1) When did you first become hooked, what was it that got you hooked and makes you stay there in Guild Wars?
I started to play on the 9th of June 2005, I was at a friends house and he showed me the game.. Ten minutes later I HAD to go home, passing the nearest game shop and bought 2 copies of Prophecies straight away. I was hooked instantly.. The thing that keeps me going are the players, my ingame friends, got to know quit a lot of new guys and girls, and real friendships can be made online.
2) What music do you listen to ingame - soundtrack or something else?
Mostly the radio is on, playing on the background because 9/10 I’m there with my headset on talking away about the birds and the bees and how to farm them on Teamspeak.
3) Your ranger is your most famous character- do you play any other professions on a regular basis?
Well with about 2500 hours of playtime on my ranger alone, there is indeed no doubt it is my most beloved profession, can’t get tired of her.. I do play Ritualist the most after my ranger, in Nightfall you don’t see them that often, and if you see them, they are mainly support healers. Now a lot of people underestimate the true powers of the spirits.. I do play a bit of every profession in fact, only mesmers and assassin didn’t qualify for any ingame time on my account.. At the moment 3 characters finished NF already: Ranger, Ritualist and Dervish. My necromancer is well on it’s way and after that I’ll take some dust off my Elementalist.
4) It’s well known you lead your own guild Mutants [Mu], could you give us a little history and share any stories about that?
This is quit a long story, I’ll try to summarize it a bit
Almost 4 years ago, the only thing I did on the internet was chatting, until a friend asked me to try out this game called Mu-Online. I played it, liked it and got hooked quit fast, because I don’t like to play alone, I dragged some more chatfriends in the gaming world. You could only make a guild there at level 100 with 10% of your level being the max amount of members you could have.
Now you didn’t get level 100 in just a few days, so I just played a lot. Met this Portuguese guy called Netcracker and raced him to level 100. Started the Mutants guild (I won ^^) and kept on playing to have the ability of more members for the guild. At level 180 (+8 months intensive playing) I got wings for my character ingame, not a lot of people had them at that time, soon my fellow members followed. Because we were so high level and successful ingame, we got known pretty well on wiggle 2 servers..
Some Korean guilds started to hack the servers like mad, cheating was their way of live on Mu-Global, and the fun started to faint away.. That’s when Netcracker set up a privat server for Mu-Online and we’ called it: Mutants-Mu
Lots of people played this server, made even more friends there. As an admin on the server I held lots of events and had a great team of other admins to back me up and prevent hackers or unfair players to wander about in our game.
A year and a half past, and without new content and limited skills and only 3 quests ingame, we decided to do something else and expand our gaming experience.
Guildwars was our new world, within 2 weeks, we bought ourselves a guildhall (53K at the time) and more and more people from Mu-Online started to appear on the GuildWars servers.. The guild grew like mad. You won’t ever see me or a guildmember shouting in a town because we are looking for recruiting players. All players asked me if they could join, coz they read about Mutants, or they played a mission together with us..
5) What games prior to GW did you play? And which was your favourite?
As mentioned above the only game I played before Guildwars was Mu-online (not counting the very first version of “Prince of Persia” when I was a little teenager)
6) Is there anything you still play now when not roving the worlds of GW?
I’m not shifting between different games, I like to play one and find out as much as possible info about that one game. Having a job and a household and play like 7-8 hours of Guildwars a day, doesn’t leave me much room for another game =)
7) When did you first become interested in graphics? Is this a GFX thing or do you also partake in more traditional methods of expression?
While chatting in my early internet days, I followed an online course about Paint Shop Pro and was amazed by the stuff you could do with it.. Especially the moving pictures (GIF-files) were my kind of bread. Made myself a website where people could ask there personalized animated GIFs, which was very successful at that time..
Other job and gaming made that chapter in my life close down.
Always in the mood to take a picture of a friend, cut him out and place him in a highly irrelevant other picture, and showing that to our mutual friends.. Always in for a good laugh
8) What was it that first attracted you to the forums and how long have you been an active member?
Joined Gameamp on the 19th of September 2005 and found this site while looking for a map of a certain mission. I liked the ‘community’ feeling here and decided to throw in a few gaming experiences myself. This forum got me hooked as well…
9) Why choose Tribina as your user name?
Chatname in early days was Tribal-ke
Tribal referring to the black and white tattoo kind of pictures because I like those pictures a lot and –ke means ‘little’ in Flemish.
Lots of people didn’t type out my name because it was to long, and they derived Trib or Tribke from it.
My female ranger can’t have a guy’s name, so I feminised it to Tribina.
(which actually means ‘display stand at a fair or market’ in Russian I believe, didn’t know that, they told me ingame ^^)
10) Since becoming staff we all know that you have made an amazing contribution with the new Armor section, what inspired you to do it?
Well I was thinking about getting a set for my elementalist, now I don’t need to know the materials needed for it, because I’ll see that when I’m at the armor crafter. What I wasn’t able to see, was how the set looked like ingame. Those little icons of the armor npc’s didn’t reveal anything at all.. What if I don’t like the set I’m about to buy? Where can I find a picture for it? Not one decent picture out there at that time, so I gave myself the nice little job of hunting down all armors ingame..
11) What is your favourite set and why?
This must be the Ritualist FoW armor, it’s so detailed.. I just love it.. It really differs a lot of the other Ritualist sets, you can see loads of tribal tattoos on his skin… Awesome set that is
;-)
12) Why did you choose those specific locations for each chapter for the armor sets?
1)Prophecies’ spot was at Copperhammer mines, this gave me loads of problems coz not all people made it to that little town yet, I ended up running a whole bunch there.
2) Factions’ spot was just outside Kaineng Center, almost all players got there, but had to switch between international and home districts all the time
3) Nightfalls spot was in my Guildhall, had to pay 100g for everyone I invited, but it made work so easy! Definatly would do it again at my Guildhall;-)
13) How did you go about finding the armors and creating the pictures?
Got quit a lot of help from Mutants guildmembers and Gameamp guys.. Some actually spend a fortune to let me get 2 pictures of a set that wasn’t online yet… When I’m desperate and can’t find a single set, you can find me in towns shouting for people with a certain armor on..
14) Which was the hardest set to find a picture for?
Male Ritualist Vabbian armor without a doubt
15) How long did it take to do?
Well I started taking pics 2 weeks after Nightfall was released, because I wanted to enjoy the game first before I would start on those armors. Couldn’t start straight away anyway, had to let people get to places first and buy the armors? That makes it about 1 month to complete all the armors..
16) How does it feel now that it’s finished?
Feels relieved in a way =) I’m very proud of those pictures and I do know they help a lot of people, so it’s defiantly worth the effort… Don’t want to go and count the total amount of pictures I took so far though ^^
17) If you could design your own armor set, what style or theme would it have and for which character?
It would be for a ranger anyway, that’s for sure…Leather looks with an animal theme worked into it.. And of course I would put in some glow as well… Kormir shouldn’t be the only one with such a nice colour armor.. I could design something awesome if only… only… I could use Arenanet’s programs for a bit ^^
18) Which part of the planet do you inhabit and how long have you graced it?
Belgium, land of the beer, chocolate and manneke pis,
Was born in the town where they make the best beer of the entire world, Stella Artois, nearly 29 years ago…
19) Do you live on your own or do you have others trying to get your attention away from the PC?
Call me lucky.. I live together with my girlfriend and she shares the passion for GuildWars..
We have PC’s enough, so no fighting there ^^. She is my main monk, feel pretty safe when she’s going along to try and save my behind from a few more deaths..
20) When not playing games or creating graphics what do you like to do?
I like to create a website once in a while (pure html ones) or go for a drive on my big bmw bike.. Can’t forget to tell we have international guildmeetings once in a while as well.. I met about 5 Dutch guys, 8 Portuguese guys, 12 Argentina guy, 1 Swedish dude and loads of Belgians already.. England beware, you’re next ^^
21) What puts food on your table in the real world?
I work for an adult education centre, for people who are unemployed for a long time.. I do all the administrative work there, and if a teacher gets ill, I’m the substitute ^^
I like teaching adult Excel- Word-Outlook-Internet but will also teach other things like first aid and stuff..
Lately I got in charge of 17 pc’s and a new server, working out how to configure everything in the best possible way..
On top of that I got promoted to webmaster of my company’s website (big site…..)
22) Talking of food what is your favourite thing to munch?
Californian pistachio nuts, roasted and salted *drewlllllll*
23) If you were a fish what kind of fish would you be?
mmmmmmmmmmmm smoked salmon… *drewl*
24) If there was one question you think we should have asked, what was it and what is the answer?
Question: Will global heating make the price of ice-cream go up?
Answer: I’m stocking my freezers at this moment..
