I have decided to admit to myself that Guild Wars 2 is my unicorn: a mythical beast that shouldn’t exist, but I’ll be damned that it does.

Like many gamers, I’ve played many a game over the years, and in that time there’s a lot of water under the bridge. Many sights have been seen, many fights have been fought, and many lovers have been loved, but with any trip, it’s the journey and not the destination that defines the experience. All of the MMOs that I have played over the years were way-stations on my journey to an unknown destination. I always figured that the final resting place would show itself to me when it was good and ready, and in the meanwhile the cosmos would allow me to just bounce around the landscape as I saw fit.

I think the end of my journey is in sight.

Like any trip, through, it’s never just one, so I will continue to sample other MMOs. And like any destination, it’s never going to always live up to glossy expectations set forth in the brochure. I don’t expect to leave other MMOs behind forever; I don’t expect Guild Wars 2 to be the end all, be all of MMOs. We have a history, those other games and I, and like anyone with a shared history you’re anchored, and it’s comforting to return to those locations from time to time. But they weren’t strong enough for me to call them the destination. No one purposefully takes a trip to a highway rest-stop and calls it a day, after all.

The thing for me about Guild Wars 2 is that is just felt natural in the BWE. I wanted to be there, and also to range far from the hub. I didn’t want to go out to seek fortune, but instead I just wanted to seek for seeking’s sake. What was out there? What’s going on that I don’t know about, and how can I get involved? I didn’t need any NPC to send me into the wilderness because I was already bolting off in that direction for my own selfish reasons. Even when I was being decimated in WvWvW – and especially when I was doing the decimating – I felt that yeah, this is just about right. This is how it should feel. I don’t want to leave, and when I am pulled away (or ejected thanks to periodic beta scheduling), I just want to return.

So there it is. I dub myself “Guild Wars 2 fanboy”. I don’t travel the familiar fanboy paths, though: I still don’t care about gear or discussing balance between classes or using numbers or stats. I’d make a fan site, but without those kinds of topics, I can’t foresee the site being anything other than “this is what I did in game today!”, which isn’t interesting to anyone else but me (and not even then, really). So I’ll probably keep my fanboyism to myself, with the occasional display here and there, but always with a mind that this isn’t a Guild Wars 2 blog specifically, and that rampaging and frothy-mouthed fanboyism is a sure way to get on people’s nerves. I don’t need Guild Wars 2 to do that. XD