Backsliding : GW2, EQ2

Jeromai appears to be reaching the very limit of his patience with GW2 and the people running it and who can blame him? He makes some extremely apposite and valid observations, both on his own blog and in the comments to this one, about how a game one touted by its developers as a shining example of inclusivity caved on its principles to become the very opposite:

"Guild Wars 2, an egalitarian enjoyable game, bent over to cater to the strident demands of the "we need raids and like the exclusivity it brings because then I can feel better than others" subset and ripped apart the community in the process."

It's true. It's also utterly confounding. Over the lifespan of GW2 other MMOs, almost across the board, have progressively withdrawn from exclusivity in favor of a variety of mechanisms designed and intended to open up previously elite content to the widest possible audience.

WoW introduced "Looking For Raid" to facilitate pick-up raiding. Rift created Intrepid Adventures "to give all players a chance to experience some of the lore of the high level raids". LotRO redesigned Fellowship Quests so that they could be soloed rather than requiring a full group.

There are many similar examples of MMO developers re-tuning their games to reflect reality: players are less social than they were, they don't play as often or for as long as they did and they have a lot less patience for anything that they don't find fun. As Jeromai points out "Wildstar should have been an object lesson in catering to only one small subgroup and expecting the bills to be paid."

Of the MMOs I play the one that has benefited the most from this change of attitude is EQ2. It's a game that has always had a storyline but for many years it was a narrative largely recounted in raid instances. 

At some point when I wasn't paying close attention this began to change. When I returned after a break and played through the 2012 and 2013 expansions Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan I was surprised to find the entire storyline laid out for me, not just in the open world zones but in specially-created Solo and Advanced Solo instances that mirrored those for groups and even raids.

By the time we got to last years Kunark Ascending the sales pitch made that realignment abundantly clear: "All new dungeons for Solo, Heroic, and Raid parties alike". Note that equivalence. It's important.

The move towards inclusivity extends to open world content as well as instancing. ESO recently flattened the level barrier with the "One Tamriel" initiative and EQ2 has long had the option to recalibrate your character's level to match the zone.

Then there are the open world, raid-like events that bypass traditional raid requirements. Generally considered to have originated in Warhammer Online's "Public Quests" before being refined and formulated by Rift with its "rifts" and "invasions", this kind of all-pile-on, zerg-friendly content perhaps reached its apotheosis of public acceptance in last year's pre-event for WoW's "Legion" expansion.

GW2 was an early adopter and something of a market leader for this kind of thing. The game has auto-leveling maps and well before launch ANet made a huge play of the "Dynamic Events" system. However original, let alone mold-breaking that may have been in 2012, nearly five years later it appears little different from the industry standard.

Rift certainly did much of what GW2 does back when GW2 wasn't even in beta and EQ2 has been dabbling with this kind of open-access, inclusive, large scale content since 2011's Destiny of Velious expansion, albeit with mixed success. The current iteration that came with Kunark Ascending, however, is proving extremely popular.

Four months after the expansion arrived, every day at the time I play, which isn't even during North American prime, there's a good chance there will be multiple instances running for Obolous Frontier, Jarsath Wastes and Fens of Nathsar. General chat pings constantly with calls for OF2 or JW3 and ad hoc pick-up raids form, although there's no requirement to be in a raid to participate. 

It's all remarkably good-humored. Other than the occasional request that someone drops a mercenary to make space for another player I have seen absolutely no histrionics, arguing, complaining or elitist jerkism. 

The events are fun although the aging EQ2 engine does make it hard to tell what's going on at times. They are popular primarily, though, not so much for the gameplay as because they are immediately accessible to anyone of the appropriate level and they offer a good chance of desirable rewards.

In this respect Blizzard and Daybreak, like Trion before them, seem to understand something that ANet have never acknowledged, namely that giving people what they want will get them to log in and play. In GW2 the expectation is always that you won't get anything you want from doing an event; in other MMOs you know it's not guaranteed but you feel you're in with a fighting chance.

Contrary to popular belief, GW2 mobs do have desirable drops. Every mob has an infinitesimal chance to drop a variety of "good" items, while "named" mobs such as World Bosses have specific items on their loot tables. The problem isn't what they can drop. It's what they do drop. GW2 has always been exceptionally ungenerous in its in-game rewards. Even though the frequency has been tweaked upwards over the years it remains far and away the most miserly of any major MMO I have played.

This ethos of scarcity (or should we call it meanness?) doesn't extend only to drops from mobs. It even includes holiday events. Compare the recent Lunar New Year event in GW2, in which about the only interesting item (and that's stretching a point) was to be found as a very rare drop from Lucky Envelopes, with the holiday running in EQ2 right now, Erollisi Day.

Erollisi Day is Norrath's analog of Valentine's. It's a relatively minor holiday in the Norrathian calendar. It brings with it nothing much more than ten repeatable quests, six one time only quests, ten achievements, nine books of crafting recipes, a collection, a race and two vendors selling holiday items of all kinds.

Every year the developers add something new and occasionally they retire something old from the line-up. This year they added a short quest called You Don't Bring Me Flowers, which I did with my Berserker on the Skyfire server. It was simple and straightforward and it netted me a pink, patchwork baby dragon for my house.

That was a reward worth considerably more to me than the small effort it required. I logged in my Shadowknight on the Time-Limited Expansion server, Stormhold with the intention of getting him a dragon too. I then found myself wrapped up in all the other entertainment on offer. I ended up taking him racing, doing the collect and completing several of the older holiday quests until eventually I ran out of time before I got around to the doing the thing I came for. I'll be going back again for the little pink dragon and I'll try to get it for several of my other characters as well.

Before that, while I was there on my Berserker I noticed some calls for a Public Quest in Kylong Plains. I didn't know there was a KQPQ. I traveled there by world bell, asked for a raid invite in chat, clicked on the window that popped up, flew to the spot on the map and joined in what turned out to be one of the best PQs I've seen in EQ2 and certainly the most visually appealing.

All of this I did instead of what I'd expected to be doing, namely the new GW2 stuff that came with last week's update. I did it because it was fun, it was easy and it was inclusive. It was, in fact, the very antithesis of  "preparing to have fun rather than just having fun".

Those, by the way, are the three words I used to associate quite specifically with Guild Wars 2: fun, easy, inclusive. The addition of instanced raiding (now with even more elite "Challenge" mode!) and the tuning of more and more content, including both open world and solo instances, towards players able to demonstrate skill sets honed in and for a raid environment, seems to me to mitigate strongly against all of them.

It's painfully ironic that it's GW2 that seems to be focused on adding elite content right at the time other MMOs are tearing it down. For a game that Mike O'Brien promised wasn't about to "fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs" it seems to be making a pretty good fist right now of jumping feet first into the very same traps those traditional MMOs finally escaped.

In Praise Of The Zerg: Rift, GW2

When some Ancient from the last century came up with the acronym MMORPG, the first two letters represented the then-astonishing ability of the internet to allow large numbers of individuals around the world to play together in the same game space. Back in those halcyon days, when everyone was making - or talking about making -  Virtual Worlds rather than mere games, to qualify for the double M club it was enough for large numbers simply to share the same imaginary milieu.

From the very early days, though, there was a drive to do more than just parcel the worlds up into pockets and have all the pockets talk to each other at a distance. EverQuest began with no formal raiding structure but players invented one of their own, bringing larger and larger gangs to clear entire zones in a rolling wave of terror. When SOE formalized matters with the Planes of Power expansion the raid size was set at 72, a number that sounds pretty massive even today.

My own first memory of truly huge conglomerations of players comes not from EQ but from Dark Age of Camelot, which debuted in 2001. Realm vs Realm saw the creation of massive forces that came together to siege or defend keeps. My PC could not handle those numbers. My experience of siege-play consisted mainly of extreme close-ups of the stretched and degraded textures of a game engine under stress as I pounded on a wooden door for what seemed like eternity.

For a while it seemed as though technology would fail us. I quit DAOC. EverQuest pared back its ambitious raids from 72 to 54 to 42. World of Warcraft set the bar at 40 and let it decline from there. It looked as though the concept of massiveness itself had been redefined.

I first noticed the tide begin to turn with the arrival of Rift. The early beta weekends were an exhilarating rush as Trion unveiled their USP - endless, rolling incursions and invasions that brought dozens, scores, hundreds of mobs down from the skies, demanding a co-ordinated response by similar numbers of players.

Someone's technology had improved. Ether I had a better PC or Trion had better developers. Whichever way round it was, for the first time I found myself caught up in truly overwhelming fantasy battles, surrounded by an army of allies, facing off against a horde of enemies, with fireworks and explosions detonating endlessly all around - and I could still move!

Rift changed everything. Since then I have felt the tug of massive-scale events like a comet feels the pull of the sun. No matter how far I retreat to my own, isolated solo instances, or potter alone in forgotten zones, the call of the crowd always draws me back to the core.

Apart from technological progress, at the heart of the ongoing, successful integration of very large scale events into the genre is the removal of the requirement for formal organization. Warhammer's Public Quests are usually quoted as Year Zero for the new age of automated socialization but for me it was Rift that set the pattern.

When it comes to reasons not to raid one of the biggest negative factors is the sheer time it takes to get things moving. I always liked the idea of raiding - conceptually. It was the experience as it played out in real time that drove me to find something more interesting to do - like sorting my bank vault or watching paint dry.

Those first beta weekends in Rift were a revelation. Instant raids, no drama! All the fun and none of the tears - of boredom. Instead of competitiveness there was camaraderie - a sense that we were all in it together, at least until we ran into those filthy Defiants/Guardians (delete as applicable).

Over time, for reasons that escape my ability to comprehend but which, no doubt, have their roots in finance, Trion chose to dilute and eventually dismantle the underlying raison d'etre of their flagship game. Instead of the magnificent turmoil of unpredictable, inescapable and never-ending planar invasions we moved to an on-demand service.

First we players were granted the ability to craft lures that allowed us to rip open the skies and bring down the invaders we wanted, when we wanted them and wherever it was most convenient. Then came Instant Adventures. All the action you can handle at the click of a button. 

A few nights ago, back in Rift after a long, long lay-off, fiddling with the UI trying to find out what stuff does, I found myself in a Raid. Just my Rogue and twenty or so of her closest complete friends she's never met before and never will again, throwing themselves like chaff into the blades of godlike creatures in the expectation of certain death, certain loot, certain XP.

I had no clue what I was doing. No-one spoke. Prompts appeared across the screen so I followed them. Hammy, post-modern voiceovers stripped away all conceivable veneers of belief. I died and died and died. Then I died some more. 

My roles had long since been revamped in my absence to the point where almost none of the icons on my hot bars did anything at all. My contribution over half an hour was limited to auto-attacking with a bow. No-one complained. No-one cared. No-one noticed.

As Rift slumped towards self-parody, GW2 snatched the baton and ran. The direction the race was beginning to take was not universally applauded. Many seemed to fear a breaking of bonds between the human beings behind the avatars to be inherent in the move towards a more informal, ad hoc social structure. 

In the event, and with uncomfortable irony, it was the more formal matchmaking mechanisms implemented by MMOs that tried to shore up those failing traditions that led to a sense of increasing alienation. Their structures seemed designed to create groups that never spoke, their ever-shifting places filled and re-filled by strangers who came together in silent purpose, never to meet again. 

It transpired that the hurly-burly of the new ad hoc orthodoxy, counter-intuitively perhaps, fostered an atmosphere much more conducive to a sense of hail-fellow-well-met, we're all in this together goodwill. On a good day, anyway.

As this all played out ArenaNet waxed hot and cold over their own supposedly unique selling point, the dynamic event. The years piled up while they played with the concept, sometimes successfully, often less so. 

For a time they seemed set on huge, seething, surging map-wide brawls, an approach that reached its apogee with the glorious invasions of Scarlet's armies and the epochal Fall of Lion's Arch. That era seemed to end as Living Story 2 was parcelled up in instances, while the chains of timed, tamed events made gameplay in Dry Top and Silverwastes feel as desiccated as the landscapes. 

That trend continued into the dripping jungles of Heart of Thorns. Would the story of Rift repeat itself?

Coming into 2016 it seemed likely that the last remnant of glory would fly in tatters over World versus World, where the long-maligned zergs still roamed like wounded dinosaurs, awaiting the end. And then, once more, the winds changed. 

As we wait in the foyer of Living World 3, the new, post-Johansen GW2 slowly takes shape. A path to the future begins to emerge, picking its way cautiously between the wild chaos of Scarlet and her all-conquering armies and the stately dance of Heart of Thorns. 

The preliminaries began slowly but they are gathering pace. A patchwork of smaller events is building a palimpsest. The bandits, the anomalies, the competing factions, they all arrive without much fanfare but decline to leave. Now we have The Running Man and to a resounding cheer the rolling PvE zerg is back. 

All the new events are neither entirely random nor set to a fixed pattern. They move from map to map at a defined pace but incorporate an element of randomness that sees Commanders hopping waypoints, trailing their squads behind them.

This is the iteration we were looking for. It bodes very well for the still-unannounced, mysterious second expansion, and for the equally unannounced, equally mysterious Living Story 3.

The destiny of the MMORPG lies in each and every direction. The genre's greatest strength and most difficult challenge is and always has been its malleability. More so than any other form of video game, MMOs seek to be all things to all players, all at once.

Well and good. But the true defining trope remains encapsulated in that first initial: M is for massive. Without that sense of scale everything else is a mere collage of identities drawn from elsewhere. 

Let's get bigger. And then bigger still.

Guiding Principles : EQ2

If you zoom in tight on the center of the picture above you'll see a snappily-dressed ratonga with his back to the camera. He's proudly wearing Naylie's Nebulous Newsbag, a 66 slot inventory item that displays as a backpack with scrolls sticking out of the top.

This, one of the largest containers and most visually appealing back items in the game, can be obtained only by means of a quest, The Nebulous Newsies. I have a vague idea I might have blogged about the day I got my Triple-N Bag (as no-one calls it) but if so I can't find the post.

Desirable rewards from lengthy quests are meat and potatoes to many MMOs but there's something very unusual about this particular example. The quest only becomes available when a Guide appears on the server to offer it. This happens as and when it becomes convenient for the Guide to run the event, not when it might be convenient for players.

Guides aren't employees of DBG. They are players who've chosen to give up some of their free time to run events. They abide by a very lengthy and detailed set of guidelines and appear at times of their own choosing. On any given server that might be several times on a weekend or once in a couple of months.

EQ2Wire today published an excellent and comprehensive overview of this often overlooked institution. It makes for a great read that should explain just why so many EQ2 players are not just willing but happy to put up with a little inconvenience in the cause of encouraging their Guides to carry on the good work.

I have no memory of this event whatsoever but that's the entrance to Blackburrow in the background. I feel as bemused about it now as that poor gnoll must have been feeling when it was going on. Whatever it was...

For MMO players whose memory and experience of the hobby goes back more than a decade or so this all may not seem so strange. I played MMOs for years in the knowledge that many things would happen in the game that I would only hear about when I logged in and someone told me what I'd missed.

It was common practice back then for GMs and volunteers alike to run ad hoc events with no fanfare and no warning. The first you'd know would be when an excited guildmate started yelling about it in guild chat. Even when you'd found out something was happening there was the issue of getting there, which in the glory days of EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot could mean a thirty minute run - and that's assuming you could survive the journey.

Those events were server-specific, random and of extremely variable quality. They could turn out to be zone-wide carnage or an hour of improvised roleplay. Sometimes both at once. By the time the event finished you might have acquired an amazing, extremely rare item or have lost a level. I had a friend rage quit when that happened to him.

Indeed, so wildly did the experiences vary and so disparate might be the potential outcome for characters of different levels or classes or races, you would frequently arrive at the zone in question to find a host of players running towards the locus of the action while an exodus of terrified refugees fled in the opposite direction.

The defining factor of all these events was that you had to be there. There was no appointment for fun. Fun happened. If you could call it fun. Some of the events would be repeated, sometime, who knew when? Some happened just once, ever.

This looks like it might have been an "event". Then again, maybe it was just a rift. I took a lot of screenshots, though, which suggests I thought it was something special.

As time rolled on and fashions changed this kind of "be there or be square" event-making fell out of favor. Every major attempt since to introduce the concept of genuinely "dynamic", one-off events to the infrastructure of an MMO has met with a disastrous reaction from a playerbase trained by years of post-WoW MMO design to expect convenience and consistency, not happenstance and opportunism.

Both Rift and GW2 fell at the first hurdle trying to bring something approximating full-scale, real-time event-making into the game. Trion opened the first Planar raid zone with a one-time event then had to spend weeks dealing with PR fallout, both from those players who weren't able to make the date and those who were there and didn't think the effort they'd made had been well-enough rewarded. ANet changed the entire direction of development for their game after the Karka debacle.

The risk that any developer runs by endorsing and encouraging this kind of old school thinking has rarely been exemplified better than in the comments following this much more recent post. Commenter Daemonsbane articulates the dilemma developers face:

I know that for me that when I logged on last night and learned that I had missed the unique opportunity to pick up the quest for perhaps a couple of months that it took the wind out of my sails. I had earlier visited a Mariner's Bell to investigate the quest area, and came away with the understanding that it would be a bit before I was the appropriate level to pursue the quest. But the feeling of waiting to level up to access the quest was totally different, for me, from the feeling of being denied the opportunity to get the quest for perhaps months.

In fact, after finishing up what I was doing last night I no longer had the enthusiasm that I earlier had and so logged over to LotRO to quest there. Of possibly more concern to the devs is that after subscribing and spending money in the cash shop this past weekend I was still considering spending more in the cash shop to pick up some wings, but today I no longer have the urge to spend additional money on EQ2.

No business wants to lose customers like that and Daemonsbane is far from alone in feeling that there are certain benefits to automation and accessibility. On the other hand, as can readily be seen from the forum thread in which a player suggests that very thing, there's an equally vocal lobby in favor of keeping faith with the old way of doing things.

With the withdrawal of paid GM's from this kind of community-building activity the torch has passed entirely to the cadre of volunteers who make up EQ2's Guide program. Without our Guides Norrath would be in stasis.

As Feldon says

Guides provide an invaluable service for players and make Norrath feel a bit more alive.

That's a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. It might, perhaps, be worth considering in future whether Guide quests should have such extremely desirable rewards attached, given that these are quests that most players may never be lucky enough to happen upon but really, if having a great reward increases the appreciation for the work these volunteers do in their own free time and enhances their status and reputation within the community, the inconvenience that accrues is probably a price worth paying.

Daybreak Games would seem to agree. Talking about the Newsie quest, Feldon reports that

Players line up by the hundreds to pickup the quest from a Guide (it cannot be acquired by any other means) when word breaks that they will be seeking player help on a server.  A comparable quest was just added to the Guides’ repertoire this month and it will be interesting to see how frequently it is made available.
My italics.

Can't wait to see what the new quest brings! Over to you, Guides of Norrath...

Too Much Of A Good Thing? : GW2

Ravious has an excellent two-part overview up at Kill Ten Rats covering, in detail, the meta-events on the four new Heart of Thorns maps. These form the spine of the kind of open-world content ANet seems to expect to provide for us over the coming months and years.

Next week sees the introduction of the first, instanced, raid "wing", Spirit Vale. Living Story 2 was heavily instanced and naturally the new Personal Story is too. Much of the game seems to be tending that way, taking it in a rather different direction from the one many of us probably imagined it would go, but still a huge amount of development time and effort is also going into large-scale, open world mega-events like the ones Ravious examines.

Unlike raids, which seem to have come out of nowhere, this was always the plan. Back in 2012, pre-launch publicity suggested two kinds of end-game equivalent for the famously end-gameless GW2: a PvE version where long, complex chains of Dynamic Events networked entire maps and open-world PvP in World vs World. It was a plan that quickly went awry.

Yada yada. Where's the loot?

The PvE end game, based entirely in the three southernmost maps covering the drowned lands of Orr, was not well-received. Since it was content that relied on large numbers of players it had to be heavily and repeatedly tweaked, mostly downwards in difficulty, to attract any kind of critical mass. WvW largely fell into a holding pattern as a niche activity, beloved and bemoaned in equal measure by a dedicated but not very substantial following, booming occasionally when "Seasons" attracted large swathes of PvE players looking for Achievements and material rewards.

There's much more to be said about that, and where WvW goes next, but it deserves a post of its own. Suffice it to say, with neither of the expected late-game, ongoing content models living up to expectation, ANet moved on to iterate (their favorite pastime) on a number of other means of holding onto their audience and bringing in the dollars.

There was a lot of talk about Cadences and Feature Packs and a Living World. We had overarching narratives that few had the patience or interest to sit through. The Scarlet storyline, which even makes some kind of sense now, was widely reviled and derided while it was with us although with hindsight and the rose-tinted spectacles of time it's beginning to look like some kind of Golden Age.

They also serve, who only stand and ping.

We had a stream of one and two time special events. The Karka Invasion, Super Adventure Box, Bazaar of the Four Winds, The Queen's Gauntlet and the rest came and went with a mystifying disregard for player interest or reaction.

Finally we came to Dry Top and a workable pattern emerged at last. The end game, at least as far as open world PvE was concerned, would, as always envisaged, come from map-wide event chains only, unlike Orr, there would be a clear, visible framework with prompts and a timer. No longer would it be left to players to initiate and organize the chains; the system would do it automatically at set, regular times.

The seeds of the concept had been planted long ago, in the scheduling of World Bosses, in the changes made to the Tequatl event and subsequently in the even more organization-dependent Triple Trouble. The move to Megaservers and the rapid development of the Taxi system on LFG largely undercut the need for the odious, elitist specialist cross-server Event guilds, allowing ad hoc PUG raids to form and organize with relative ease.

There's always one.

Dry Top and its neighbor, Silverwastes, the last two, new overland maps introduced before Heart of Thorns, moved the meta on from discrete events that took fifteen to thirty minutes every three or four hours to a never-ending sequence on a rolling 24 hour boil. It's a format that's proved both popular and manageable with a sizable proportion of the playerbase and in HoT it's been refined and codified for clarity and coherence.

In all four maps the meta rolls in and out like a tide. There are peaks and lulls but the waves never end. It's an ocean; you can dive deep or dip in as you will. You can surf events with the zerg or solo in the shallows but almost whatever you do you'll find yourself in the water somehow, making ripples that merge with the flow.

One of the problems of GW2's major event chains has always been players not knowing where to be or what to do. With the size, scale and ambition of the new sequences ANet have made it so that almost anything a player does contributes to the grand design. They also made a decision to take some of the responsibility for organization upon themselves.

Is this the fail state? It all blurs into one after a while. Oh well, chests either way.

There are frequent prompts and instructions, from NPCs in voiceover and in large bars of text across the center of the screen. The game itself gives direct instructions on what to do and when to do it. It's unsubtle but in the hurly burly it's surprisingly effective and welcome.

There are moves afoot to remove much of GW2's signature visual clutter - the blooming neon spell effects and explosions that often make it impossible even to see the larger boss mobs let alone the ground markers you're supposed to not be stepping in. The cross-screen text is visual clutter of its own but it seems like like a necessary evil right now.

Players are a lot better at spontaneous organization than some of the elitist hardcore elements like to give them credit for but nevertheless there are always plenty of people at every event who haven't been there often enough (or at all) to have a clear understanding of what's required of them. Surprisingly, not everyone reads Dulfy's superlative guides. A good Commander (or now a good Mentor) can do a lot with a map that's willing to listen but good Commanders are a finite resource. System messages are always there, they're indefatigable and they can't be trolled.

Aghhhh! He's looking at me!!

So, iteration seems to be doing its job for now. The framework, at least, is up and stable. Whether a larger edifice can be constructed around it seems less clear. That is, however and presumably, the plan. ANet have said they intend to develop GW2 indefinitely rather than work on a sequel. Presume they don't plan on going out of business so that means a lifetime for the game measured in many years, perhaps decades.

After three years and one expansion we have (looking just at open world end-game content) over a dozen 5-15 minute World Boss events, all on fixed timers of 2-3 hours, running 24/7. There are two longer World Boss events that take 15-30 minutes, Tequatl and Evolved Jungle Wurm. There are three open-ended full-map events, Dry Top, Silverwastes and Verdant Brink, which cycle endlessly through a sequence every couple of hours or so. Finally there are three maps that run a never-ending rotation of two hours duration, culminating in a major event or sequence of events.

That's a lot of action and most of it overlaps. Other than the original World Bosses little of it scales well; or at all. All of the newer, iterated, end-game, open world content requires fairly large numbers of players to succeed. Not always a full map but sixty or so at the low end.

Rangers! Go South!

Megaserver technology (when it works, which it still does not, reliably, in the new maps, despite supposedly having been fixed) and a substantial population due to the slowly fading shine of a new expansion, mean that things are bumping along not too awkwardly for the moment. Imagine the picture in a year, though, with that year's worth of new things to do added. Imagine it in five years with (let's hope) two more expansions in place.

There are only so many hours in the day and only so many players to play them. Funneling the available population into a series of five-person instanced dungeons and ten-person instanced raids is one thing: filling six, twelve or eighteen whole maps with sixty to a hundred players for an event that lasts two hours? We're going to run out of either players or hours or both and soon.

So, self-evidently, this is a model that will require further iteration. Ravious suggested some events could be moved to a longer frequency - once a day or even once a week. That would certainly work logistically but I doubt it would fly well with an audience trained to expect a much faster cadence, to revive an old buzzword. Better scaling would be another option but then, no doubt, the rewards would have to scale too and, frankly, many of them are not all that encouraging even as they stand.

I have no idea what's going on. As usual.

It's a problem, for sure, but in many ways it's a good problem to have. Bhelgast recently posted an excellent introduction to EQ2 in which he gives a very accurate impression of what an MMO with almost too much content looks like. I agree with everything he says except for one observation: he thinks they don't make them like that any more. I think they do and I think GW2 is one of the ones they've made.

Come back in eight years, when GW2 is the same age EQ2 is now, and take a look. If there isn't a "separated at birth" thing going on by then it will only be because of ANet's ruthless willingness to remove content that SOE/DBG would allow to accrete. Of the two approaches, ANet's is probably the wiser but I prefer the alternative. In the end I'd rather have the content there and not be able to use it effectively than have it removed altogether.

Then again, this is ANet we're talking about. Come back in three years, leave alone eight, and we might be looking at something different entirely. That's what happens when you can't stop iterating. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Megaserver - The Verdict : GW2

An interesting thing happened on Yak's Bend yesterday. The King Over The Water came back. Or maybe it was Arthur, returning at our time of greatest need (except that was last week, so if so he's late...).

Yak's Bend did far better in WvW's Season One than most people expected, even most people on Yak's Bend. It was a team effort, of course, but much of the credit went to a handful of commanders, one of whom, already popular and well-known, pretty much wrote his own legend during those weeks. He may not have been Space Famous but he was as World Famous as you can be on a GW2 World.

After the party came the months-long hangover. A lot of people drifted away. A couple of big guilds upped camp and moved worlds. Our superstar commander hung around for a while then just vanished. It seemed no-one knew where he'd gone or if he'd be back, not even his guild.

Gone he was but very much not forgotten. As Season Two drew nearer there was much speculation. Surely he'd return? Every day in WvW people would be asking about him. I asked about him. No-one knew anything. The Tourney began and there was no sign of him. Weeks passed. We won. We lost. Other commanders stepped up. The war machine rolled on. Still, now and again, his name would be invoked.

Then, with no fanfare or warning, yesterday there he was. I got home from work and I'd hardly got my coat off before Mrs Bhagpuss said "Guess who's back!". He was my second guess, after our missing guildmate. Apparently word had spread so fast and wide that people were logging into GW2 from work just to say "welcome back". When I got on and went to WvW his name was all over map and team.

He wasn't online right then but even without him other commanders were leading while acknowledging tactics they were using as ones they'd borrowed from him. When he did appear later in the evening, while we were cataing Northern Shiverpeaks' inner garrison, I felt sufficiently moved to welcome him back personally even though he has no idea who I am.

In GW2, since the coming of the Megaserver, this is something that could only happen in WvW. Why? Because under the Megaserver the rest of Tyria has become the place where not only does no-one know your name, no-one knows anybody's name.

Ravious gave his impressions of the megaserver earlier this week. Broadly he seems in favor although his wife very much is not. Jeromai offers a much more critical view and it's his analysis with which I find myself in sympathy. I have tried to be open-minded and positive about this huge change and there are some good things that can be said about it, but the more I see, the less I find to like.

As I've been playing this week I've been making a list of Megaserver pros and cons:

Pro

• Cities bustle and buzz the way cities should

• I've seen more roleplaying in cities in a week than in the previous year and a half

• More events run in general, infrequently-seen events run more often and more group events can be completed 

• Very unpopular maps with no desirable large events now feel moderately well-attended

Con

• Load times for most maps are much longer. For busy maps they measure in minutes not seconds.

• Map chat has degenerated appallingly. Maybe we were lucky on Yak's Bend but open channel conversation used to be mostly polite, intelligent and respectful. Now it's an earsore that needs to be switched off after a few seconds in most maps.

• Wilderness areas feel like crowded city parks.The attractive xp bonuses for hunting and exploring in out-of-the-way places has become elusive in the extreme.

• All major events with desirable rewards are massively over-attended. Any previously required tactics or gameplay no longer exist. Every "fight" is an 80-strong zerg and lasts seconds. Scaling cannot compete. The only factor slowing these events down is massive lag. I was getting 3FPS at Jormag last night, for example. Mrs Bhagpuss, whose computer has begun to complain if there are more than 50 other players on screen, can't attend some of the big events any more without suffering screen freezes. 

• Genuine lower levels and even some downleveled 80s struggle to get credit for most stages of a large event because they either can't do enough damage or the stages finish so fast.

•  According to most reports, although I haven't attended one to see for myself, the more complex events like Tequatl and Three Headed Wurm, always hard, are now barely possible at all.

•  Community  as a concept and communities as entities have been destroyed. Jeromai's post linked above covers this extremely well. The overall effect has been as if the earliest version of WoW's Dungeon Finder had been applied to an entire MMO. Everyone is a stranger, all sense of responsibility or fear of consequence has been removed.

So, a lot more Cons than Pros. Even so, some of the positives are worthwhile and the worst of the negatives could be mitigated if most of what ArenaNet had claimed about how the Megaserver works had turned out to be true. It didn't.


"The megaserver system is a weighted load balancer for players. It aggregates data about you, like your party, guild, language, home world, and the map copy where people you like to play with can be found. Using this data, it ranks all possible versions of a given map by attributing a score to each. You’re placed in the map with the highest score, which is the one with which you have the most affinity." Source

That's the high-falutin' claim and it's nonsense. Either it's just PR guff or whatever algorithms they're using simply don't work. In my experience so far, many hours on many maps at many different times of day, not only does the system not place me with people I recognize from my home world, it can't even place me in the same map as someone I'm grouped with if we cross from one map to another. It just doesn't work.

I question whether there really is a "Megaserver" at all in any meaningful sense. This seems to me more like a clever smoke-and-mirrors rebranding of the existing Overflow technology. We're all just being pushed onto overflow servers far more frequently than before and the experience is just what you'd expect.



Using "Megaserver" to describe this effect is highly misleading. It's a term that brings to mind something like the single shard universe of EVE Online. I'm personally a big advocate of individual servers for MMOs but if we are moving to a future where all players must share a single common game-space then it has to be done the way EVE does it, with meaningful repercussions and consequences and with everyone genuinely in the same space. It has to be done in such a way that someone like the Commander I began this post by talking about would become more Space Famous as a result, not more anonymous. 

The upshot is that, post-megaserver, GW2 is a chaotic mess.

If you're pottering around on your own leveling up it's arguably better than it was, although I'm doing exactly that and my argument would be that even then it's at best a neutral change. Most events were always soloable and most events are more fun from a narrative and role-playing perspective when soloed. Other people around very definitely make them easier but they don't often make them more entertaining. 

If you love to run in a huge zerg, waypointing from event to event to autoattack something you can't clearly see, at single-figure fps rates, for thirty seconds before clicking "Loot All" and moving on to rinse and repeat, all the while chortling at sexual innuendo and scatological puns then this is probably the best update GW2 has ever had.

If you're anyone other than a leveller who hates to solo or a dedicated zerger with an adolescent sense of humor, however, there's not much good to say about any of it. My only hope is that the old ANet iterative process (if they still have that going on) might eventually come to shape the "Megaserver" into something resembling what we were promised. Some hope.

The Coming Of The Megaserver : GW2

If Year Zero can have a Day One then, for GW2, tomorrow is it. Just another twenty-four hours, give or take coffee and do-nuts, and we'll know everything there is to know about Megaservers.

Except we won't, will we? It was all quite clear at first - start at the beginning with the 1-15 maps, see how that goes, work upwards from there. Then there was a hoo-hah, retrenchment ensued and we were told the least-populated maps would get Megaserved first. That didn't stick either.

The current position appears to be...fluid. From the most recent Dolyak Express thread:

Q: Since the megaserver changes will initially affect a few areas, will the World Boss schedule table be true just for the light yellow bosses or are the rest of the World Bosses also going into the new schedule even if their areas are still not part of the megaserver?

Samuel Loretan: No, the World Bosses schedule will be released globally on April 15th. Note that the order of rollout of the MegaServer system may still change, as we’re still conducting tests, and as we will be adjusting the parameters depending on our monitoring. While I know that it isn’t what was in the blog post, we’re adjusting this to ensure the best experience for everyone, and the smoother possible rollout of this feature, which has a very large scope and requires careful operation.

I just bet it does.

It's behind you!

Anyway, all this got me thinking about World Bosses (horrible descriptor that it is, although possibly not as horrible as World Metas, which is what they often get called when the Train is running). For the first few months of GW2's existence the big ticket events like the three dragon lieutenants, The Maw, Shadow Behemoth and Fire Elemental, had no specific rewards attached to them. A chest would pop but inside it you'd find just a litter of blues and greens, with a low chance of a yellow rare, a vanishingly small chance of an orange exotic and the purely theoretical possibility of the Pre-Cursor to a Legendary (are they purple? I wouldn't know).

Even though there was very little in the way of tangible rewards people still did those events. I did Claw of Jormag any time it happened to be up and I knew about it, which wasn't as often then as it would be later because if there was any equivalent of GWStuff or its predecessor the Dragon Timer, then I hadn't yet found it. Everyone moaned bitterly about the vendor trash but there were always enough people to get those dragons down.

You can criticize his spelling all you like but you can't fault him on his accuracy.

Then Fractals came and overnight it seemed like half the population had vanished. For a while the Claw of Jormag became all but unkillable and even the Shaman at The Maw scoffed at the feeble turnout, although I notice he never actually managed to summon that Elemental no matter how long he hung around.

For many, though, the fractal attraction didn't last and people were soon back at the large-scale set pieces that were supposed to be the jewels in the crown of GW2's dynamic events system, doing what they enjoyed most - complaining bitterly about the terrible loot.

Finally ANet bowed to the pressure to make the Dragons "worth doing", added guaranteed rares, fixed a few bugs and juggled the RNG. The Risk vs Reward ratio suddenly looked an awful lot better (as well it should, seeing that with the numbers turning up there was now no freakin' risk at all!) As I wrote here , by February 2013 a World Meta Train was already in place, although no-one back then was calling it that.

Um..is anyone else still here?

Reading my own words, I'm quite surprised to find just how disenchanted and cynical I already was, just six months or so after launch. I guess that, since I thought even then that "Each event has a margin of error, presumably in an attempt to create some spurious sense of spontaneity but in practice all of them pop at numbingly regular intervals." it's hardly surprising the upcoming change from fake-spontaneity to an openly fixed schedule has had less impact on my sense of immersion than might have been expected. That fragile vessel shattered into fragments long ago.

The details are hazy now but somehow that first iteration of Guaranteed Rares got out of hand. I think you got one per character per day per boss and take-up was so great it was crashing both maps and the economy. By mid-March the train had picked up such momentum that the tracks were beginning to melt and ANet took the opportunity of the beginning of the Living Story to add some brakes.

Things calmed down after that and we all settled into a routine. I even put up a series of guides for the lackadaisical  that still work to a degree, although a number of much-needed passes on difficulty in the following months have meant that almost all the events now take a lot longer to complete than they did when I wrote the guides and the possibility of failure is now a lot higher.

If all these people are here, how come the only paw-prints in the snow are mine?

That long, rambling, inaccurately-recalled  trip down memory lane brings me up to yesterday, when, as is my wont of a Sunday (and most other days of the week come to think of it) I did several of the Dragon Events on both my accounts. I say "Dragon Events" because people still call them that once in a while. I didn't, of course, do any of the three actual dragons. What would be the point?

Tequatl, who so impressed me waaay back in September 2012 now needs an organized raid of a hundred people. Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer mostly work out their anger issues unobserved except when the train runs at Reset, the extended time taken to kill them being widely considered no longer commensurate with the rewards.

Even at a busy time on a Sunday a good turn-out is no longer guaranteed for the easier options but that scarcely matters because of one of GW2's dirty little secrets: barring the very biggest, almost all Dynamic Events are at their best when seen with as few people as possible.

Should have stopped half way through that sentence.

I did The Maw twice yesterday, the first time with four people and the second with about ten. It was exciting, well-paced and fun. People got knocked down and picked up, people kited the Shaman around, pets tanked. For a while it was touch and go but in the end we won in good time. I'm not saying either was as thrilling as the two times I've completed it with just two other players but sometimes you just have to share the fun. As I was glad to do at Fire Elemental, an event that's often hard enough to complete even with a good turn-out, but which we managed to knock off successfully with just four of us.

When the Megaserver beds in, extending its tentacles across all maps, there should be some definite benefits. It's been weeks since I last did Jormag or Shatterer and I miss them both. It'll be good to see a crowd gather for those. On the other hand, though, I wonder if there will ever be another Three-Man Maw. Melting the Shaman in seconds with a massive zerg may be a spectacle but it's not going to create many "I was there" moments, is it?

And maybe if no-one does turn up there could be consequences? Oh, silly me. 

I hope that, despite ANet's promise (or is it a threat?) that "the MegaServer system is just the beginning, and we are exploring all sorts of approaches in creating meaningful and solid social units for the system to use" there will still be the odd empty map here and there. They may have designed Dynamic Events to scale for scores of players but I get the distinct feeling that the  playtesting was carried out by an individual or a small group, because that's really where the detail and the love and attention that went into them all shines most brightly.

However it turns out, though, I'll still be doing the Maw every chance I get because I know another of GW2's dirty little secrets: you always get a Rare in the Big Chest at The Maw. Okay, almost always. I do it every day, often several times a day. Last time I didn't get a Rare was back in November. Often I get two. Or three. None of the other World Bosses pumps out the Yellows like the Svanir Shaman. I probably owe him for about a quarter of my Ecto Mountain.


Only being able to do him once every two hours is going to cut my income considerably so I just better make sure I don't miss any of my limited openings from now on. See you at The Maw, every other hour on the quarter.

What's My Motivation? : GW2

It's Groundhog Day in LA! No, make that Groundhog Hour. Hold on, I have the tour schedule here somewhere...

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      Lionguard Tours Presents : Burning Lion's Arch

10.00 AM - Your Lionguard representatives will be waiting at the entrances in Lornar's Pass, Gendaran Fields and Bloodtide Coast to escort you on your tour of Lion's Arch.

10.05 AM - There will be a brief display of local customs, including a martial arts performance, before we enter the Burning City. Please be aware that this is a full-contact demonstration so please be sure to wear the appropriate protective clothing.

10.05 - 10.40 AM - The following events will run frequently during your visit, approximately every ten minutes or so, giving everyone plenty of time to enjoy them all:

•     Black Lion Dolyak "Stampede"
•     Children's Parade
•     Lighthouse Workers' Fun Run
•     March of the Ogres

There will also be many opportunities to see spectacular displays of local customs and dress throughout the city, including the incredible Flame Legion Burning Effigies, the astonishing Dredge Mining Suits and, of course, the flamboyant Sky Pirates. So dashing! So debonair!

10.40 AM  

• Moa Race (Please note: due to the potentially hazardous nature of the current course, this race is for entertainment only. No bets can be taken. We'll be sure to let you know if that changes. We do understand that everyone enjoys a little "flutter" on the birdies!)
• Commodore Lawson Marriner's "Dignified Retreat" (Comedy gold!)

(Please also note that these two events take place at the same time so you will not be able to attend both on the same tour).

10.40 - 10.50 AM - Grand Finale!

•     "Shadowstep Tag" with the Champion Molten Berserker
•     Elite Aetherblade Display (meet at the Broken Lion)
•     Jungle Wurm Fun and Games (a great one for the kids!)

(While these events can also overlap, you should still be able to catch at least a couple in a single visit).

10.50 AM - Tour Ends. Captain Magnus (The Bloody-Handed!) will call time across the city as your tour comes to an end. Please be aware that Burning Lion's Arch is still a working city (you may notice some drilling taking place in the harbor) so please heed the Captain's Call and make your way promptly to the exits.

Didn't get to see everything you wanted? Don't worry! Lionguard Tours understands there's just far too much to experience in a single visit. That's why a new Tour begins every hour, on the hour!

Come Early! Come Often! Bring Your Friends!


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Is this the 3D photo booth?

Well, that's about what it feels like. Jeromai has a great piece up about the problems of getting players to take the whole thing seriously, but is it any wonder? How are we supposed to take any of this stuff seriously when it runs on auto-repeat 24/7?

It's a very well-rehearsed problem. GW2 was built on the concept of dynamic events and an ever-changing world but it's also a "game" and it turns out that the one thing players of games won't put up with is missing out on "content". ANet burnt their fingers very badly on the first ever GW2 mega-event, The Karka Invasion, (although I rated it rather highly) and ever since they've been in full-on retcon mode, retrofitting their dynamic world into something much more predictable and consumable.

The Escape From Lion's Arch update really brings into perspective just how far they and we have traveled since the Karka managed to knock down just the one lighthouse in Lion's Arch before promptly decamping for Southsun. This time supervillain Scarlet Briar's air armada arives in the skies above Tyria's unofficial capital, launching a devastating aerial bombardment that destroys most of the infrastructure in minutes. She follows up with a ground invasion and her seemingly inexhaustible armed forces take control. Lion's Arch burns.

There was more than one lion statue in Lion's Arch. Who knew?

And burns. And burns. For two weeks. On the hour, every hour, just to be sure no player misses out on the opportunity to finish his or her Meta (fifteen achievements, very quick and easy to get, just as well since the "reward" is nothing more than another hundred of the same little loot bags you already get by the score every single time you run the event). It also gives us all plenty of time to find the thirty piles of rubble needed for "Memories in your Hand", the solipsistic and selfish achievement that Commanders yell at you for doing when you should be rescuing citizens.

Ah yes, those poor Lion's Arch citizens. There they are, cowering in corners with massive yellow fists hanging over them like the wrath of some Simpsonian god or, worse still, lying unconscious in the street as adventures trample over them as they chase after the blue-doritoed pipers.

Is it really any wonder no-one cares about you, citizens? We rescued you an hour ago and now here you are, back in the exact same place! What did you do, sneak back in? Looking for your heirlooms, were you? Well get a clue, Lion's Archling - all your heirloom are belong to us! And you can dam' well rescue yourself this time!

Wake up, lazy cat!

The 1200 citizen rescue target isn't actually that hard to achieve. Like most things in GW2, if you want it done, do it at reset. I spent fifty fun minutes last night mother-henning the Ogre cave and environs, bucking up citizens, picking up Lionguards, speeding up ogres and generally aiding the cause. I estimate I rescued at least 50 citizens all on my own, although I had plenty of competition on and off from butt-inskys who wanted to rescue them first.

The main reason I was doing it is because working to achieve a shared goal is fun in and of itself and one of the prime reasons for playing MMOs instead of single-player games in the first place. God knows I wasn't likely to be doing it either because of the immersion factor (there isn't one) nor the for the reward (it's derisory). The best part of an hour's work during which a hundred or so people co-operate, largely against their own self-interest, nets you a shabby "Rare" bag containing more of the same inventory-clogging rubbish you already get throughout the event plus a chance at some old rubbish from previous events that you never wanted the first time round.

Perfect for those parties where everyone has to come dressed as a mechanical spider.

 
And there you have my real problem with GW2: I love the gameplay for its own sake but the "Living World" often feels like watching a news-reel on Repeat and when it comes to the "rewards" for participating there's almost never anything that interests me in the slightest. The armor and weapon skins are largely vile. I have literally never used any of the dozens I've acquired. Mini-pets and illusions are fleetingly amusing but I just can't get 1% of the pleasure out of them that others seem to find. The boosters sulk unused and unwanted in my bank. Even the Rares and Exotics I salvage just turn into unused stacks of ectoplasm.

As I read that post linked above describing the last time Lion's Arch was invaded I was struck not only by how much more immersive, compelling and memorable it was for being a one-off but by how much better the rewards were: "In the end I got a couple of rares and a couple of exotics, one of which I could actually use, and everyone got a 20-slot bag (worth about $10 in real money) and a level 80 exotic jewellery item. Some folks even got Legendary Pre-Cursors". A 20 slot bag, if you can believe it, which needless to say I am still using. That's the kind of rewards you can afford to give out when something only happens once.

4/30 today, 4/30 tomorrow, 4/30 'til the heat death of the universe

Horizontal leveling is great in theory and it works pretty well in GW2. I already had just about everything I needed a year ago. Now I can just play. It's taught me a valuable lesson about myself, though. It turns out I prefer rewards that increase my character's power significantly to ones that...don't. Oh, I've always known that the incremental upgrade path, where your new Mighty Legionnaire's Sword of Mightiness makes you 0.35% more Mighty than your old Mighty Soldier's Sword of Mightiness, doesn't work for me, and GW2's a bit like that even when you're leveling up but I never realized until I got there just how it would feel at 80th, where you'll spend almost all the time you ever play.

Now that's what I call a reward.

 
It takes a while but eventually the awful realization dawns: you'll never see a real upgrade, ever again. Oh, you can grind til your fingers bleed for Ascended gear but we got our wish there - it's the ghost-image of Vertical progression, not the real thing. You don't need it and if you get it you won't notice it. And it might still not be so bad if the cosmetic "upgrades" that make up the supposed alternative progression path didn't look like they'd been designed by a fifteen-year old Hair Metal fan on mescaline.

So, take away the visceral St Crispin's Day thrill of the one-time only event and replace it with Repeat Performances - Showing Every Hour, then lard heavily with pointless, worthless "rewards" I neither want nor need and there you have it: GW2 one year after the start of the Living Story.

So, here's my question: why am I still playing the heck out of it and having a great time anyway?