The Cruellest Month: GW2

The position I claim to have held on Dailies ever since I first heard of them is rapidly becoming untenable. A couple of years ago, if asked what I thought of Dailies I'd have said they were the Devil's work. No, that's unfair - I wouldn't have waited to be asked. Then came Rift . Another year on and assimilation is complete. As I outlined recently my GW2 gameplay now revolves around a certain set of goals that are repeatable once every twenty-four hours.

Could be Emerson...

This leaves me exposed. Not only does it seem that I do after all quite like doing the same thing every day, provided that thing is a thing that I like to do, but also it appears I have "goals", something else I've been going around denying. Just as well my oft-quoted personal motto, adopted when I was in my gauche teens and never bettered, is Ralph Waldo Emerson's "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".

GW2 doesn't beat about the Suspicious Bush. A Daily is a Daily. It says so right there on the Achievement page. Much has been said about how GW2 dailies work well even for people like me who claim they don't do dailies. No quests to get, nothing to do that you probably wouldn't be doing anyway, the whole thing ticks along in the background like a well-tended boiler. 

Not so the Daily's big brother, the Monthly. This insidious innovation asks much more and it exerts a hideous fascination. Each month there are four things that must be done. These can change, although so far only one has.

Never saw this event before and I live here!

There's a relatively uncontroversial one: "Event Participation". This requires that you be present at a hundred Events during the calendar month, which is simply a subset of the Daily. Strike that one off. All the rest are problematic to a degree.

In the first two months, the truncated August and the full September, there was a requirement not to die. Most MMO players probably try not to get their characters killed as a general principle but as anyone who's ever attempted to get an "Undying" title or achievement in any game knows, actively avoiding character death radically affects gameplay. GW2 is particularly odd in that this marker is incredibly easy to hit at 80th (takes about 10 minutes or less) but pretty tough at low level. 

Always time for a Vista, even in the midst of a War

Fortunately for the inept and the reckless GW2 offers a myriad of ways to gain xp that don't involve fighting anything or even leaving town. Since this isn't EQ2 in 2005, you don't take your life in your hands every time you use the forge so crafting smooths this one along nicely. Vistas are a slight risk - you might fall off and falling damage in Tyria is ferocious. Still, it's a lot safer than actually fighting anything. 

Exploring also brings in the big xp - discovering a Waypoint out in the wilds gives as much xp as killing more than twenty monsters nearby. Therein lies the problem, though - there are monsters nearby and monsters tend to want to kill you. No-one ever claimed exploring was safe. Best stick to towns, although I think we usually call that "Sightseeing".

No need to bother about it this month anyway, for this month we are allowed to die. The Undying benchmark has vanished, replaced by a row of ???. From hints dropped these are widely assumed to refer to an upcoming Halloween-related event. We shall see.

Oh but they look so pretty...

That leaves two. Monthly Salvage Kit Uses is frankly nuts. Who thought to include that? Was it ArenaNet's in-house economist, the unconvincingly-named John Smith? Is it there just to funnel items out of the economy and replace them with marketable crafting mats? Whatever the reason, this is actually the one I find hardest. With silver still relatively hard to come by all magic weapons go to vendor and even salvaging every non-magic item across four characters only just hits this target in a month. Last time I ended up buying stuff on the TP just to destroy it.

Finally we get to the real joker in this four-card pack. Monthly WvW Player Kills. World vs World was what I was planning to write about this morning. Yesterday being a Sunday and a day of peace, naturally I spent almost all of it trying to kill people. Specifically, trying to get my fifty player kills. It wasn't how I'd imagined, let alone planned on spending the day. Not that it wasn't enjoyable. In parts.

Yak at the Back. As usual.

I may get around to my thoughts, such as they are, on WvW itself another time but just for now, mull over this specific aspect. Is it any wonder there are so many running skirmishes and so many players not following the strategy propounded by Commanders in Map chat? Is it any wonder that so many people sound like they have no idea what they are doing or seem to have an entirely different agenda? They don't! They do! They're out in the Frontier trying to get this box ticked so they can go back to Lion's Arch as fast as possible. 

Probably. Really, who knows? I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time, pulling the Achiever lever to nudge PvE players into something they might never try otherwise. Try it, you might find you like it. Whether it has that effect or the opposite, well, do we have any way of knowing? All I can say for certain is that 50 player kills in a month is a pretty low bar that should only take a few minutes a day but even so it manages to be quite annoying while it lasts.

Why did I spend all Sunday at it, then? That's a topic for another time.