Guilded: Guild Wars 2 and the Quest for Celery

The release and early success of Guild Wars 2 has made quite a splash in the world of online gaming. What's going on in there? Let's find out: Tom Chick emerges once a week to bring you tales from inside the world of ArenaNet's iconoclastic MMO.


When you're considering crafting professions, Guild Wars 2 helpfully provides the following warning if you try to select cooking:

"Are you sure? Cooking is an advanced profession. It is a deep dark hole into which you throw money and time. If you want to make a small fortune cooking, the first step is to get a large fortune. Cooking will leave you impoverished, with your inventory full of dough, spice mixes, pasta, and various other things that won't fit into the collection storage we helpfully provided so that you have room in your inventory for stuff you find. Cooking is not for you. Maybe you should be an artificer or an armorer. In fact, go try armorer. Everyone needs armor."

Being a fan of the Cooking Mama games -- I am not joking one iota -- I ignored the warning. I wanted to cook. This is my story.


Crafting in MMOs is a mostly established thing without much variation from game to game. That's the case in Guild Wars as well. The last time I encountered crafting that departed from the usual formula was in Vanguard, where crafting is an elaborate series of steps to create components of varying quality, involving raw materials, tools, critical hits and misses, work orders, and a whole set of skills and attributes for each step of the way. If you lathed, sanded, and lacquered a plank just right, you could get a grade-B table leg. Don't even think about grade-A table legs until your woodworking attribute is higher and you've spent more points on finishing. Eventually, you and a few dozen guildmates can build an honest-to-goodness entire boat.

A Little of This, a Little of That

Crafting is one of Guild Wars 2's most conservative features, but it reminds me a bit of Vanguard for how it involves a sense of poking and prodding and fitting component together. It also involves trying various things to see what happens. Especially cooking, where the recipes, ironically, aren't so obvious. The pattern for making weapons, armor, and socketable jewels is established pretty quickly, but cooking is all about trying various ingredients together to see what they make. It's about combining strawberries and sugar and then figuring out what to add next to make it a tart, pie, or a cookie. It's about later doing the same thing with blackberries, then pumpkin, then peaches. It's about figuring out how to turn poultry into poultry stock into herbed poultry stock into dill cream sauce into an elaborate meatball dish.

Or it's about just looking at the wiki.


Early on, I wanted to mess around with ingredients and naturally discover recipes. Guild Wars 2 wants me to do this. When I match bread and a slab or red meat, I get a hamburger. Now I do it with a wedge of cheese and I've got a cheeseburger. Replace the bread with that sesame seed bun that I created when I added the sesame I found to a bread recipe. The ensuing Big Mac is what Guild Wars 2 calls a deluxe burger. I didn't go to Burger King.

Playing Pantry Tetris

Culinary tinkering takes up a lot of space. Many of the raw materials in Guild Wars 2 live in their own storage space, separate from your backpack or bank, but incremental components like that sesame seed bun fill up your regular inventory. The curious experimental cook will feel a squeeze for space. However, when I finally got around to selling all the ore, wood, cloth, and special components I'd amassed over 70 levels, I had enough gold to buy additional bank space for all my cooking components. I like to think of it as remodeling and expanding my kitchen, and I was able to do it because I was a cook who didn't need ore, wood, cloth, and all those special components.


Sometimes it's too frustrating not knowing what's missing from a recipe. For instance, early on in my cooking career, I knew I needed vegetable stock. I had the onion, carrots, and water, but nothing in my kitchen fit into the last slot. I knew one thing was missing, but I had no idea what that could be. To my shame, I resorted to the wiki, which told me I was missing celery. How was it that I hadn't found celery?

The wiki had an answer: celery isn't something you find, like blueberries. You can't even buy it on the trading post, which is Guild Wars 2's player-driven commodities market where I earned the money to expand my kitchen. Celery is only available from a farmer in the human area, and he'll only sell it to you if he likes you enough. So there I was, driving bandits out of a farmstead in the Gendarran Fields to make Milton Book like me enough to sell me his celery. I wouldn't have it any other way. I love that Guild Wars 2 made me go out of my way for celery. I love that I was killing those bandits for a reason specific to my narrative. Remember that cooking is an advanced profession -- if you're not willing to appease Milton Book by clearing a few bandits from his fields, you're not advanced enough. Go make armor. I'll be over here killing the spiders in Eda's grove so she'll give me apples.

A Small, Good Thing

Cooking is endearingly domestic. Just as crafting itself is a whole different kind of gameplay in an MMO, distinct from the fighting and exploration, cooking is even more distinct. It's quiet, modest, and small. It's not as fantastic as brewing a potion, or as hardy as forging a sword, or as practical as stitching a leather vambrace. I don't even know what a vambrace is. I barely know what a hilt is. But I know what a pie crust is, and I know it needs some blueberry filling, which I made with sugar, starch, and lemons, along with the blueberries I found in Dolyak Pass. The resulting blueberry pie lasts for 30 minutes after I eat it, giving me a 20% chance to steal health whenever I score a critical hit in combat and, like all food, it gives me an experience point bonus.


But what am I going to do with 48 blueberry pies? Man, charr, or asura can't live on pie alone. Sometimes I want pepper steaks that make me hit harder for 30 seconds after scoring a kill, or minotaur steaks that improve my chances for a critical hit as well as the damage it causes, or orange coconut bars that improve my chance to find magic items and increase the amount of money dropped by enemies. I will never eat 48 blueberry pies. So half of them go into the guild bank for my guildmates, and then I immediately give away half of the remaining half to random strangers.

I think of handing out food as no different than the way some spellcasters sprinkle passers-by with buffs. Guild Wars 2 lets me click on someone, then rightclick his name, and then select "send mail to." I simply attach a blueberry pie and a "Have a nice day!" subject header.

What else am I going to do, sell the pies on the trading post? Food is worth nearly nothing in Guild Wars 2's economy. I've already benefitted from making the pies (the experience points you can earn from crafting aren't trivial!), and I'd rather provide someone with a pleasant surprise than add another mere copper piece to my cash reserves. There's no downside to giving someone a blueberry pie -- it's like spending a trivial sum on fireworks that create a brief sparkling animation, or playing music in the streets of Bree in Lord of the Rings Online, or dropping a train set in the Orgrimar auction house. Just as some people cook in the real world not because they like cooking, but because they like feeding other people, Guild Wars 2 is happy to let you do a small, good thing.