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[Matariki Rain]

Mammal, what do you want to know? Overview, lore, forums, servers, roleplay? The only external things you need to bring to chargen are a suitable name--you can Google for name advice and generators--and a decision about whether to join one of the roleplay servers (Tarnished Coast for North America; Piken Square for Europe).

Official wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Main_Page
Useful info forum: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum - see especially the Vigil Academy for chat about builds
A roleplay forum: http://www.guildwars2roleplayers.com/

You get slots for five characters on an account. You might well decide to dive in, mess around, and then, if you think you've screwed things up, start over.

There's a bunch of stuff that's handled "by account" rather than "by character", which is a bit of a novelty when you're used to your characters being their own people with their own separate hangars and accesses.

The only roleplay I've found so far has been lightweight chat in taverns and the occasional ganging up to fight together in the field. Oh, and with Ulf's characters, but that's taken as read.

[Valdezi]

Thanks, Mata, I'll work through this stuff. I'm not used to thinking about servers - Eve is the only MMO I've ever seriously played.

[Matariki Rain]

Me too, and I'm generally not a solo gamer, either, so there's a bunch of stuff to figure out.

There are five races:
1. Asura: intellectual Yodas who make clanks: have three schools of science
2. Charr: big cats with attitude and gearwheels, who've killed their gods: have three remaining Legions
3. Humans: steampunk/fantasy, with aspects of the circus: have six gods
4. Norns: oversized (stereotypical) Vikings: have totem animals
5. Sylvari: plants, the whole race "awoke" only recently: have a phase of the day.

You also need to pick a profession:
Heavily-armoured "soldier" professions are: Guardian, Warrior
Moderately-armoured "adventurer" professions are: Engineer, Ranger, Thief
Lightly-armoured "scholar" professions are: Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer.

Anyone can fight close or at range by using appropriate weapon combinations. Anyone can heal, and the game positively encourages a culture of healing random people. You can play it as a single-player which happens to have other people around, although some things are much better with company.

[Lyn Farel]

ObEVE: Why didn't Incarna get this level of avatar-based stuff working? I mean, I love Incarna's sculpting and detail, but what use is perfect customisability if we can't get more than one of them in a room together?

Because CCP screwed up by releasing it too early in that embryonic state and players made sure that CCP almost kills the project as a scapegoat afterwise ?

[Matariki Rain]

Lyn, yeah, that was mostly rhetorical.

More thoughts on GW2 as I play it some more: it's mostly ethically very easy. There are bad guys, and you aim to defeat them. No real shades of grey. I was trying to read up on the Nightmare Court, the plant-people's main internal starter baddies, and the language needed some heavy Wikipedia-style tags about bias. I found myself thinking "In EVE this would be a niche player faction with a rich and fruitful subculture".

(You do get choices in your personal story, but so far they've been mostly triage/resources decisions.)

[Valdezi]

Okay I'm in. We should hook up, Mata, we're vaguely in the same tz.

[Matariki Rain]

We should: PM sent.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

There are actually a ton of people roleplaying Nightmare Courtiers, in spite of the games incredibly black and white morality. (Well, at least as it expects the players to percieve. Sometimes I feel like the game creates actual moral ambiguity completely by accident, but leaves the player character powerless to act on it.)

[GoGo Yubari]

Aaaah, I'll get to that game at some point, but right now a bit too much on my plate and too little money in the wallet going in all kinds of directions, so I'll have to stay out for a bit.

I'm gonna be all over a CHARR WARRIOR, though. But most of y'all play on the NA servers unfortunately and I'll be heading onto the EU RP one when I eventually do make it over.

[Matariki Rain]

Gwen, roleplay in GW2: tell me about it!

[Gwen Ikiryo]

Okay! You see, I... Uh...

...Er, can you be a little bit more specific? :p

[Matariki Rain]

Well, there are these taverns where people stand around chatting, but what else is there?

[Katrina Oniseki]

2. Charr: big cats with attitude and gearwheels, who've killed their gods: have three remaining Legions

Worth noting that the Titans were not gods at all, but rather demonic entities that tricked the Charr into believing they were gods for a short time. Once the Charr realized their mistake, they rebelled against the leading shaman caste (the Flame Legion) and threw out religion and anything else related to worship.

The Charr IC, other races IC, and the OOC lore generally recognizes that the Charr do not have gods at all and never did. they were just bedazzled by pretty fireworks and stuff for a while. So, it's more accurate to say the Charr are big angry cats who are even more atheist than they were thousands of years ago.

It's also inaccurate to say 'the Charr killed their gods' (Titans), since it was the human player characters in GW1 that did an overwhelming majority of the Titan killing once the demons were accidentally released. There are a few instances where a Charr legion or cluster of warbands downed a single Titan though. For the most part, the human GW1 heroes killed the Titans, while the Charr got rid of the Flame Legion who had claimed the Titans were gods.

[Matariki Rain]

Thanks for that, Kat. I have much to learn.