This, That And The Other.

A bit of a grab-bag today, I'm afraid. I'm not really feeling it for long, involved treatises at the moment, which is probably just as well. Then again, I also haven't come up with any clever new ideas for short, pithy posts, so it's just going to be a little bit of what I've done and what I've read.

And mostly what I've done is get my Charr Engineer in Guild Wars 2 set up as a Mechanist, the new elite specialization for her class that comes with End of Dragons. I mentioned I was working on her in the post on planning but at the time about all I'd done was spend the points. That's the easy part.

Yesterday I got down to the detail. I went to Metabattle to look for a build. As I may have mentioned about a hundred times, I find making and changing builds every bit as compelling a piece of content as camping a two-hour spawn for a rare drop. Actually, not even that compelling. At least if the drop does finally drop there's a moment of euphoria before the grim realization of just how much time you wasted sets in.

My dislike of builds puts me in an odd position in regard to Metabattle and sites like it. In theory I kinda, sorta disapprove of them. They're somewhere in there with all the other forces that push mmorpg gameplay towards some kind of bland, cloned efficiency. It drives originality, whimsy and quirkiness to the perifery, whereas I'd like those sorts of behaviors to be right in the center.

On the other hand, they are really useful and they save a whole lot of time. When it's something I don't find fun to do the long-winded way, it's extremely easy to overlook the implications of taking a shortcut. 

In this particular instance I felt happier than usual about doing it because it's far too soon for any genuine "meta" to have coalesced. All we have so far are are suggestions. The build I followed, the Power Mechanist, is in the "Draft" section and so far just one person has voted on it. They did give it the full five stars, though.

I was drawn to it by the description: "Power Mechanist is a simple build that offers very high damage. It is exceptionally easy to play and is one of the best generalist options for open world farming currently."I especially like the part that says "exceptionally easy to play."

Naturally, I couldn't resist fiddling about with it. I didn't like the sound of the bomb kit much. I remember using that many years ago and finding it both exciting and unreliable. I stuck the speed signet in that slot instead and resolved to stick with my trusty rifle.

I did go with the suggestions for gear, more or less, which led me to a typically bitty, frustrating crafting session as I tried to remember which of my characters was the Leatherworker and then who had all the mats. Despite GW2's nominally excellent material storage, there's always something you need for Ascended gear that isn't where it's supposed to be.

In the end I opted for a mix of Ascended and Exotic gear, using some Ascended chests I had lying around, unopened, in the bank. They had the wrong stats, of course, so that meant making all the relevant items to throw into the Mystic Forge to change them to the stats I needed, namely Berserker (It's almost always Berserker for me, even now.)

After that I had to find which Guild's vault I'd used to store my runes and sigils and then of course it turned out I only had five Scholar runes so I had to buy a sixth on the Trading Post. Eventually I got it all done. It took me a couple of hours, including the most important part of all, coming up with an appropriate new look.

As the screenshots in the previous posts and this one show, the new look is radically different. As an Engineer, this character has always fancied herself something of a cool customer, clad in black leather and looking like she means business. As a Mechanist she's show-offy, stylish, even a little bit glam rock.

The gloves, which I think look great, come as a reward for becoming a Mechanist in the first place. All the rest are things I had unlocked in the wardrobe except for the rifle and shield, both of which come from the End of Dragons Saltspray set. I bought them on the TP for a few silver.

As you can see in one of the shots, but not, for some reason, in the one at the top of the post, which is from the login screen, I've given her orange, glowing eyes. I don't usually go for that look, which is very commonly seen in GW2, but the colors went perfectly and it seemed to fit the quasi-robotic theme.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with how she's turned out. Now I just have to learn how to play her.

New World

Following on from another recent post, I spent a couple of hours in New World today. The postponed patch has landed and as far as I can tell hasn't totally wrecked the game. Yet. 

I wanted to find one of the Easels for the new pictures you can put in your house but so far no luck. I was hoping they'd be marked on the map but if they are can't see them. I also didn't happen across any of the new random roadside encounters and the Level 40 Group Instance that was blocking me from continuing with the Main Story Quest is still in my journal. It hasn't been converted to a solo option. Boo!

On the plus side, the linked storage seems to be working. I completed a quest in Monarch's Bluff using some timber I pulled out of the storage in Weaver's Fen and it didn't cost me a coin. Even more positively, I had a great time running around Aeternum. I remembered very quickly why I enjoyed myself there so much for so long last year. 

I dinged 55, cleaning out some old quests and I feel moderately motivated to motor through to sixty. Fast travel and linked storage make the game feel considerably more like a regular mmorpg, something about which I have mixed feelings. I'm very glad I got to play before they changed it but as has always been the case for me, having had my chance to do it the slow way when everything was new and exciting, I'm more than happy to do it the fast way now it's familiar and routine.

A couple of other things of minor note to mention before I move on from New World. For some reason, all my Achievements had been reset. It was just a mouse-click to restore them at the game's prompt but I have no idea why it was necessary. Also there's a free bear-skin rug in the cash shop. I've claimed it but my rent hasn't been paid so I haven't placed it yet. Something to look forward to next time!

And finally, The Metaverse. Oh, god, not that again!

Don't worry. It's just a couple of links. I expect most people reading this would have already seen Andrew Ross's summary of the GDC 2022 panel entiteld “A Brave New (Virtual) World: Ethics and Governance of XR and the Metaverse” over at MassivelyOP. It's an interesting, if occasionally hard to follow, read. 

Less likely to have been spotted but even more interesting is this piece at The Atlantic by Ethan Zuckerman from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It's well worth reading not just because of the good sense Prof. Zuckerman talks about the Metaverse and what it can and can't be but also for a whole lot of historical detail about the kinds of proto-metaverse platforms that existed anything up to a quarter of a century ago.

It certainly wasn't news to me that we'd seen all of this before but it's very satisfying to see it laid out in chapter and verse with links to the evidence. This one, particularly, looks worth investigating further. It's the write-up of something called The Metaverse Roadmap Summit, which took place in 2006 and featured, among others, our good friend Raph Koster.

And finally, one more from The Atlantic. Dating back to late last year, this one goes under the provocative title "The Metaverse Is Bad." It's an extreme position, to be sure, but I suspect what the author really means is "Facebook's version of the Metaverse is bad" and no-one's going to argue with that.

Time To Build: GW2

Yesterday's update saw the arrival of Build and Equipment Templates for Guild Wars 2. As the lengthy and detailed official guide has it, Templates are "a much-requested feature" that's been "in development for a long time". Someone has a gift for under-statement.

Even I, as far as I am from seeing this kind of build management system as a necessity, indeed tending to think of it as yet another blinking nuisance I might one day have to deal with, could hardly have remained unaware of the demand. For years I've listened to people mithering on about the lack of such a facility, how it ruins their enjoyment, how primitive GW2 is compared to [insert name of any other MMORPG here] and how they're sure some solution could be implemented in an afternoon by any halfway competent intern.

ANet's developers, infamously, grind slower than the mills of the almighty, albeit to a far coarser scale. They've spent so long, first ignoring the demand, then delaying on their promise to meet it, that a third party alternative has been in place for years.

GW2 is not a game built for Add-Ons. They have a very dubious status and players can and do get banned for using them. Over the lifetime of the game there have been many anxious posts on the official forums requesting clarification on the legality of various unofficial plug-ins.

Usually such pleas receive nothing more than ANet's trademarked stony silence. Once in a while, when some such device becomes too popular or notorious to ignore, an official statement on its use will manifest. Even then, as a user of such an add-on, the best you can hope for is a vague, handwaving non-assurance that you won't find yourself locked out of your account for installing it...for the time being.

Consequently, even with an apparently satisfactory third-party option available, there will be considerable pent up demand for an unequivocally approved version that doesn't require a lot of fiddling about and doesn't have to be downloaded from a potentially problematic source. Unsurprisingly, that's a demand ANet would love to monetize.

Massively:OP ran a piece on the potential cost of using the new system to its fullest, suggesting that "If you’re the kind of person who runs nine characters, one from each class, then your fee could be pushing over $360." Well, possibly. Technically. Theoretically. Maybe.

There is, predictably, some outrage over both the implementation and the expense. It all seems a little overdone to me, although I freely acknowledge I'm not the target market here. I tend to agree with  Bree, author of the M:OP post, when she concludes, "...not a whole lot of people will need to buy anything at all". I'm pretty sure I won't. (Then again, there's this, which appeared just after I finished the post. Arguments over design and costs are one thing but breaking the whole game is something else again.)

More than that, I initially believed I wouldn't even use the system. I loathe changing builds. I quite enjoy setting them the first time but my preference is to do it just once for any given character and then never open that screen again.

In GW2 it's something I like to do as soon as the character dings 80. At that point I decide what the character's combat function is going to be and what they are going to look like. I go through my warehouses of rainy day items, go around the relevant vendors, pore through the Trading Post and have a jolly good time.

It's a little treat I often save for a Sunday after lunch. It takes me a good few hours. Once it's done, my fervent hope is that I'll never have to do it again for that particular character. Unfortunately, what with MMORPGs being vibrant, living worlds (hah!), inevitably there comes an update when I have to revisit and revise.

What I have never seen myself needing is a whole slew of pre-set options allowing me to turn, say, one character from a healer to a damage dealer in mid-fight. Except, actually, maybe I have and just hadn't allowed myself to recognize the fact.

When I logged in today to claim my free Build Template on all three of my eligible accounts (because my rule of thumb is never to turn down a free lunch even if I'm not feeling hungry) it took no more than a few minutes for me to realize that I had, after all, some pre-existing, vestigial pretensions to build diversity.

If not, how would I explain the full sets of soulbound gear mouldering at the bottom of the bags of several of my characters? I'd all but forgotten that, when some of those unwelcome updates had forced me to reassess and re-gear my most played characters, I'd stashed everything from the outdated build "just in case".

My Necro, for example, started out as full Condition (damage over time to the non-GW2 player). Inevitably, at some point and for some reason I can't now recall, the meta shifted to Power (direct damage) for classes that had previously relied on DoTs.

I was playing a lot of World vs World at that time and my Necromancer was the main character I took to The Mists. Condition builds were very lackluster in that mode and although I resisted for as long as I could, eventually I cracked and converted to Power.

My timing was terrible. Very soon afterwards ANet massively buffed condition damage and we entered what became a lengthy meta based on that change. Power necros became passé almost overnight but, as it happened, I was in the process of switching to Elementalist in WvW anyway, so it didn't really matter all that much.

My Necro these days mostly does content that requires a lot of AE tagging - something that occurs very frequently in GW2 - so she's back wearing her Condition gear to support her ground-targeted Marks. In her bags, though, she still has all her Power gear.

Well, she did. Until about an hour ago. Now it's all in her second Equipment Template and the space it took up in her bags is...well, space.

There will be plenty of people who bemoan the design of the new templates, which require you to own the gear you want to use rather than have your right to ownership recorded in a database, the way Skins work. As someone who keeps all kinds of used items in storage because they feel more "real" that way, I strongly approve of my gear not vanishing to leave nothing behind but an entry on a list.

I realize this is insanity. If there's an eternal debate on the meaning and value of authenticity in the physical world, which there most certainly is, how much more abstract must the argument become when the items in question only exist as icons on a screen? 

How can an icon in the grid of my bank vault be more "authentic", more "real", than the identical icon in the grid of my Wardrobe storage? I can't answer that. I just know it can. It is.

For that reason alone I welcome the new templates. I can keep my old gear and and have the bag space back. What's more, of my nineteen characters only a handful have cast-off gear sets but my storage is stuffed to bursting with gear I've acquired over seven years and haven't yet found a use for. Now I can move a whole lot of that onto Templates and free up yet more valuable space so I can fill it with even more worthess crap precious momentoes and valuable items.

Whether I'll ever use the Templates for their notional function - changing the way my characters behave in combat - I'm not sure. I might.

I almost certainly will on the Druid/Ranger I take through Living World instanced content. I use him because he's specced for extreme healing and very high survivability but his DPS is correspondingly dismal. I have, on occasion, re-dressed him in his old Condition gear to get past a particularly egregious roadblock so it will be very good to be able to hot-swap him from Heals to DoTs as needed. In fact, I've already set up his basic Equipment template for that.

I haven't yet looked at the other Template, his Build. I will, though. Since it's there I'll probably take the trouble to set one up for each of the characters I kit out with a second set of gear. It's not something that needs to be done this week or even this year. It'll save for those long Sunday afternoons in Winter.

To conclude, much as it surprises me to say it, I'm finding Templates a lot more useful than I expected. Notch up another win for the new management.

Dead Air: TSW

As the discussion in the comments following yesterday's post makes it painfully clear, when it comes to playing MMOs, "builds" are not my strong point. If you're going to play an MMO designed around a giant skill wheel, however, there's no point whining about it, you just have to knuckle down, read the mouseovers and get theorycrafting.

Naturally my first recourse was to google for someone else's work but as this Reddit thread complains most of the builds that come up on a search are long out of date. Fortunately there was someone I could steal from - me!

Presenting The Presenter!
The one and only screenshot I managed to grab

For all I said about The Secret World being an easy game to come back to it does still rely on the returning player having some vague memory of what happened last time around. Last night I knocked off the rest of The Meowling without incident and fought my way into the abandoned soviet bunker in Transylvania for the showdown with The Presenter to conclude this year's new Halloween quest, The Broadcast.

Only The Presenter had other ideas. I fought him twice and lost twice, each battle taking ten to fifteen minutes. If I concentrated on survival I could still be fighting him now - he and his coterie of broadcast-bedazzled spooks together struggled to take me under 90% health. On the other hand, he wasn't showing much sign of dying either, since I seemed to have the approximate DPS of an elderly rabbit dual-wielding limp lettuce leaves.

If it wasn't for his incredibly irritating habit of running from room to room and making me chase him while his spectral fan club whaled away at my unprotected back this so-called fight might have gone on even longer but in the end sheer tedium wore me down and he got the better of me. Half an hour of that and I'd had enough.

It was apparent that I'd need to rethink my build or get better gear and  wasn't convinced I wanted to see the end of the quest enough to do either. Last year I ran into exactly the same issue with The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn. I put a lot of effort into fixing that and my hard work got me nowhere. It's an experience I wasn't keen to repeat.

Scuse me! Coming through!

After I'd moaned about it passive-aggressively at some length in the comments here, Sylow very kindly offered to help me figure out a build that would bring my time-to-kill into single figures (minutes that would be, not seconds). By the time I read his comment, though, I'd figured out a build all by myself. Or rather, I'd stumbled across the five builds I'd worked up the last time I had this problem, all neatly tucked away in the Gear Management tab I'd completely forgotten existed.

I found it right after I'd spent maybe an hour going through Actives and Passives trying to match Builders and Consumers, affliction and impairment, Blades and Assault Rifle until I'd made myself thoroughly cross-eyed and confused. At least I was able to confirm my own consistency of approach because the new build I arrived at was extremely similar to the one I'd stored away under the name DPS+Leech.

Just as well, too, because I was so eager to take a look at it I didn't think that slotting it would wipe the one I'd just spent an hour working on. Never mind. It was good practice. Or something.

Equipped with my old-new build (the one that had so singularly failed to progress me past my 50k hit point roadblock in the Tyler Freeborn quest, something I was conveniently choosing to leave forgotten) I raced through the black tunnels of the festering underground facility, ducking ghosts and knocking over barrels of irradiated waste until I was once again face to face with The Presenter.

I died, of course. Only this time he was at least taking damage at a reasonable pace. And I thought I knew where I needed to improve to make progress. First off, get my back to a wall and stop those ghosts getting behind me. Second, figure out an actual rotation for these skills that would get those synergies flowing.

And it worked. Almost all the damage I took occurred on the between-room runs when the ghosts had free shots. Other than that my health stayed up while his went down, just as it should. It got quite close near the end, when I panicked because I thought I might actually win for once and fell off my rhythm, and I did have to drink a couple of Elixirs along the way because of those darn ghosts, but in the end I was still standing and he wasn't and that's all that really counts.



The quest itself had a somewhat muted coda. As is usual in TSW it left me feeling little the wiser about what had been going on and feeling that I'd almost certainly missed something important. I love that feeling. It's one of the best features of the game.

How much more I'll be playing I wouldn't like to guess. I took a quick look at my gear and it's more sub-par than I remembered - mostly green Q10s with one or two blue Q9s. I have a green Q10 blade but my rifle is a Q8 blue - I have a Q10 green rifle but it lowers all the important stats in comparison to the Q8. What all that means I'm not really sure.

I think I saw Rick Wakeman play this thing on Tales From Topographic Oceans

This is the thing with MMOs: as Alysianah at Mystic Worlds confirms, the grind is real. If you want to do more than dabble then there nearly always comes a point when you just have to get your head down, read the guides, study the tool-tips, farm the mats, kill the mobs, knock out the dailies and do all those other things that make playing in virtual worlds feel like having a imaginary, unpaid job.

The Secret World has the best stories in MMOs but that's a lot of work, even for a good story. Also for a waistcoat, which was the reward I got.

GW2: The Existential MMO

I don't know what I'm doing. Three weeks out from launch, Level 80 already. Dressed in leathers I sewed myself, blue in quality, cinnamon in color. Wielding weapons prized from the hands, paws or possibly stomachs of my hapless victims. Studded with jewellery lovingly handcrafted by Mrs Bhagpuss, also mostly blues. Nothing in my upgrade sockets but fresh Tyrian air.

This is not great gear. It's not end-of-leveling gear, let alone end-game gear. I could buy better on the Trading Post for pennies. It looks fantastic but I haven't even matched the stats, let alone chosen them for a particular purpose. I don't, in fact, have a particular purpose. As I said, I don't know what I'm doing.

Gear's not the half of it, either. Look at my Traits. Look at my Skills. When I hit 80 I had over 50 Trait Points and 58 Skill Points unspent. This morning I tried to spend some but I didn't get far. It isn't that the things I could buy with them aren't useful or interesting. It's that I don't need any of them.

Yah! Stupid catapult can't hit me here!

As I type this I'm logged into the game, tucked safely on a ledge below The Colonnade. Three events ticked past as I was typing and I got Gold for two of them and Silver for the third. If I contributed anything I have no idea what it was. Except when it isn't, GW2 is easy. Very pleasantly, enjoyably, comfortably easy. All you have to do is turn up. Sometimes not even that.

I was there! Kinda.

I'm easy with easy but easy doesn't offer much in the way of a plan. Levels drift by like dandelion clocks on the Queensdale breeze, events give out rewards whether you win or lose, and though the gear you have and the skills you've chosen do make a difference to how you perform, how you perform doesn't make a lot of difference to how much fun you have.

There, that's the nub. It's far too easy to enjoy yourself. If it's all fun all the time, where's my motivation? That's something with which some people are having a hard time coming to grips.

My contribution

It certainly wasn't worrying me until I hit the level cap and it's not worrying me now. Puzzling me, yes. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had a long discussion about stats this morning. That's not normal. We do not talk about stats. We were talking about stats on a Monday morning because on Sunday afternoon, while we romped across Malchor's Leap and Cursed Shore, knocking the Risen back down and filling our pockets with Orichalcum, somewhere along the way we bumped into the Karma vendor who sells a full set of Exotic Quality Level 80 armor for 42,000 Karma the piece.

That's a lot of Karma. After 80 levels during which I have barely spent any Karma at all, I have enough squirreled away to buy the coat and one leg of a pair of pants. If you're going to try to collect another quarter of a million Karma points to get the set, you want to be quite sure that what you buy with them is what you really need.

Stats? Who cares? I got a giant matchstick!

Which is how Mrs Bhagpuss got to be thinking about stats and asking me what were my thoughts on the matter, which in turn is when I realized I didn't have any. I've just been living in the moment, going with the flow, doing my own thing. I only tend to start thinking about stats and builds and gear when I hit a roadblock that stops me doing what I want to do and in GW2 there are no roadblocks. (Outside of Dungeons, that is, and I don't plan on going in any of those thank you very much).

So where does that leave us? Confused, mostly. Confused, directionless and happy. My current plan, if it can be dignified as such, is to fiddle about with a few "builds" and see if I can tell the difference. That's always fun. In The Secret World, tweaking my build changed things up hugely in a way I wasn't expecting. Maybe that will happen in GW2.

First of all I need to work on, guess what, bag space. If I'm going to try out different combinations of stats I'll have to lug around a load of gear. GW2 doesn't provide much in the way of convenience for holding or swapping gear sets, unlike TSW. I quite fancy running as a Condition Damage ranger, and as Heal/Support. A Trap/Spirit build could be interesting, too - Natural Engineer I could call that one.

There. Now I have a plan but I still don't really know what I'm doing. Perfect!