I'm especially lazy I let my hounds of Balthazar do it) and tend to the poor peoples wounds. They hop up, cheer and thank me, I'm a hero!

Stopping to help injured people as you pass them is a great idea for a daily task, unfortunately wanting to be quick makes me a bit of a manipulative cow. Okay a lot of a cow on the days I trail mobs into an NPC to get that final revive..

I'd like to say I'd change my ways, that I'll put in a few more minutes to find already downed NPCs or players and help them out, but I probably won't!

Where's Francis?

You may have noticed that I've been a little quiet lately. I had been doing daily content and I'd planned to keep that up. However I recently got news of a death in my family and it's knocked my enthusiasm. I plan to get back to more frequent content when things improve a little.

My greatest regret in this is that it means there'll be no post from Francis today. What I can offer however is a brief OOC account of how he's doing;

Francis is still a coward, he's been running away from things a lot. He's explored Shaemoor and the nearby farms, picking apples, feeding cows, saving bunnies and fleeing bandits. The new daily achievement system is suiting him just fine as before he could only do the gathering part of the daily, now he can do things like dodging the people trying to hit him for some extra XP!

I've realised I should have picked a class that has buffs as utilities to get participation in events, but it's too late now, I like him as he is. Besides, it just makes things more challenging.

As for progression; with only a little play he's now level 6 is up to silver coins in his back pocket and I haven't even started any crafting yet.

Looking forward to Monday.

Monday brings a new patch, the Flame & Frost Prelude. I could do a summary of the content that's to come but instead I shall point you to The Egg Baron's post as that has everything all neatly laid out! My post is just a personal look at the patch beforehand and I plan to do one after to see if it lives up to expectations.

Story Progression.
I love GW2's story, I've just been slow in following it, favouring alts and experiencing as many of the early personal story arcs as I can so I'm a little (a lot) behind the curve on the overall story. I'm sure one day I'll get to level 80 and have seen and experienced more, but I'm taking my time savouring it.

The fact that the world keeps evolving, that things change and develop makes it so much easier to invest in the game. I'm already curious to see hints of whats to come in the future with this prelude involving the Norn and Charr.

New Daily Achievement System.
As someone who used to go nuts chasing down innocent bunnies and obscure underwater fish just to get the 'kill variety' part of the daily done I'm looking forward to seeing changes in the daily achievement system. Seeing some variety in objectives for the day would make me more inclined to do my daily rather than putting it off to play with the market or roleplay!

As the daily and monthly will be giving a new currency, laurels, I can forsee a lot of my time going towards completing them and it ending in me pulling my hair out as I try to decide between buying something useful and buying pretty cosmetic things!

I'll also be intrigued to see what effects this system will have on the prices of dyes (both identified and unidentified) as screenshots of the system have shown unidentified dyes as one of the rewards.

New Gem Store Items.

It's almost like they know I spent all of my gems about a week ago and don't have the RL funds to buy any more! While the quaggan backpack is utterly adorable I don't think any of my characters will be wanting it so that's a relief at least. I'm just waiting to see what other items end up in the store and if I'm going to have to cut into my banked gold to get some shiny new things. (I'm never going to get that Golden title!)

The non-adventures of Francis Hawkins

Meet Francis Hawkins, the coward. Starting tomorrow his journals will be appearing on my blog (roughly) every Wednesday. I realise this blog is mostly about money making and similar in GW2 but I am a roleplayer so I feel the need to do these things.

Francis, for reasons that will be detailed in his own words, has been thrust out into Tyria on his own for the first time with very little to his name. He can't fight, he doesn't like the idea of fighting and he has no real practical skills. How will he survive? Will he survive?

These journals will be an in character record of a little out of character experiment, I want to see how much XP Francis can get without fighting (and without me getting bored!). He'll be exploring Tyria as a person and not an adventurer and hopefully his journals will be an amusing read whether you're a roleplayer or not.

Noooo!

I was going to do another journal/guide today but this got in my way. At least the blow of the Trading Post being down was softened by how utterly adorable the 'Down for Maintenance' picture is!

Welcome to Golden Griffon Trading.

Welcome to Golden Grifon Trading, home of yet another Guild Wars 2 blog. I've been playing GW2 for several months now and enjoy many aspects of the game, one thing that really drew me in was that I wouldn't have to pay a subscription fee and I'd still get a lot of great content. I'm not the richest person so my glee doubled when I noticed that account perks like extra character slots could be bought using gems. The main way to get gems is to pay real world money for them but there's also a currency exchange where you can swap your ingame gold for gems.

This started my love affair with playing the market, I'd heard people say that some serious gold could be made by playing the Trading Post. Most play the market to get gold for high end gear and similar ingame rewards, but me, I'm a bit of an alt addict, more likely to have scores of lower level characters over focusing on one high level one.

My first step was finding out how to 'play the market', thankfully a quick google search gave me all sorts of returns, blogs, videos and more all offering advice on ways to make money. With time I'll update my blog to detail some of the resources I found and which of them were useful (and which were less than useful). I'll put the ones I found useful up as links over on the right of my blog so anyone can go use them.