Q: What do you do in the Guild Wars community and where can everyone find you?
A: What-ho chaps, I’m Magical Mike and I make general commentary videos on Youtube for Guild Wars 2. I try to cover all sorts of things but mostly focus on picking apart patches and analysing them, probably a little bit too much.
I have a really unfortunate name and you’ll likely find a bunch of stuff from a certain stripper film if you look for me, but hopefully searching for magicalmike2 GW2 on youtube should do the trick.
Q: Did you hear of/play GW1 and what were your experiences/ your impressions? What is your earliest memory if so?
A: Oh man did I play GW1, that game occupied me for years and is easily the best value-for-money game I’ve ever bought.
A friend of mine in high school got hold of it and showed a bunch of us what it was like in pre-searing Ascalon. I was sold when I heard there was no subscription fee and a group of four of us got started. We had a ranger, a monk, an elementalist and myself, playing as a mesmer.
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I had constant energy problems with imagined burden and conjure phantasm and adding my secondary class as elementalist, with even more costly skills, really made the first part of Prophecies difficult. I loved it though and ultimately played the game to death, getting 31 titles maxed in the hall of monuments before GW2 came around.
Q: Did you/are you playing other MMO's? What attracted you to them?
A: Before GW1 I played a lot of Runescape, which is actually where my channel name comes from, since Magicalmike without numbers was taken. I loved that game 10 years ago too!
I had no idea it was even an MMO, let alone what an MMO was. I thought it was a point-and-click game, so I spent my first day trying to combine pots, wheat and chicken feathers… Yeah I was clueless.
I’ve tried various MMO’s over the years but never stuck to any of them. Subscription fees never really gelled well with me and most of the free ones just didn’t pull me in like GW2 has.
Q: When did you start playing GW2 and what got you involved in the game itself?
A: Right at the start of the first public beta events. I was part of a GW1 alliance that was really excited about GW2, with absolute certainty that we were all going to continue our journey in the next game. So it was an easy decision to get involved early. Really, without them, I do wonder if I would have bought the game so early but I reckon I’d have tried it eventually anyway.
Q: What have you enjoyed about GW2 and what has kept you playing?
A: The combat is absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, the number 1 reason that I love GW2. It’s always felt visceral and impressive, albeit a huge visual mess in the early betas with the clouds of skill effects flying everywhere. The first time I tried the warrior with a hammer, I knew my main.
So the combat and the world itself have been the main things that kept me playing. I love checking out new places and the more intricately designed areas. The new Lion’s Arch is incredible, Dry Top was pretty cool too and the jumping puzzles and scavenger hunts in these maps are some of the most refined versions of those aspects of the game to date.
Q: What has been your favourite memory of GW2?
A: Super Adventure Box made me giddy. I love the jumping puzzles in GW2 and they would come a close second, but SAB expanded on them in such a uniquely fantastic way that it just blows everything out of the water. I’m sad that many people haven’t had the chance to play it and I’m crossing my fingers that it’ll make a glorious comeback eventually!
Q: How do you feel about the upcoming expansion HoT?
A: I’m staying mostly reserved with my expectations for HoT. I’ve yet to come to a proper conclusion on the amount of content it’ll feel like we get.
The revenant so far looks like it has potential but I desperately want to see how it plays with a full set of specializations and traits.
The elite specializations look really interesting, easily the most intriguing thing they’ve shown us so far. I’m excited to try the reaper and I’m desperate to know what the warrior will get.
However, there’s a lot of stuff I’m worried about or not that interested in. Guild halls right now don’t really grab my attention, the mastery system looks like it’s quite shallow in scope (excluding gliding, because that’s a game changer for explorers like myself), stronghold and the new WvW borderlands are okay and I’m dieing to know what “challenging group content” actually means. So we’ll see, I’ve not made a decision on it yet!
Q: What class do you main/ What is your least liked class and why?
A: I love the huge range of weapons the warrior can wield. The core specialization patch has reinvigorated my love for how these weapons, skills and traits interact with each other and not just for the warrior profession. I actually play all of my characters and I have one of each class at level 80. I jump in to SPvP to do their dailies fairly often and generally enjoy the many different play styles that GW2 offers. I really don’t enjoy elementalist that much though, it has it’s moments of really sweet burst, but the warrior can do that too and I just like the feel of a good, strong, eviscerating chop.
Q: What is your preferred game mode/Have you been drawn to any other modes?
A: I’m mostly a filthy PvE casual but I jump in to SPvP fairly often. WvW is the only main game mode that I don’t really enjoy, but I’ll mess around in there with friends from time to time.
Q: What has drawn you to your game mode of choice?
A: PvE allows for exploration of new content the most often. I can fight things in PvE, I can mess with new builds in PvE, I can play alone and I can play with any number of friends there.
It’s also the mode that I can most comfortably make videos about, which is a pretty nice bonus!
Q: Has it changed since you started playing? If so, how?
A: PvE changes the most out of all the main modes. New story, new maps, new builds, new achievements - all sorts of things change on a regular basis (when the living world is in progress).
I think mostly though, it’s the players and their knowledge that has the most effect on the game for me. I remember struggling in dungeons with a condition warrior and I really appreciate the smoothness at which we can now beat them.
Q: Why did you choose to make content from this game mode?
A: I make content on PvE because it’s the mode I know the best, not that I really know all that much!. I’ll make SPvP build videos when I feel like I have a good idea, but PvE offers a lot of things for me to talk about. Patches that offer new areas to run around and new challenges, new story that allows me to analyse it… Really I just love sharing my opinion of the stuff that I play and I feel like while I may be overly critical sometimes, I fill that little niche by saying what I do.
Q: What is your opinion on the lore of the game?
A: While I can’t compare the lore of GW2 to any other major MMO, I can say that it feels like it has a solid base that they keep building on. My main problem with how the story is presented currently, is that most of my enjoyment of it comes from the community discussions and speculation, rather than what actually happens in-game. Not that it’s bad, I just occasionally have these moments where a character will make a comment or do something that seems unusually stupid.
Q: Is there a place, theme or person you would want new content to include?
A: I would love for new content to go back to the racial starting kind of stories and tie them in some more. I’d love to explore more of what it means to be a charr or a norn and various politics and struggles that all of the races have, both internally and with each other. I’m intrigued with how the sylvari will struggle with new preconceptions in the expansion.
Q: What do you speculate as the next possible race?
A: Argonians would be cool to pl- oh? Wrong franchise, right. Obviously those bird creatures, Pingu I think they were called? Tengu? Yeah I think that’s it, I’ve heard that they’re a fairly popular candidate.
Q: What crafting discipline did you level up first and why?
A: I leveled armour smithing to 400 within the first couple of weeks after launch. The trading post wasn’t yet available and trading between players wasn’t reliable, so playing a condition warrior and always needing specific gear meant that the best way to get it, was to make it myself. The amount of farming drakes, centaurs and spiders in Gendarren Fields that I had to do was silly. Let’s all take a moment to be thankful for the trading post and our lord and master, Evon Gnashblade.
Q: What is your favourite PvE content [Jumping Puzzles, Guild Missions, World Bosses, dungeons ect] and why?
A: I’ve already talked about new content and jumping puzzles, but let’s take a second to appreciate world bosses, dungeons and guild missions too. I love how cool the world bosses all look and I love the mechanics of the ones that have them, but it’s a shame how many of them can just be auto attacked and die so quickly. I’m not much of a world boss runner unless I need gold but while they look great, there’s only so many times I can appreciate that aspect.
Dungeons are much the same, I love the dungeons in GW2 and would love to see more in HoT but that’s looking unlikely at this point. I actually don’t mind the berserker meta because it makes runs so smooth, but I wouldn’t mind seeing an increase in the amount of top-tier viability to other tactics and such. More options are always better.
Guild missions are also in that vein; a lot of fun to run the puzzles but they’ve grown somewhat stale after so long. My favourite has to be Angvar’s Trove in Snowden Drifts. I have a video of my old guild doing that and it’s got some fun memories for me.
Q: What do you enjoy so much about the profession you play as most and why?
A: I have a fairly even split between warrior, guardian and necro. Each of these has different strengths and it depends on what I feel like playing. Terrormancer is a lot of fun, power necro offers a scary amount of damage, medi guard has fantastic burst and lets me use my Juggernaut and warrior has so many options that I can make it work with anything. I enjoy just about all the professions though, since they all offer something that I like and I’m not absolutely awful at them… Unless I am and have no idea!
Q: What is your favourite/least favourite PvP map and why?
A: The thing that hurts PvP maps to various degrees for me, are the secondary objectives. I know that these make the maps interesting and diverse, but I can’t stand how distracting the treb is, I’ve seen temple games that were a sure-fire win go to pot after a lucky tranquility grab and don’t get me started on Skyhammer!
Other stuff though, like the orb on Spirit Watch, the beasts on Forest and the guild lord on Foefire are alright, since they rarely affect things much in my tier. Sure beasts distract some players and sure the orb does too, but lord rushes tend to only be a thing when a team is already in a comfortable position. Maybe others have different experiences there, but that’s how it goes personally.
I’d love to see a map with no secondary objectives, just to really focus on the conquest PvP. Courtyard doesn’t fill that gap for me though and I’m on the fence with Stronghold. I can see it being a lot of fun, but I’m interested more on how the top players’ strategies will work.
Q: How did you get started with the community, what inspired you to get involved?
A: This is a long one, so here we go. This question goes way back to when I was playing GW1. There was a very small group of content creators that offered unique videos back then and it was fairly difficult to find what all of them did. So I had this bright idea to collect them all together and make one video to show them all off in one, easy-to-find place. I had Doom Box, GuildWarsBuddy, SabreWolf, GWBogusDude and a few others that I can’t remember, all help me out with the idea. I thought it turned out really well and that I was helping the community, but then it became more and more obvious that there were tons of small channels also doing GW1 content. I had planned for this and had a few minutes at the end of the video to add annotation links to everyone, but it quickly became overwhelming and I didn’t want to add certain people that I personally wasn’t interested in.
I meant well, but it got the better of me. I also had some music on there that had to go eventually, so the video is now private.
However, I did manage to get involved with a number of people and made some life-changing friends as a result. GuildWarsBuddy was one of these friends. We got talking to each other over time and I ended up going on a run of The Deep in GW1 with his alliance and other various people. It was the first time I had used VOIP and played with all 12 people in such an organised team, and I loved it. I joined his guild shortly after, got involved with tons of alliance stuff and collab videos, I met WoodenPotatoes through that guild and ended up doing tons of stuff with them.
Just that one decision to join Eternity Lost and Found was huge. It eventually led to the reformation of Never Enough [Tyme] in GW2 and our Youtube channels bringing in a large number of new players to our community, which we then shared back through our videos again.
Q: Why do you think GW2 has such a great community around it?
A: The game itself promotes so much positivity that it translates to other areas outside of it. In PvE you’re always happy to see people, there’s no loot stealing, no difficulties when people attack the same mob as you and overall there’s a lot of people with a lot of patience in GW2 that love offering help with things.
However, I would have to make a perhaps controversial comment about the community too. Reddit in particular is a place where you see this all the time. If something comes up that splits the community or causes controversy, a large amount of people become bi-polar. One day can be all negativity, while the very next day, all could be forgotten and everything is sunshine and roses.
The HoT pre-purchase discussion is a good example of what I mean. Some people defended it with extremely white knight attitudes, ignoring the problems that other people had, and other people were the exact opposite, spewing hatred and threats all over the place.
Basically, while it’s fine to have your opinions, I see a particular minority on the forums that stay critical and offer thoughtful solutions and discussion get consistently ignored. It’s tough to get people to consider other’s opinions and I wish that this rational part of the community was much bigger.
Q: Could Arenanet do more to curate and develop its community?
A: They do a good job of promoting people on PoI and on Twitter and I think on Tumblr too? I don’t keep up with that stuff though.
What I would love to see more than anything else from Anet, is them finding more time to talk to the community on the forums and reddit. I’d love to see some more transparency and to see their thought processes when it comes to patches so that I could better understand them.
I’d also like to see them just get involved in the discussions more often too. I know it’s really hard for them to find the time and for them to change their policies, but it’d be fantastic to see them be more social than I already know they are.
Q: Why did you choose your particular format [youtube/twitch/blogs etc]?
A: I had a blog for a while! I just couldn’t keep up with it and got bored. Originally I started Youtube with Runescape videos, in fact, my first one was of me getting 99 cooking with Here I Go Again by Whitesnake as the background music. It was a terribly boring video as you can imagine!
But over time I got involved with adding commentary to my content, which wasn’t very common at all back then. It hit me quite fast that the format lends itself very well to tutorial style content and audio blogs or reviews. It became this platform to share my thoughts on various things and hopefully also offer help to those that needed it. I always find that watching someone else do a thing helps me out; having it explained is even better!
Q: What content do you create?
A: I generally do various opinion pieces on patches or news that interests me. I could easily increase the volume of stuff that I put out, but I consider a lot of news that comes out as fairly “fluffy” and if I don’t get hands-on with something, then I can’t be sure what I think.
Occasionally I’ll have a one-off idea also, like the video I did called “Consume Conditions.wmv” that was just a silly joke. Build videos, jumping puzzles and achievement guides sometimes appear as well, but not as commonly. There’s also other games that crop up too, I’ve done a fair bit of Dark Souls content and Skyrim stuff.
I also have a series in it’s infancy where I set a goal and try to beat that challenge without being killed, the Iron Man aspect makes those a lot of fun to make.
Finally is Quid’s In, which is supposed to be a review series to talk about games that I absolutely love, but those videos are super rare.
Q: How much does the audience and community influence your production/creations?
A: It depends on what kind of thing we’re talking about. My main priority is to always make the stuff that I want to make first. It’s always for me and my own reasons, but if someone asks for a specific thing then I’ll consider it or at least reply back in a comment.
However, if we think about the HoT pre-purchase thing again, I initially didn’t want to comment on it. What I found though, was that I could make a calm argument and try to mediate both sides of the issue while also offering my own take on it. I only did that video to try and reduce the confusion and help everyone understand each other’s issues - it was a direct result of the audience influence.
Another example would be if I wanted to share a build versus being asked to share a build. Tutorial style content is usually something that I see opportunities to make as I go, like achievement guides for tough stuff, but will also take requests for too. But most importantly, I make the content that I want to make and that I personally enjoy.
Q: Do you have any advice for people wanting to follow in your footsteps?
A: Tons. So much advice, but I have a fairly small channel and there are reasons for that. I could go on all day on this topic alone so I’ll just offer a couple of points:
Know why you’re doing it. Are you trying to make this a career? Are you just doing it for yourself? Do you have the motivation to push your content quality higher?
For me personally, I do it primarily for my own enjoyment and to interact with people. I never expect anything from my videos. Keep making content that you’re happy with and people that also like it will find it. I can’t stress enough how important it is to do this “new media” lark for your own enjoyment. Everything else is a bonus!
Do your research. If you want to do it right, you have to know your audience, your content, your software and everything else.
If you don’t know what you’re talking about, people won’t listen to you. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, people might react unfavourably. If you don’t know your software, your videos won’t look as nice as you hoped. Research is KEY, make sure you learn as much as possible.
And finally there’s all the other stuff people have said, so go read their interviews too!
Q: What type of games do you play for your own enjoyment?
A: I love RPGs. I also really enjoy a good platformer, or racers, puzzlers and shooters. If a game is good, I’ll play it and finish it - I’m generally quite discerning when it comes to buying new games.
RPGs offer such fantastic stories and can be much deeper than many other games - though you do occasionally find a rich shooter sometimes.
At the moment I’m playing through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I’m so deeply engrossed in the story that I can’t stop referencing it to people. They never asked for this.
Q: Who else would you recommend in the GW2 community?
A: I say old chap, this question is rigged. Whoever I don’t mention will be forever mad at me and I will feel guilty for not doing so.
There’s so MANY though!
The guys doing the Tea Time podcast are a riot, so that’s MightyTeapot, Brazil, MMOINKS and WorldofEnders’ Boottspurr, each of them offering their own take on many different things. Teapot does very unique analyses, Boots does the most interesting (but awful ;) builds, INKS is a source of up-to-date news and Brazil is my go-to guy for meta PvE builds.
On twitch there’s various others that I watch. All the Abjured streamers are great, I love how well Chaithh and Phantaram explain their thought processes in PvP.
Teldo does this very well also, Khezekiah, Sir Koroshi and Wolfineer are other engi players that I watch…
I know I’m forgetting people, I’m sorry! There’s reddit threads that try to cover everyone, Google those!
Q: Who is your favourite Youtuber/streamer [non gw2]?
A: This one’s tough too, I usually treat Youtube and Twitch like others treat Netflix and I binge on people’s content. Right now, I find myself watching EpicNameBro and LobosJr for a lot of Dark Souls stuff. ENB does lore and some tutorial styled game play, whereas Lobos does the most insane challenge runs imaginable. I’m also really enjoying a lot of RoosterTeeth stuff currently.
And just you wait for SGDQ this year, it’s gonna be incredible! If you love speedruns then Google it, seriously.
Q: If you could ask another creator or a GW2 developer/community moderator a question, who would it be and what would you ask them?
A: I would ask Brazil why he loves condition guardians so much. I just don’t understand how one man can express such an unyielding opinion!
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