Author: Admin

Guild Wars 2 Launches Season 4 Episode 2: A Bug in the System


Today marks the launch date of the latest Guild Wars 2 Living World Episode: A Bug in the System. In this episode, the Commander continues his search to find the source of and shut down the attacks on Tyria by Palawa Joko’s minions. In order to save the world once again, the Commander must infiltrate an Asuran Inquest laboratory and combat the horrors found inside.

Episode 2, A Bug in the System, introduces: 

  • A new storyline 
  • A new map to explore 
  • A brutal legendary dagger 
  • A new mastery in the max-level progression system 

A Bug in the System is free to owners of Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire.

(Source: Arenanet Press Release)

RuneScape Slams Clue Scroll Exploiters With Banhammer


Jagex has dropped the banhammer hard on six accounts found to be exploiting a bug in this past week’s clue scroll overhaul. Jagex posted on the RuneScape Subreddit to note that while six accounts were banned for utilizing the exploit, more than 50 other accounts were banned for attempting to trade said exploited goods for real money. The exploit involved a very specific set of circumstances and led to rewards being duplicated and then distributed around the economy.

In the post, Mod Infinity noted that Jagex is confident that most of the items have been swept up, that the impact on the economy would be negligible, and that items that were sold to other players will be removed with the gold reimbursed to the buyer.

It was indeed much harder to reproduce than just having a full inventory, that just sends excess loot to the bank. This required you to have a specific inventory set-up, a specific final clue step, and a specific final clue challenge. Those exact circumstances sadly did not manifest in testing.

(Source: Reddit #1, Reddit #2)

H1Z1 Officially Launches As Its Player Base Dwindles


H1Z1 has officially launched after three years of early access, and its launch has brought with it a brand new game mode and the prospect of a coming pro league ala Overwatch’s recently launched venture. The official launch comes alongside a new content patch officially launching season one as well as introducing tactical drops (choosing your deployment area), an overhauled user interface, as well as Auto Royale, a new game mode that sticks players in vehicles and locks them there.

First, a BRAND NEW GAME MODE! This was one hard secret to keep, but we are excited to bring you Auto Royale™, a new team-based, vehicular battle royale game mode. We’ve seen how entertaining driving around can be in H1Z1, so we decided to run with the idea and have a little fun. In Auto Royale, we lock you and your teammates into a vehicle, launch you into the map with up to 29 other teams and watch the mayhem unfold.

That said, H1Z1 may be facing an uphill battle now that it is fully launched as Steam Charts show that the base has dwindled by about 91% since its peak last year. Last March, Kotaku waxed poetic about how King of the Kill had managed to pull its way into the top 10 most active Steam games despite the fact that the reviews were relatively negative for such a popular title. In fact, King of the Kill saw exponential growth between August 2016 and its peak in July 2017 and despite a review of just 57% positive at the time, managed to peak at over 150,000 concurrent players.

And then that number plummeted. By September that figure was down to 105 thousand and by November that number more than halved to 42 thousand. As of the last month, King of the Kill has dropped to about 14,000 peak concurrent players. How this drop in players will affect the viability of King of the Kill’s planned pro league is unclear, as the game’s Twitch viewership has also seen a major drop in attention in favor of PUBG and Fortnite Battle Royale.

Guild Wars 2: Season 4 Episode 2 Hits March 6


Guild Wars 2 is gearing up to release the next part in its living story, Season 4 Episode 2, this coming Tuesday. Picking up where the series left off, the death of Balthazar at the end of Path of Fire led to his power being absorbed by the dragons Kralkatorrik and Aurene. The Commander (the player) and their allies must deal with an empowered dragon and the ongoing assaults on the land of Tyria by Palawa Joko.

Episode 2 introduces a handful of new content to Guild Wars 2, including:

  • An exciting new storyline
  • A new map to explore
  • A brutal legendary dagger players can add to their line of legendary weapons
  • A new mastery—part of Guild Wars 2’s max-level horizontal progression system

Keep an eye out for Episode 2: A Bug in the System on March 6.

RuneScape Overhauls Clue Scroll System This Week


As part of its ongoing quality of life updates, this week RuneScape players see the launch of an overhauled treasure trails mini-game. Treasure Trails are RuneScape’s answer to scavenger hunts, players are given a series of clues and are tasked with following coordinates, performing emotes, wearing specific items, and solving puzzles with the possibility of obtaining rare, much sought after rewards.

The update introduces a new master tier level along with 60 new rewards while also improving the experience for users on all levels. While the system previously restricted players to having one scroll of each tier at any given time, players can now collect unopened scrolls and complete them at their leisure with the knowledge that they are not missing potential opportunities. In addition, hidey-holes have popped up around the land offering players the opportunity to stash away items required for clue solutions in those areas.

Senior product manager Matt Casey had the following to say on the update:

“When we spoke to our players at RuneFest 2017, we wanted to make it clear that we would be delivering some of their most desired updates to RuneScape throughout 2018. With the full launch of the Clue Scroll rework we’re beginning to do just that, whether it’s the hardcore challenge of the Master Tier, or the incredibly desirable rewards at the end of the trails.”

Eager collectors will also find that an in-game book that tracks their entire collection, along with new highscores to compete toward and a reward point system for completing clue scrolls.

(Source: RuneScape)

Beta Perspective: OldSchool RuneScape Mobile Weirdness


As MMO Fallout’s official only staffer and the internet’s number one games journalist, I’ve seen a lot. Betas, alphas, pre-alphas, day one patches, you name it. Last year I reviewed to rather poor reception the pre-release build of Shadow of War, and while the preview was condemned as “tone deaf” and “stupid,” I came out of that experience pretty sure that I would never encounter an odder product. And then this week I was sent what I can only assume is a beta build of Old School RuneScape Mobile.

Now I’ve been in some strange betas before, including one for [redacted] where the developer asked us to download a Torrent and then had the nerve to ask us to seed it for each other, but this takes the cake. My beta instructions came in a fancy little box which, upon opening, revealed its contents to be mostly powders and some strange doohickeys: stars and little bits of paper that say “RuneScape Old School” on them. The beta version I was sent is code named “Vanilla Cupcakes,” suggesting that someone at Jagex is taking cues from the Android style of naming updates.

A little bit odd, but I had a job to do.

Now I don’t know much about technology, being a tech journalist, but I do know that one of the basic tenets of mobile is that apps are supposed to be simple to start. Take the photo app I’m using to capture these pictures, I click once to start the app, then click once for every photo I want to take. The setup for this beta has eight steps, the first of which includes preheating the oven and creaming some butter.

Clearly this must be some kind of trial, after all RuneScape is about overcoming bigger foes and if I can’t 1v1 some butter, then what kind of scrub would I be to take on the full beta? This is like one of those Man Crates, that novelty item where the contents are delivered in an actual crate that you have to open with a crowbar. The first half of the tutorial asks you to solo pk some butter, followed by cupcake mix and two eggs at the same time. I’ve been playing RuneScape long enough to remember the Recipe for Disaster quest so none of this really blew my mind. I had to provide my own eggs though, I hope this is going to be fixed for the full release.

All this butter drops on death is more butter.

The OldSchool RuneScape beta comes in the form of six consumables, not unlike how Nintendo handles demos on its systems, and they appear to expire after a couple of days once loaded and you pretty much have to prepare them all at the same time, so I’ll have to make good use of each one. I went onto the RuneScape Reddit to see if anyone else was complaining about this style of beta build but couldn’t find a single person talking about it. I guess this business model is just accepted now.

And then I saw this note and everything became clear.

Silly me, this isn’t the beta itself, it’s a quest that will inevitably lead me to the beta. Just to show there was no hard feelings, I took the six “mobile devices” I was sent and decided to toss them in the oven to think about what they’d done. A good seventeen to nineteen minutes at 325 degrees will teach a valuable lesson about coming into my kitchen and bamboozling me to get my eggs. Boy does it smell like vanilla bean in my house.

While I let those hotheads cool off, a statement which I’m pretty sure doesn’t qualify as a pun, I went back to the task list. Next step was to cream more butter and beat it with the icing mix. You know it’s hard to fully comprehend just how much butter is in 200g of butter until you see it sitting out on a measuring plate. Hint: It’s a lot of butter.

As I creamed the second batch of butter, I got to thinking about the possibility that I’ve been doing this whole thing wrong and that the list of instructions may have just been a metaphor not meant to be taken literally, like I’d come to find that it’s not the cupcakes on the plate that matter but the cupcakes in my heart. Perhaps this was a sort of strange live event and, upon my completion, my door would be kicked in by Mod Ash who would grab the cupcakes and make a run for it. Maybe, just maybe, I was the target of the world’s most genius, not to mention expensive, plot to trick someone into baking snacks for some hungry, tired developers. Ocean’s Eleven, but British and with only six people.

The last two steps are to cover the cupcakes with icing and then decorate with the stars and those bits of paper with the RuneScape logo on them. The instructions call them “wafers” which apparently mean edible paper, as if implying that the stuff you use to print documents isn’t edible, but I digress. I’ve decided to dub these “ScapeCakes,” because it flows off the tongue easier than “CupScapes.” It might still need some workshopping, I tried to float the idea past my roommate but she was wholly uninterested in the ordeal and seemed more content with napping in front of the heat of the oven.

In conclusion, I’m 35% certain that I was never actually playing any OldSchool RuneScape during this whole process, but I learned some important life lessons along the way like how there’s really never a bad time for cupcakes, I should probably take a class in cupcake decoration, and that this crew of Jagex staffers will get their mitts on my cupcakes when they pull them out of my cold, cupcakeless hands. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t qualify as a preview since I didn’t play anything, but I’m frankly too full of cupcake to remember what the original intention of this article was.

Verdict/Disclosure: 4.5/5 – Jagex has discovered an innovative and delicious new way to deliver beta content, albeit this version isn’t as mobile as a game played straight from the phone. Thank you to Jagex for sending the cupcakes, this is not a sponsored post but more of an example on why I’m not allowed nice things. I don’t actually have access to the Old School Mobile Beta.

Hi-Rez To Roll Back Card Unbound


Hi-Rez Studios this week announced that the controversial, albeit apparently successful, Cards Unbound updated will be removed from Paladins over the next major release cycle.

Cards Unbound is a controversial update that changed the way that cards (which can affect power) are collected. The update was criticized by long-term players who saw the update as a method of shoehoring players into the game’s cash shop by pushing the card leveling system to random loot boxes.

“Our team will be working over the next major release cycle to remove Cards Unbound from the game. We will be replacing it with a new system that I believe the community will be really excited about — including the re-introduction of the deck building point system, and a method for obtaining cards that will be way less grindy.”

Some points on how the new system will work are as follows. This list subject to change.

  • Legendary Cards will now be called Talents.
  • Talents will only have a single level.
  • Talents will be unlocked for free by earning XP and gaining Champion levels (for example; level 1,5,10,15).
  • All Champion Cards will now be free (No cost or grind).
  • Deck creation will return to a point system where players can distribute 15 points across the five cards they select for their loadout. Each Champion Card will have five ranks to choose from.
  • Talents will not have ranks, and are not included in the loadout point cap.
  • Talents and Decks will continue to be chosen at match start to allow players to tailor their playstyles based on their opponents.
  • New Talents will be added over time and give further varied playstyles.
  • Champion Mastery will no longer be capped at level 25. Instead, it will work similarly to Player Account leveling (which has no cap).
  • Card chests will be removed from the game.
  • We are evaluating the best options to compensate players for their previously earned cards, and hope to share details soon.

More information can be found at the link below.

(Source: Google Docs)

Old School RuneScape Celebrates Five Years


Time flies when you’re grinding for that 99 skillcape, and nobody knows that more than the players of Old School RuneScape which this month reaches its five year anniversary. It’s hard to believe that five years ago we were talking about Old School RuneScape (which MMO Fallout for some reason consistently referred to as ‘OldScape’) as this small project that we had no idea if it would be popular enough to be sustainable, with the high end of the hopes being that Jagex could commit just enough personnel to make very small content updates and ban some bots. But just as luck would have it, the game exploded in popularity over the next year and drew in enough people that it receives regular content updates and rather massive, exclusive additions.

In 2015, MMO Fallout managed to snag an interview with Matthew Kemp, product manager for Old School RuneScape not long after Deadman Mode, the game’s hardcore spinoff, originally launched. Deadman mode, where players can kill each other virtually anywhere and can lose large amounts of their belongings on death, in turn spawned its own massively successful eSports spinoff in the form of seasonal Deadman tournaments, with winners taking home $10 grand in cold hard cash.

Senior Product Manager Matthew Kemp (the very same) had the following to say on Old School RuneScape’s coming year:

“2018 is a huge year for Old School, and not only because of these anniversary celebrations and the launch of the game’s own dedicated Twitch channel. We are currently in the middle of a pipeline of closed beta tests for Old School RuneScape on mobile, and already are getting some excellent feedback from those lucky enough to receive an invitation. In fact, the feedback so far has more than validated our decision to make the full game available on mobile platforms for new, returning and current players later in the year.”

Both Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3 are in the process of being ported to mobile devices.

(Source: Jagex Press Release)

Fraudster Update: Will Adkins and the Open Letter to MMO Bomb


It’s been nearly two weeks since MMO Fallout published our piece regarding the Marvel Heroes Rebirth Indiegogo project, Marvel Heroes and the Diploma Mill of Nostalgia, and the article has garnered quite a bit of controversy by which I mean accusations of plagiarism and a demand that we link to a blog you might formally know as MMO Bomb. Now I’m not here to disparage our fellow denizens on the internet, since that’s the job for our subject of interest, but I’d just like to make a small 100% unrelated anecdote before we begin that when Johns Hopkins university measures the radiation coming off of the sun, they didn’t necessarily bounce their research off of, nor do they need to cite Aunt Sue walking outside and noticing that the sun sure is bright today.

But I’m not a jealous person, and since there is the distinct possibility that an ambitious editor in chief of said website (linked above here and below mine) decided to point out to anyone who covered the story that they broke it first, I have enjoyed the normal increase in traffic that Crowdfunding Fraudsters provides along with the boosted revenue ($0) with the safety of knowing that the inevitable legal complaints will not be coming my way because someone else decided to raise their hand and take the brunt of the attention. The less time I have to spend filing complaints to the State Bar Association in response to frivolous threats, the better.

Now, since our article was published, the Indiegogo campaign has been shut down with a message on the game’s website giving an explicit accusation that “a gaming blog” ignored the facts in order to publish false allegations for the sake of driving traffic and generating revenue, along with a small hint toward potential further action over irreparable damage to Paragon Institute.

“The bankruptcy hearing that would lead to the sale of Gazillion assets has been delayed; this would give us little time to react once the outcome of the hearing is known. Secondly, the landlord that controls the offices for Gazillion is petitioning the court to take possession of all on-site assets per his lease agreements (including the servers containing source code and game assets); it is now possible that the assets will not make it to a court-led sale.

We are aware of the false accusations originating from a gaming blog; we have been in contact with their president in an attempt to resolve this.  They have elected to ignore the full facts and  seem motivated by the goal of driving traffic to their site and generating revenue. These false allegations have caused irreparable damage to Paragon Institute. More details will follow as we are able to share.”

I know they’re not talking about me because MMO Fallout has no revenue to generate, and nobody from Paragon has been in touch. There’s also the little matter that nothing we said was false and, just to throw an example out of the blue, our piece didn’t make any potentially actionable statements like musing on the possibility that Paragon Institute may be looking to continue the diploma mill practices of Chadwick Institute. I’m just throwing statements out there.

But imagine my surprise late afternoon on February 10 when a comment showed up on my piece by none other than Will Adkins himself, or at least a private Disqus account signed up for with none other than a Virtucorp email address (for more information on Virtucorp, see the above link) and a lot of information. The long comment, interestingly enough, was a direct open letter not to myself but to the other author of this fine coverage (again, linked above). I’m willing to take a shot in the dark that this was posted on the wrong website, because it was almost immediately deleted and then re-posted on the actual article that Adkins was responding to. Thankfully the internet never forgets, and I’m sent a copy of all comments posted here by email for record keeping purposes which according to the MMO Fallout legal team gives me permission to re-post for your viewing pleasure.

The good news is, according to this commenter who we’ll refer to as “Will Allegedkins,” in the unlikely event his credentials turn out to be forged, we now have an answer for the connection with Chadwick University, the defunct diploma mill who ceased granting diplomas back around 2007 and not a few years ago as has been reported on other websites. The website for Chadwick University has since come back online since our piece, directly explaining the link between the two organizations:

This site is maintained by Paragon Institute, Inc. (a 501c3 non-profit) to facilitate transcript requests for former Chadwick University students and share site content as it existed in 2007; Paragon Institute has not been involved in the academic operations or conferral of said degrees. Except as otherwise noted, the site reflects policies and standards as implemented during operations.

See, a simple question given a simple answer, Paragon is acting as a custodian to Chadwick’s transcript requests because it may be a thankless job, but someone has to do it. According to the Web Archive, this explanation has been up for at least several years now, the archive doesn’t go further back than 2015, so don’t get the impression that it has suddenly been updated.

But what about Paragon Institute itself, the 501c3 non-profit? We tracked Paragon Institute to Virtucorp, another website that has seemingly risen from the dead since our piece and, as we stated originally, is still filled with Lorem Ipsum gibberish and doesn’t actually include anything about anything.

I did note in the original article that Paragon Institute originally operated as American Southern University and according to its 501c3 filings for the past ten years, did business under several names of which MMO Fallout was unable to procure any evidence of any of these entities doing anything or existing in any substantive way for that matter. I’m not saying they didn’t exist, but if they did they have all been forgotten by the elephantine memory of the internet.

In addition, the ASU filed its form for organizations that claim less than $50 grand annually, which explains the lack of institution-esque work and the fact that we can’t identify anyone associated other than Mr. Adkins. There is zero web presence for any of the names, none of them show up on the official list of accredited institutions, nor do they show up on lists of unaccredited institutions for that matter. We have no information about them, and given that fact I tried to quickly move on from discussing their existence at all.

But Paragon Institute, as I later learned, hasn’t really done anything either. After the Web Archive decided to start working for us again, we went back as far as we could into Paragon’s past, 2014, and found that the institute was still in its re-launching phase even back then. We’re inclined to believe Mr. Adkin’s statement that the institute never issued a single diploma because such a statement would be easily disproved if it were a lie.

“Paragon Institute has been legally empowered since it was formed, as American Southern University in 2008, to award diplomas. However, it has not issued one during that time. The original intent was to create MOOCs and partner with other institutions to award accredited academic credit. As other providers moved into that space, the organization has pursued other initiatives more targeted at niche markets – such as STEM training and the one proposed with the IndieGoGo campaign. JASON – can you provide ANY evidence that Paragon has EVER awarded a diploma, legitimate or otherwise?”

Mr. Allegedkins has a point here, there is no evidence that Paragon Institute has ever awarded a diploma, and by our research there is no living evidence on the internet that it was ever a functioning institute, accredited or otherwise. It’s like the podcast I talked about starting back in 2010, it certainly exists in theory but has never actually gotten around to producing episode one. The statement goes on to say that Chadwick University probably wasn’t a diploma mill, and this is one of the few points I have to disagree with Mr. A-kins on.

“The main reason cited for being a diploma mill is that Chadwick University granted credit for life experience. Particularly during that time, accreditation was more about protecting faculty and the school rather than students”

Not necessarily true. We know Chadwick University was a fraudulent institute just by looking at its founder, Lloyd Clayton Jr., a quack whose degree in the faux medical practice of Naturopathy has gifted him with expertise in the arts of herbology and massage, whose school was slammed with class action lawsuits, and whose (also unrecognized) accrediting institution was founded by a woman who believed that the “Jews and Catholics” were suppressing evidence of her psychic link to the lost city of Atlantis. You see, there is a purpose on why MMO Fallout went into more detailed coverage of Lloyd Claton Jr and Chadwick University than other outlets did, it paints a clearer picture than simply saying “some people have called them a diploma mill.” Chadwick U was never accredited by anyone who mattered, it was however licensed to operate until Alabama decided to crack down on (you guessed it) diploma mills.

Legally speaking, we are not accusing Chadwick University of committing a crime because operating an unaccredited institution was not illegal at the time that it existed in Alabama. We simply pointed out that it is illegal to use a degree from Chadwick University in several states to obtain a job.

I didn’t spend too much time on this in the original piece as to not get off track, because I’d like to make it perfectly clear that the activities of Lloyd Clayton Jr. and Chadwick University have no bearing on the credibility of the Paragon Institute, and I am emphasizing that out of my own free will, but since we’re on the topic, Clayton’s other college (Clayton College of Natural Health), also defunct, offered courses in topics like aromatherapy, spectro-chrome therapy, therapeutic touch, and imaginal healing. If you’d really like to get off topic, we can start discussing the unlicensed doctors who graduated from Clayton’s schools who are now serving prison sentences for peddling fake cancer cures, duping and in some cases possibly causing the death of their patients via bogus treatments. None of Chadwick University’s actions have any bearing on Paragon Institute, I’d like to remind you.

“As a side note, not being recognized by Texas does not mean that Chadwick wasn’t a good education. I don’t expect most people to know about academic licensure, unless they claim they do and portray it incorrectly. In Texas, you must either be accredited or be based in the state for your degree to be recognized. Period. It’s not based on academic quality in that regard.”

Accreditation is absolutely about quality, in fact it’s literally in the mission statement on the Department of Education‘s website.

“The goal of accreditation is to ensure that institutions of higher education meet acceptable levels of quality.”

You can’t get accredited unless your institute adheres to guidelines on the quality of education, performance of the students, meets certain financial viability requirements, as well as the credentials of the staff. I know this because while in college the institute I was attending was being audited to determine its qualification for continued accreditation (which happens every few years), and I discussed with several professors who were directly associated with keeping the school accredited the qualifications required and the things that they needed to prove.

Now does that mean that every school that isn’t accredited is because it is not of acceptable quality? Of course not, that would be a logical fallacy. The process is, after all, voluntary and not all institutes are willing to go through what is a very difficult and expensive process. It’s like being certified by the Better Business Bureau, except the accreditation institutes have actual authority.

It’s like the difference between a deli being certified kosher and another just claiming to be kosher. They could theoretically both be going through the exact same process, with the latter simply deciding not to pay the required fees to be certified by a third party agency, and the former suppressing evidence of the lost city of Atlantis. Both outcomes may result in food that is equally kosher, but one comes with the approval of a guiding party that can reasonably be assumed is demanding that certain standards be kept, and the other is on the losing end of a barrage of lawsuits and busy dealing with the federal government trying to get them shut down and thrown in prison for fraud, like that Kevin Trudeau guy.

But let’s talk politics, did you know that Will Adkins ran for Congress in 2008?

“The third-party needed to pull in 2% of the vote across the state to remain on the ballot. This paved the way for future campaigns. It was a clean race, ran in only a few months v. a year for other candidates, helped achieve the desired goal, and was run without taking contributions from our citizens. I knew that I wasn’t going for the ‘win’ and could not take funding knowing that.”

For the record, I did do a lot of research on Will Adkins the man, 99% of which I left out minus what is likely his house (and address of Paragon Institute) and the fact that he was planning on running for Congress this year. I left out the part where he ran in 2008 as a libertarian because it’s frankly irrelevant to what he’s doing now, and would probably just come off as petty and disparaging to talk about the results, or I could make a comment about how Adkins’ performance in the second district actually strengthened the Libertarian ticket and may have had a direct hand in increasing turnout for the following two elections, making for the strongest election periods for the Libertarian party in the recent history of the second district of North Carolina, but that probably sounds like off-topic praise coming out of nowhere.

Allegedkins goes on to mention that they had some former Gazillion staff on board, however the perception of the project is too negative at the moment to proceed, ending with a parting shot against the article’s author.

Yes, the IndieGoGo campaign has stalled. Much of the feedback I’ve received attributed it to your article which was a misleading attempt to drive traffic and revenue; this then spread to other sites. We have been in contact with former Gazillion staff members (a limited number albeit) and was looking forward to announcing this soon. Even though they understand the situation, they feel the perception of the endeavor is too negative right now.

Jason, I get that you’re not a real news organization; you are a well-read gaming blog, but your readers still expect integrity just the same. In this case you are attempting to make the news rather than report it. We don’t know if it is malice on your part driving this or an inability to do real investigative reporting. We hope it’s not ill intent.
-Will Adkins

Now that’s rough, but since the campaign has been cancelled and doesn’t look like it will be returning in the near future, I guess that ends this saga of Crowdfunding Fraudsters. Hopefully we all learned something important from this experience.

Tune in this April when we cover the official launch of the ZX Spectrum Vega Plus, and tune in later this year when In Plain English covers the case of Paragon Institute v Defendant.

(Source: My Email)

Guild Wars 2 Launches Friend/Ships Campaign


This week marks the launch of ArenaNet’s Friend/Ships campaign for Guild Wars 2. For this campaign, ArenaNet is highlighting the stories of players who have forged real relationships through their mutual love of all things Guild Wars, but you don’t have to have met your special someone online to get in on the fun.

For those who do have tales to tell, you are invited to share your story on social media with the hashtag #GW2FriendShips, with stories entered in for the chance at a number of prizes.

ArenaNet invites all players to share their own experiences on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, or directly on the Guild Wars 2 Facebook page using #GW2FriendShips or by submitting a story directly through the campaign’s website at guildwars2.com/friendships. If they also use the hashtag #GW2Giveaway when posting, qualifying posts will be entered into a sweepstakes for the chance to win a variety of prizes!

Players an also unlock a special item by logging in any time up to the end of the month, as well as gift their friends a 25% off discount for Path of Fire by using the code “GW2FRIENDSHIPS” at checkout.

(Source: Guild Wars 2)