Panoramas of the 5 Main Cities of Tyria

Let me tell you first that my Asus G2K notebook is old... about 10 years old. The graphics card (Radeon HD 2600 mob) sucks, the rest does as well. I have constant graphical glitches (mostly geometry flickering on distant landscape) in Guild Wars 2, the framerate drops to <1 in WvWvW and loading screens are this looooooooooooooooooong. Still, the game is absolutely awesome and I just don't care about it.
The textures for these panoramas are on medium because a higher setting just wasn't possible for me. Everything else is on maximum just for these screens. No AA because my card only supports FXAA and that seems to be just a blur filter.
That said I still think they turned out nice enough to show them off.

Imgur seems to recompress images until they are <1mb. If you want to download the original pictures which are a bit bigger you can do that here.

I'm Tjista on Flussufer-DE btw.

Hoelbrak

Black Citadel

Rata Sum

Divinity's Reach

Lion's Arch

Lion's Arch 2

The Grove

New Mystic Forge Recipes for Guild Wars 2 just in!

TLDR: You can build yourself a permanent portable Mystic Forge!

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To flush out most of the crap thats clogging up the Trading Post in Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet came up with some recipes to use exactly those items and turn them into something useful.

First the basic transformations that are available now:

250 XX + 250 XX + 1 Glob of Ectoplasm + 1 Mystic Coin ==> Mystic Chest

where XX is one out of the following:

Sticks of Butter
Green Wood Dowels
Green Wood Logs
Soft Wood Logs
Hard Wood Logs
Iron Ore

All of these items are available en mass and cost under 10c. That's going to change fast though.

The Mystic Chest contains one Trophie and an item which you can use further in the Mystic Forge. It also has a chance to containn a permanent transformation potion!
The Trophies are supposed to be sold to Merchants. They are worth between 10s and 4g! Maybe more. They have no other uses, they're just very expensive vendor trash.

The Item for the Mystic Forge is one out of 4 Blue Ones or a yellow(rare) Mystic Frame. You have to combine one of each into a Mystic Node if you want the portable Mystic Forge, else just sell it on the Trading Post.
To get the permanent portable Mystic Forge do this combination:

1 Mystic Node + 1 Mystic Frame + 50 Mystic Coins + Mystic Nexus

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Update: These temporary recipes have been removed somewhere at the beginning of October 2012.

Guild Wars 2 Trading Post: How to set the price for your item in a sane way...

The Trading Post is finally working (most of the time) and there is ample opportunity to make some silver or even gold coins. And who doesn't love coins!? If you want to be a seller there is something about the pricing you should know though. And judging by most of the itemprices it isn't known too well... The moment you offer your item on the trading post you will lose money. This is probably to discourage overly ambitious underselling. This fee is 5% of your set price. If you'd put up an item for 1 gold this fee would be 5 silver. Put it up for 2 gold and it would be 10 silver. You are not going to get this fee back in any way. Okay, so your item sits on the trading post for a while and suddenly gets bought by a stranger. Yes! You go to the trading post to collect your coins and see... it's not as much as you had expected. That is because the trading post takes away another 10% of your winnings if it gets actually sold. You get for example 90s for an item you put up for 1g, 72b for an item you put up for 80b, etc. All in all you earn just 85 silver for an item you put up for 1 gold. Thats 15% you are missing. If you actually want to earn some money while crafting and selling you have to price your item accordingly. Add up the cost of all the items you need for crafting and mark them up by 18%. Why 18%? Imagine your materials cost 100s. To just break even you would have to make another 100s back after collecting your winnings in the auctions house. Maybe you thought you could just mark it up by 15%. Lets go through the math here: 115s - 5% (the fee for putting it up) = 109s25b 109s25b - 10% (the fee for selling it) = 98s33b You would still lose 1s67b... The right amount to mark it up for breaking even is: 100s (thats the amount you want back to break even) * 10% = 110s 110s * 5% (the fee for putting the item up) = 115s05b Now, the difference isn't much between 115s and 115s05b but remember this is just for breaking even. So you should at least mark up the cost of the materials by something like 20% to make some coins. If the market of a particular item doesn't allow that kind of mark up you should just stay out of it... Thank you for reading this longwinded post. I hope I could enlighten at least one of you. Tjista of Flussufer(DE)

New embeddable Khan Academy Video Player

The Khan Academy is an awesome source for everyone who feels the need to further his horizon. Up until now I was watching their Videos on Youtube, but it seems (TIL) they are offering a points program for people who watch them on their website and virtual points are always a big deal.

Embedded Khan Videos from Youtube meant that their users couldn't earn points for watching them. This changes now since Khan got its own embeddable Video player.

By watching Videos through their own player you also seem to have a bigger choice of languages for subtitles.

So here is one particularly interesting Video about Evolution and Natural Selection.

Introduction to Evolution and Natural Selection

By the way, all of their Videos are highly interesting and informative. I'm aware there is some debate about whether Salman Khan (founder of the Khan Academy) is a good teacher or not but I'm sure he is at least making lots of people interested about topics they probably would have never touched with a 3,048m pole because they may seem intimidating. I love their Videos and can wholeheartedly recommend them!

How to play your own music collection in Guild Wars 2

Not only can you play your own music in Guild Wars 2, you can also control when they will be played.

All you have to do is to create playlists which include your tracks and put them into a special folder. This folder can be found under: C:\YOURWINDOWSNAME\Documents\Guild Wars 2\Music\

Supported types of playlists:
.wpl .m3u .pls .asx .wax

Supported types of audio files in those playlists:
.mp3 .ogg .flac .wav .aiff .mid .it

This folder will most probably be empty. You have to name your playlists a certain way to have them played at the appropriate time. The following names are recognized:

Ambient
Battle
BossBattle
City
Crafting
MainMenu
NightTime
Underwater


All mp3players like WinAmp, iTunes, etc make it really easy to create a playlist. Just create one with the right name and put it into the Music-folder.


Troubleshooting:
If you are using Windows Media player you can run into a problem with the playlist where GW2 doesn't recognize the audio file paths because WMP saves them in relation to the playlist as opposed to saving the full path.
If that happens open the playlist in a texteditor and change the absolute paths including the drive letter.
For example WMP would write \bandname\title.mp3 instead of D:\mymusic\bandname\title.mp3