Warm Impermanence : GW2

In just over a month's time the Alpine Borderlands maps that have been the mainstay of GW2's World vs World gameplay for the entire three year life of the game to date will vanish. When Heart of Thorns arrives they'll be replaced wholesale by the Desert Borderlands.

Unlike the new sPvP map, Stronghold, which has been made available several times for open play-testing, or even the PvE map, Verdant Brink, which has been revealed in piece-meal fashion to anyone willing to pre-purchase, the Desert Borderlands have remained shuttered behind a strict, invitation-only closed beta.

The absence of an NDA means those of us (almost everyone playing) who didn't receive an invite have been able to read the feedback of those who did and thereby garner some kind of impression. Nevertheless, unless ArenaNet choose to throw open the gates for open testing before the October 23rd launch, come the day we'll all be stepping off a cliff into the unknown.

That's just the beginning of what should prove to be an enormous shake-up for the niche activity that was originally posited as GW2's endgame. In an announcement that seems to have passed largely unnoticed and uncommented on, at least outside of the official WvW forums, ANet certified that following the launch and stabilization of the Heart of Thorns expansion their focus would move to sorting out World vs World once and for all:

"As work on Heart of Thorns wraps up, we’ll be treating resolving the remaining core areas in WvW as our #1 live development feature priority for the game".

John Corpening, the "game director for WvW", who made the announcement, lists a number of the longstanding problems that have dogged WvW ever since it began, with population imbalances, night-capping and the scoring system chief among them. He states that he wants to improve matters by encouraging "...Strategy, Competition, Collaboration, and rewarding the contributions of both players and guilds who participate in the daring adventures and epic battles that make up a great match".

The spectre of PvE hangs above the battlefield.

Whether by "Collaboration" he means more of the kind of "double-teaming" alliances between two of the three servers in a match that most WvW regulars revile and consider tantamount to open cheating isn't clear, although I strongly suspect that in going with a tri-partite system in the first place such alliances were always intended to be part of the plan. More likely he means collaboration between factions on the same team.

Changes already announced to the rules and processes for "claiming" structures like Keeps and Towers suggest that a huge plank of the forthcoming plan to save WvW rests on Guilds. Indeed it seems that with the arrival of the first expansion the development team have at last noticed that the name of their game does suggest, at least to players, war between guilds is what the game's about.

Mention this in map chat and someone will immediately explain the lore behind the name of the "Guild Wars" franchise, which has nothing whatsoever to do with player-run organizations. Commercially, however, it has never made much sense to have a PvP oriented game that features player guilds, call it "Guild Wars" and then do nothing whatsoever that relates to guilds fighting one another.

HoT is set to go some way to correcting that misleading impression with Arenas in the new Guild Halls and a GvG Leaderboard for Stronghold in sPvP but the area where ANet are particularly promoting the clash of guild against guild is in WvW. How that is going to work out in practice is something we won't even begin to understand until it's already upon us.

This huge, looming cloud of uncertainty is one of the prime reasons I'm not very invested in WvW right now. It seems rather pointless to commit time and energy and emotion to something that may be swept away in just a few weeks. In feeling that way I appear to be very much in the minority. Most people are behaving as though nothing is going to change at all.

Group hug!

Of course, we on YB are close to the culmination of what has been a very long campaign. Tunnel vision may have set in. Almost exactly a year ago Yak's Bend began an adventure that saw the server move from plucky T3/T4 stalwart with a history of slacking during normal play and over-achieving in the formal competition of The Season to unlikely contender, first for T2 and then T1.

It was a messy, bloody affair. Never a very popular server, in the long, attritional grind to the top, YB managed to fall out badly with just about everyone we encountered. Our enmities with Stormbluff Isle and Fort Aspenwood remain particularly vicious but they're just the most festering of a number of running sores from our past.

Typically, being Yaks, we profess not to care what anyone thinks of us and claim to thrive on the pressure. And by and large that's how it is in our bubble. Many times we were told we would be broken and yet here we are, more than holding our own in T1, having crashed the tidy little private party that Blackgate, Jade Quarry and Tarnished Coast ran for themselves for so long that it seemed it would always be that way.

To get there we somehow acquired a massive influx of guilds, some of which dropped down from T1 in an attempt to break the hegemony. As far as I know that was their choice. I don't believe we sought them but we welcomed them when they arrived with their carpet-bags in hand. They gave us weight of numbers and coverage that we had never had before yet surprisingly they seem not to have changed our deeply-loathed affection for and reliance on siegecraft and defense. Maybe that's what drew them to us or maybe we just assimilated them as we've done to so many before.

It wasn't meant to be like that. T2 was touted as "the fights tier" until we broke it. I believe that plan has been re-routed to T3. What T2 is like right now I'm not sure but there seems to be some plan afoot to establish a rotation that includes at least some of the two upper echelons, which would make a nice change. We had that in T3/T4 once and it was fun.

How can this even happen?

T1, now we're here, seems oddly familiar. We were led to believe that World vs World in the heady heights of T1 would be very different from what we knew from the minors. It's not. It's just the same only with more people. What does differ the higher up the tiers we rise is the politicking.

Back in T3/T4 eighteen months ago things were far more rough and ready. I barely knew the names of the guilds on other servers we fought against let alone the names of their commanders. These days I know plenty. What used to be an amorphous blob of red ants swarming across our precious borderland now has to be called out by tag and driver as we discuss the different tactics and styles of one guild over another. Behind the scenes deals are made, guilds work together, responsibilities are allocated. There's a modicum of seriousness to it all that never was there before.

That speaks to Anet's purpose. My feeling is that many playing WvW would welcome a structure that encourages and rewards a more formal, militarized approach. Personally I prefer anarchy, chaos and imagination and luckily I have a way to recapture that flavor one in a while. Two of my accounts are on Yak's Bend and always will be but my third account is on Ehmry Bay, down in the bush leagues of T5, and there the old, haphazard ways persist. It's like going on holiday to the past.

When GW2 began there was great hope among many for its three realm large-scale PvP. Old DAOC and Warhammer lags hoped to recreate the good times. Within a few weeks the shine went off that penny. Most of those hopefuls left, often in bad humor. And yet every day when I enter The Mists I find myself fighting alongside names I've known for a year, two years, even three. Some of our commanders have been tagged up since 2012. For a lot of people WvW just works.

It does for me. There's still no player versus player I've done in any MMO to date that compares with a two-hour keep defense like that of our Garrison on Saturday afternoon, when we held off the full map blobs of both JQ and BG working together under, if rumor is true, the command of two real-life brothers. Epic is not the word. Ok, epic is the word!

It'll be nice to have desert sunlight if nothing else.

So, for my money that Anet don't require me to pay, WvW is still working pretty well. Still, as John Corpening says, "...despite being a leader in large team open world battle games ...there are some areas that we can improve." I can think of a few for sure but whether any changes Anet can bring will ever be able to address the fundamental problem John outlines I tend to doubt.

He calls it a "concentration of talent", where "hardcore players from most worlds have migrated upwards through the tiers looking for new experiences and greater challenge", something that has led to "the most dedicated teams locked in near perpetual stand off against the same opponents week after week". And that's the thing; the best will usually want to play with the best. They won't spread out altruistically for the good of the community across all twenty-four servers just so everyone gets a good game.

It took months, literally months, of concerted effort for one server, Yak's Bend, to bull its way to the top. How equality, fairness and excitement is to be promulgated throughout all eight tiers of the North American league without the most committed, involved players clustering together in just a handful of servers for exactly the reasons he gives I have no idea. It would be good if it could happen but so would World Peace and flying penguins.

Still, whatever our Dev Masters have in mind, at least they are finally turning their long, slow gaze in our direction. I guess that's a good thing. I'm not quite sure. I don't quite know whether to be excited or afraid. Probably both I expect.

Golem Rush! : GW2

It's unusual for patch notes to contain information about changes that haven't happened yet. Usually you'd expect to get that kind of news in some form of Press Release or Announcement. Why ANet chose to open the notes for Tuesday's update with a reveal of their latest World vs World special event beats me but that's what they did.

It's a wonder it took them this long to get round to another WvW event. What with Living Story going on indefinite hiatus and everyone left twiddling their thumbs waiting for Heart of Thorns to get even as far as a firm release date it's a fair bet that a lot of players have, like Ravious, wandered off to find something else to do.

Throwing WvW a quick change-up always looked like an easy way to bring bread and circuses to the people so it's very surprising the tactic hasn't been used more often. It's getting close to a year since the last full Tournament and all we've had since then was the Sneak Attack event just before Christmas.

That simply removed some of the notifications we normally get to warn us that towers and keeps are under attack. It was received fairly well in the end, having been heavily criticized on the forums before it happened. Quite a few people, myself included, seemed to think it was an improvement to the regular ruleset and should have been adopted as a permanent change.

It wasn't, though. It came and went in a single week, never to be mentioned again. That was six months ago. The optimistic tone of the press release at the time, in which it was suggested that "This special event gives us an opportunity to freshen up play by bending the rules of WvW, and we’re excited to try out some new things and offer improved rewards for a limited time" led some players to believe it would be the first of a series of one-off rule changes but nothing more has been heard of a second event.

Until yesterday, when we heard we were getting a Golem Rush. In our house that's a phrase that's often yelled excitedly from one room to another as one of us zones onto a map to find Our Glorious Leader shoulder-deep in half-built Omegas.

We love golem rushes Chez Bhagpuss. Of course we do. We play on Yak's Bend, Home of the Golem Rush, after all. It would be a very poor show if we didn't. It must be said, though, that not everyone is so keen. In some circles and on some servers golems are looked down on as the cheesy last resort of skill-impaired PPT siege-humpers who couldn't win an open field fight with a three-to-one advantage.

The reaction on the forums from those quarters has been predictably hostile. The usual suspects are out making the usual claims that ANet just doesn't get WvW. Some posters even feel an event that makes a feature of one of the more controversial tactics in the game is tantamount to ANet trolling its own players.

Counter to that are plenty of people applauding the potential chaos and looking forward to a week of all-out robot war. I'll put my hand up to being on that team. And even among the naysayers there's a sizeable moderate faction pointing out that it's just for one week and we can all surely manage to put up with it for that long or find something else to do if we can't.

As to why Golems have been singled out for this attention there's plenty of speculation. Perhaps it's some clever gold sink? Maybe we won't be able to deploy golems in the Desert Borderlands (which are themselves getting a stress test right in the middle of the Rush) and this is some kind of last hurrah?

I don't know and I don't much care. I just want to be there when the golem armies march. I always want to be where the golems are, whether I'm piloting one (I have a full license), running alongside with the ground troops, making a suicidal run to get a Disabler down or standing on the walls raining flaming meteors on their steel-domed skulls. Offense or defense, golems mean fun.  Unless you're the poor mesmer who has to do the portals. Talk about performance pressure.

The most Omega Golems I've ever seen deployed at one time is around fifty. They kept moving about so it was hard to count. That charge ended in complete disaster since half the people pressed into driving the mighty metal machines had no idea what they were doing and we had so many people in golems we forgot to bring any ground troops.

I'm sure that's going to happen again. I'm hoping we might even get to see all three sides bring half a hundred each for the mother of all battles over Stonemist Castle although I fear if that were to happen my PC would catch fire.

It'd be worth it just for the screenshots.

Sing When You're Winning : GW2

A very unusual match for Yak's Bend this week. We're playing the 8th and 9th placed servers in Silver League, Northern Shiverpeaks and Isle of Janthir respectively. We expected to win but the margin of victory has been a lot wider than I expected. At time of writing (10 am Tuesday morning) we have over 200,000 points, leading IoJ in second place by almost 140k.

We've been ticking over 400 pretty much continually since the match started, frequently going for long periods over 500. I heard there was an hour or so when we actually ticked over 600, although it must have happened while I was asleep. Back in March and April, when we met the zergforces that were Kaineng and Dragonbrand in their pomp, we were on the receiving end of this sort of thing quite often but I can't recall seeing it from the other side in quite this way before.

The strange thing is that with far less to play for than usual, this week's win being guaranteed, there appears to be more enthusiasm than ever for WvW and more Yaks on the field than ever before. It seems that far from wanting challenge and glory, a lot of people just like to get stuff done without those pesky other servers getting in the way.

Both new and recently-added incentives are bringing a ton of unfamiliar names into The Mists, all with agendas of their own. Of course, most folks who are interested in ticking all the world exploration boxes finished up months ago, but there are still a few late-adopters and plain old lazybones, of whom I'm one.

Cats. They'd be good at climbing. You'd think...

Despite hearing quite a lot of requests over the weekend along the lines of "Can we just take Veloka? I need the vista for World Completion", I hadn't thought to look at my own progress until I logged into Eternal Battlegrounds a few minutes ago to take a screenshot for this post.  Looking at the map I realized that although I was in the zerg that took both IoJ's and NSP's Overlook keeps yesterday I hadn't realized I had vistas still unchecked in each of them. Fortunately we still owned one and as I was hopping up the beams sticking out of the tower to reach the top a bunch of Omegas were already on the march to the other, so that's all sorted!

Is that all I get?

World exploration may be old hat but the Season Achievements and WvW Ranks are still fresh and interest in those is keeping the trains running on time. I'm familiar with Karma/WXP trains running when we are losing badly - they're often employed as a motivator and morale booster when there's little or nothing more effective open to us. Massive trains running virtually 24/7 when we have the ability to take stuff anywhere at will is a new one on me, though.  

The Rank system appears to be the mechanism of desire here. One of our best and certainly most popular commanders commented in Map chat that he was hoping to use this week to get to Gold status before the next match. The lowest Gold title comes in at Rank 1395. (The highest possible rank, Diamond Legend, appears at Rank 9,945, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first). By running trains non-stop he reckons to average 100 ranks a day.

By the time I finished last night my Charr ranger, my primary WvW character although by no means my only one, stood at half-way through Rank 99. At 100 he moves on from being a General, a title I very much like, to become first a Veteran, then a Champion and finally a Legend. That all takes another fifty ranks until 150 when the clock gets rolled back and the entire sequence begins again from "Invader", only this time with "Bronze" stuck in front. I imagine I'll be long gone from GW2 before it becomes relevant, but in theory the entire process repeats five more times after that, going through Silver, Gold, Platinum and Mithril and ending at Diamond.

As for the Season Meta, I'm very happy to confirm that I completed that at the weekend, on one account at least. Mrs Bhagpuss is one achievement short of completing it on both accounts but two is too much for me. It's a distracting complication in many ways. I did some things I would never otherwise have done at all, such as all the Jumping Puzzles, and quite a lot of things I might have done but not right now or not all at once, like standing on fifty ruins for 45 seconds at a time in a borderland we already own.

The signs of these Achievements disrupting natural gameplay were everywhere; players draining vital supply to repair walls that were still being trebbed as they selfishly clocked up progress on Defense Restorer; players selfishly throwing down unnecessary ram blueprints hoping to get some hits towards Demolition Expert; players selfishly sitting on the circle at sentry points for Sentry Capturer Extraordinaire while map calls went unheeded.

First server problems

The difference this week is that whereas such behavior has previously been roundly condemned and peer group pressure has been employed to minimize it, in this match the general attitude towards the focus on individual rather than team goals has been much more laid back. All in all it's made for a relaxing change but I think most regulars would prefer a closer match.

That said, we have still had some fantastic battles on occasion. We were blithely circling the Northern Shiverpeaks borderland last night, helping ourselves to whatever we fancied, when NSP brought a zerg in and wiped us at their Garrison. We promptly picked ourselves up, made a swarm of Omegas and marched them north for retribution. The second battle was intense but we emerged victorious.

Later, the evening saw some ferocious fighting in Eternal Battlegrounds, with both Isle of Janthir and Northern Shiverpeaks fielding the largest numbers I've seen from them either in this or previous matches. There's intense competition between IoJ, who have come last in every previous match but who are currently in second place in this one and NSP, who stand to lose their place ahead of IoJ in the League if they can't overhaul IoJ's current 10k lead.

The dynamic of this match may be unbalanced but so far at least it's never been dull. All the same, it'll be nice to get back to normality next week, when we face the steamroller that is Stormbluff Isle and our old frenemies Ehmry Bay.

March of the Golem Army : GW2

Yak's Bend has been getting hell from Dragonbrand for a while now. They have a very heavy "Night Crew" that comes out with the stars and stomps all over us. Playing GMT hours against them on what's reckoned to be primarily a U.S. West Coast server means that if Mrs Bhagpuss and I are on during the day we spend the morning in doomed last stands over Keeps that we inevitably lose and then the afternoon on a tit-for-tat round of retakes. It makes for great xp and karma but it can get a tad demoralizing.

Left at the camp. No, the other left!

I wasn't planning on doing much World vs World last night. The match is winding down and things were quiet. Yaks had enough of a lead on Ehmry Bay to be reasonably sure that we'd stay in Tier 4 while they slip down a tier, making room for our old friends Maguuma, who are barnstorming Tier 5 after dropping a week ago. We also have the welcome prospect of Dragonbrand leaving us as they rise to T3, to be replaced by Isle of Janthir, who we have played before but about whom I remember nothing. All change on Friday then, and very welcome too.

Did I log into MechWarrior by mistake?

My plan was to take my Elementalist up-country from Black Citadel all the way through Ascalon to Frostgorge, opening as many waypoints as possible as I went. She'd just dinged 72 and it won't be long before she can take a poke at Jormag's left toe. Not  to mention take her turn with a pick at the Orichalcum mines. I'd just reached the end of Blazeridge Mountains when Mrs Bhagpuss told me "Come here - you've got to see this".

"Here" turned out to be the Dragonbrand's Frontier." This" was a Golem Army. Tired of being kicked around in our own backyard Our Glorious Leaders had assembled a huge strike force of mobile siege engines with the intention of marching them across the Dragonbrand map until we'd painted the whole thing red.

Red's our color this week. It means we're third. Even though we came second last week. We're coming second this week again but we'll be third again next week, too. We didn't come second enough. Funny game, WvW.

What did you say the weight limit on this bridge was again?

There was a shortage of golem pilots so Mrs Bhagpuss and I both hopped inside one. (Not the same one - there are no two-seater golems. Not yet). One crew marched off to assault The Garrison. Our team went to Hills. I admit I thought we'd be lucky even to get there but everything went amazingly smoothly, if you don't count half the golems going the wrong way round a supply camp and me putting someone on my own team on ignore for yelling at me four times for spinning once (my finger slipped, alright?)

Bay, Garrison, Hills. Collect the set.

We took Hills, the others took Garrison. We waypointed back and then our lot took Bay after a comedy interlude where we all jumped out of our golems and ran to a tower then ran back and jumped in again when it turned out we'd gotten our signals muddled. I learned that a Golem can swim, that if you dodge in a golem it makes him run faster (although not for nearly long enough) and that if no-one in  the guarding party kills a skale it can nip quite a few chunks out of a Golem's backside. You'd think it would break its teeth but no...

Throw me a line, I'm sinking fast!

Dragonbrand seemed slow to wake up. I think they were busy in the Eternal Battleground. Eventually they began to appear in numbers, seething like an anthill someone recklessly poked with a stick. A good old ding-dong ensued, with Hills, Bay and Garrison changing hands several more times. I had one more run at Garrison in a Golem and helped take it a second time, then I had to go to bed. Summer dinged 74 in what must be two of the most amusing levels I've done to date.

The much-demanded end to free server transfers is finally happening on January 28 and no doubt there'll be a lot of jockeying for position and server-hopping between now and then. We're staying put. Yaks we are and Yaks we stay. A month or so after that we get to find out what the much-ballyhooed major changes to WvW are. My bet's on a greater emphasis on PvE, a shift to shorter-term objectives and a general move away from anything that might be considered "serious" RvR in favor of something more appealing to the hit&run crowd that tussle and scrap along the roads to Stonemist Castle night after night.

Yak's Bend Golem Synchronized Swimming Team

Could be good. Could be terrible. The sooner we get some hard facts, the happier I'll be, either way. Until then, let's hope for more fun evenings like this one.