Feline Weird In Lost Ark

Here are some screenshots. I think they sum up just what a freakishly weird game Lost Ark is better than anything I could put into in words.

A six-foot tall, black and white cat, an unnerving, yellow sparkle in its eye, a gold bell on its crimson collar, sprawls in the middle of a cobbled city street. The cat leans back in a disturbingly human pose. Beside the cat sits a large, white rabbit. Strapped to the bunny's back are a pair of ornate leather panniers and a scroll case as though it were a beast of burden. Behind the unnatural pair an imposing, high-renaissance ceremonial arch reaches towards the blue sky. Heroic statues salute. Guards stand at attention. Children with wooden swords play at being soldiers. No-one seems to find anything about the scene remotely unusual.

Now the cat is standing up. From somewhere (Who knows where?) it has produced a pistol. It stands in a dueling pose, the gun in front of the eye that doesn't sparkle, the other arm (Hand? Paw?) concealed behind its back. The rabbit, unconcerned, seems to be playing with something on the ground.

The pistol vanishes. The cat begins to dance. The cat has moves. The cat wants you to know about them. The rabbit pays the cat no mind. Neither does anyone else.

As if concealing a weapon while naked isn't enough, the cat brings out a six-foot hoverboard. From where, again, who can say? The board, vividly illustrated, is decorated with, among other things, an embossed head. Whose head? Of what creature? That, at least, can be explained.

Although there is no photographic evidence to prove it, that is the image of a known associate of the cat, a small, teardrop-shaped entity with appendages that could as easily be leaves as ears. The cat has been seen walking the streets with the leaf-headed creature by its side. Where the creature is now is as much a mystery as where the hoverboard came from.

The cat, justifiably proud of its ability to dance while standing on a hoverboard, performs for its own amusement. No-one watches. No-one cares. The city has only recently avoided being destroyed by fire during a demonic invasion. The entire nation is locked in an existential struggle with the forces of darkness. A cat on a hoverboard doesn't merit a second glance.

As I said in a comment to Aywren, who posted pictures of her character in Lost Ark, dressed as a mouse "I was already having trouble trying to work out just what sort of game Lost Ark was trying to be but now these costumes are part of it I think I’ll just give up trying. Clearly, whoever’s behind it just doesn’t care, so why should we?"

If You're Reading This It May Already Be Too Late...

This is going to count as one of the tardiest PSAs ever but better late, as they say. I wouldn't have thought to mention it at all had Mrs. Bhagpuss not appeared behind me as I was about to log in for my dailies in Guild Wars 2 this morning to tell me there was a free gift in the Black Lion store (Which she confusingly referred to as "The Red Lion", as if it was a pub.)

As it happened, I already knew there was a freebie because I'd picked it up yesterday on both the two accounts I'm playing regularly. It's one of those Black Lion Claim Tickets that entitle you to a free weapon skin or some such cosmetic doodaddle. I only took it because it was there. I never turn down a free gift, even one I don't want. That would just be rude.

All I ever do with the things is throw them in the bank. I rarely even click on them or visit the vendor that takes them to see what they buy. This time, though, I was fortunate enough to have Mrs. Bhagpuss to advise me. 

She was keen that I should know there was an option right at the bottom of the vendor's inventory where you can buy something called a "Vintage Black Lion Weapon Box". As far as I can tell, this is a new addition to the game. The wiki entry doesn't give a date but the History there only goes back as far as last month.

Mrs. Bhagpuss told me the boxes contained all the old skins that used to be in Black Lion Chests, the game's heavily overpriced lockboxes. Okay, to be strictly accurate, it's the Black Lion Keys that open the boxes that are overpriced but it's always the keys, isn't it? I don't know why we talk about lockboxes being the problem. Does any game actually sell the boxes?

Getting back to the free ticket, my usual problem with them is that I suffer from choice paralysis. I hate choosing one item to pick from a list. Faced with a whole lot of things I could spend my tickets on I prefer not to spend them at all. Not making a choice means that, notionally, I own everything. So much more satisfying.

I have no such compunctions when it comes to shoving my hand into a virtual bran barrel. I love lockboxes just so long as no-one's expecting me to pay for them. I particularly love them when they're extremely likely to contain something I don't have and have a high chance it might be something I want. 

Better yet if it's something I can sell. All the skins that come out of these boxes are tradeable as far as I know. What's more, so are the boxes. Mrs. Bhagpuss mentioned that, should I not want to open the box, I could just take the money, currently somewhere around 30 gold, by hawking them on the Trading Post.

I didn't do that. I opened mine. One free ticket on each of my three accounts, the third of which I logged in for the first time in months just for the purpose. 

I even logged my free account in to see if ArenaNet were going to be super-generous. Unsurprisngly, they were not, although my Charr there did get his fourth birthday present and a Wintersday gift from under the tree, which he was standing next to, suggesting it's been a year since I last saw him.

On the paid-for accounts I was very pleased with what I got, so much so that I used several of the other tickets I had squirrelled away. The pick of the bunch was the Greatsword, the name of which I forget, closely followed by the Sceptre (Ditto.) You can see them both at the top of the post.

All of the skins I got were good enough that I might use them, although I'd have to find a character who wields the relevant weapon, which might be a bit of an ask. Maybe when End of Dragons shuffles the pack again.

I checked the going rate for all of them on the Trading Post. The lowest was 25 gold. The highest, suprisingly the rather staid-looking axe, sells for around 55 gold. I think if I was looking to make money I'd probably open the boxes and sell the contents rather than sell the boxes themselves. The odds look pretty good there.

I held back some of my tickets just in case. In case of what, you may well ask. I have no idea. 

I'm not clear on whether these Vintage boxes are a permanent addition to the game, even assuming they really are new, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. As for the free tickets, I believe this is the final day. I did say I was late on this one. Sorry about that.

Tomorrow, though, there's another freebie: a Guaranteed Wardrobe Unlock. Another spin of the wheel! The official announcement doesn't mention how long that's going to be around, either, so I'd recommend grabbing it on the 17th just in case it's a one-day wonder.

This has been a Public Service Announcement. We now return you to your regular programming. Assuming you can even tell the difference.

A Little Late or Always Read The Instructions : GW2

When the Festival of the Four Winds began three weeks ago I took a look at the Meta and decided it was impossible. Usually these things allow a certain amount of leeway. They let you to skip a couple of the achievements you might find particularly difficult. This time it appeared you had to do all of them.

What's more, there were twenty-five, which is a lot. And the reward was some piece of armor that you couldn't Preview in game. A pair of gloves. It sounded like an awful lot of work for a pair of gloves. Who looks at their hands in an MMO anyway? Gloves aren't like a cloak or a hat that you can show off or admire. They're just gloves.

I dismissed any thought of finishing the meta. I just got on with doing the events and achievements that interested me or those I enjoyed. Which turned out to be most of them.

For one thing, I loved finding all the crystals. I was gliding around Labrynthine Cliffs on thermals for the sheer thrill of it anyway, so why not swoop down and pick up the shinies?

So much has changed since the Festival was here four and five years ago. One of the most under-reported additions to the game has to be the UI tweak that lets you to have the names of all interactable objects visible on screen, at a distance, all the time. Combined with the ability to fly - either  with a glider or a Griffin - what was once annoying and difficult has become simple and instinctive.

So instinctive, in fact, that I didn't need to use Dulfy's excellent guide until the very end, when I had to resort to research to find a couple of particularly well-hidden crystals. Mostly I just ran or flapped around and grabbed them as I saw them. Working out how to get to some of the ones I could see from a distance was particualarly enjoyable and satisfying.

Boss Blitz, the event in Queen Jenna's Crown Pavilion that involves the perpetual slaughter of six Bosses, held my attention for the entire three weeks. It's an almost perfect demonstration of social interaction in MMOs. In fact, when I came to write about it here I found I had so much to say it was in danger of unbalancing this post, so I'm going to write it up separately.

After a week or so I noticed that I'd done about two-thirds of the achievements for the meta. I also
realized about then that the tally of achievements that counted included some I hadn't thought were part of it, while some I thought were included didn't seem to count after all.

Had I thought to left-click the meta itself, all would have been revealed. There's an itemized list of what's required. Despite having played this game for six years that simply never occurred to me. It was only when someone mentioned it in map chat yesterday that I gave it a try.

Instead, I kept plugging away over the course of the Festival, letting the meta fill in as it would. For a long while I thought some of the achievements from the Queen's Gauntlet counted. They don't.

I surprised myself by getting all the way to Liadri, the last of the original Gauntlet bosses, in a single session. The Queen's Gauntlet, a series of timed, solo fights against increasingly tough or tricksy opponents, isn't really my kind of thing but it was fun to do once.

What does count for the meta are the races, or at least most of them. Fortunately the all-but-impossible Griffin race doesn't figure on the card although the ill-conceived Skimmer race does. The skimmer race isn't much fun. Skimmers all move at the same speed, slower than any other mount, so it's not much of a race. It's also never won by anyone on a Skimmer. 

Every race is won by people who jump off their skimmers in the final land section and mount up on raptors instead. Every race ends with a lot of angry skimmer riders calling raptor riders cheats. Luckily  you don't need to win for the meta, just finish within two and a half minutes. You could probably walk the course in that time. If you could walk on water.

The other two races are tougher all round. The mounted one at the end of Boss Blitz and the Dolyak race in Cliffs are both incredibly annoying and enormously entertaining at the same time. The former takes you through a lot of awkward terrain and a pile of hostile mobs; the latter turns you into a pig-sized dolyak and makes you use the original zephyrite crystals to control your movement.

For the meta you have to complete each race in about half the maximum time allowed: two minutes for the mount race, two and a half minutes for the Dolyaks. That's tight. It took me a number of practice runs to work out a strategy and a number more to implement that strategy effectively.

Since the mount race starts only when a Boss Blitz has been successfully completed and the Dolyak race is every two hours, it took me several sessions to get them both done. The Dolyak race was about the last thing I needed.

With that finally done I hit 25/25 and received my reward. It was better than I expected. The gloves have a very nice aura effect that is quite noticeable. An aura's not a hat or a cloak but it's not nothing.

I thought it would be of interest to Mrs Bhagpuss. On my original advice she hadn't been bothering with the meta either. She wouldn't have been able to complete it in any case because she absolutely cannot ride mounts. She literally gets motion-sick just thinking about doing it.

She had, however, already hit 19/25 on the meta meter, with just a few crystals, the races and one or two odds and ends to do. I finished those up for her yesterday afternoon, meaning we have now each  completed the meta on one account.

Ironically, when I read through the Dulfy guide after I'd finished, I found out you can "craft" the gloves anyway. By "craft" I mean there's a Mystic Forge combine for them. Since the meta gives you a stingy single armor weight of just one of the three designs, if you like them, you're likely to end up "crafting" several more anyway.

Even so, had I been paying better attention three weeks ago, and had I understood sooner what was required, I might have finished the whole thing on more than one account. Nearly all of it was fun to do.

Also, in retrospect, it would have made more sense to have done at least some of the events - and the dailies - on the other two accounts, especially the one that wasn't around the last time we had the chance to do all this. It's not a big deal because the items on sale aren't all that special but I do have a lot of them already on the account I was using to run the events this time.

There were a few things I wanted. I didn't have the new Watchwork Mk II outfit. I have the original and I used to use it a lot. Now I have the new one. I'm not sure I can see the difference to be honest. And for some reason I never had a kite until now. Not sure how that happened. I bought two.

Anyway, it's too late now. The Festival ends tomorrow. You live and learn. At least I had a ton of fun. And I hope and trust  the Festival of the Four Winds is now established as an annual event. I'll be better prepared next year.

Lockbox Apocalypse : GW2

A few days back, when I posted about the addition of new mount skins to GW2's Gem Store cash shop it was mostly with the intention of examining the emotional disconnect I was experiencing between the concepts of "Mounts" and "Mount Skins". In retrospect this seems somewhat like pointing out an unusual species of squirrel leaping from the branches just before a falling oak tree crushes you to death.

As it happens, at the time I wrote the post, I was blissfully, not to say naively, unaware that the topic was even a matter of particular controversy. It was only after Jeromai drew my attention in the comments to the fire raging on the forums that I became belatedly aware of the crowd brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches.

The "Official Mount Adoption Feedback Thread" started by GW2 Communications Manager Gaile Gray has now dropped to page two of the forums, albeit not before it grew to more than seventy pages containing nearly three thousand comments. It would probably still be top of page one and growing if it hadn't been for an intervention by ANet CEO Mike O'Brien, who stepped up personally on Friday to try to get things back under some sort of control.

Blue is the color.

Unfortunately, far from dampening down the fire, his peculiar "Message About The Mount Adoption Certificate" merely served to pour gasoline on the flames. The full text is too lengthy to reproduce here but the gist appears to be "Thanks for complaining. We thought it was a good idea but maybe it wasn't. We aren't going to change anything but next time we'll try to finesse things so it doesn't look quite so much like an obvious cash grab". Or, in his exact words:

"Microtransactions can be polarizing, and we’ve received both positive and negative feedback on the license. We won’t change the existing license in a way that would invalidate the investment players have made, but I want to confirm to you that our next planned mount skin releases will focus on individual sales like the Reforged Warhound and bundles like the Spooky Mounts Pack. We will not add any skins to the currently available Adoption License, thus not pushing down the odds of acquiring any one skin in that set.

We appreciate the thoughtful feedback many of you have provided, and that you hold us to high standards for monetization."

Unsurprisingly, this has satisfied almost no-one. The new thread resulting from Mike's non-apology can't quite match the size of the previous one but it's still near the top of page one and growing, with less than half as many posts so far but even more page views.

A lot of the conversation isn't particularly edifying. There's a deal of the usual to-and-fro between a relatively small number of ultra-committed opponents or proponents that these threads always see. Filtering out the trolls and professional complainers, however, it seems clear that, at the very least, ANet risks losing a deal of good will over this.

Or so you would think from reading the forums. Looking for some further context I went to Reddit. Couldn't really find anything apart from a thread about Wooden Potatoes destroying a Mount Adoption Certificate in his stream. Some good jokes in that thread but not much salt other than a few people calling the OP out for disrespecting Wooden Potatoes.

Starbound top and center.

So much for anecdotal evidence and reportage. How about a witness statement?

Last night, for no better reason than someone called it in map chat, I decided to go do Triple Trouble. I've been two achievements short of a meta there for months but I'd stopped bothering the Wurm after the last several "organized" attempts turned out to be a complete shambles.

This time was much, much better. Organized by QUTE, everything went very smoothly. All three heads came off and died. I went with Crimson, having first remembered to join the escort party (thanks to a sanity check via Dulfy, despite having been told by two people, in answer to my question in-game, that I didn't need to). I got the Phytotoxin Enthusiast achievement I was missing and the kill on the Crimson head. All I need now is a single kill on Amber and I'm done.

Before all that, however, there was half an hour of standing around the campfire at Firthside Vigil waiting for a critical mass of players to be taxied in, squads to be formed and so on. While we waited we were entertained by aerial displays from a squadron of multi-colored griffins including the undeniably impressive if utterly bizarre Starbound,.

I wasn't expecting it to be quite this big.

Also present was a green bunny skinned as a frog and the only mount skin I really like, the Twin Sands jackal. In short, there were a lot of people riding mounts skinned up from the recent and supposedly unacceptable loot box sale.

What's more, they all seemed to be very pleased with their purchases, to the point of wanting to show them off at every opportunity. With a full map and a lot of newer players (judging by the questions being asked) I didn't hear a single negative comment about mounts or skins from anyone.

That was also my experience in Lion's Arch, the traditional home for GW2's never-ending fashion parade. A lot of chatter about the new mount skins and all of it excited and positive. While the forum threads may be filled with vitriolic complaints and threats to quit, the response in game and on Reddit seems to be quite the opposite.

At the very least, the visual evidence within the game seems to be that these things are really selling. What's more, I would note that at time of writing I have yet to see even one player mounted on a 2000 Gem Reforged Warhound, the only mount skin available as a single, direct purchase.

It adds a whole other dimension, doesn't it?

Maybe that's because the Jackal is the least popular and least useful of all the mounts and no-one rides them anyway. Or maybe it's because 2000 Gems is significantly above what the market will bear for a single mount skin right now. I imagine it's a little of each. 

Either way, it certainly seems people are keener to pay 400 gems for a random skin than 2000 for this specific model. I know I would be.

I'm relatively neutral on the whole lockbox issue: I agree one hundred per cent that there are some serious concerns that need to be addressed over the accessibility of quasi-gambling activities to vulnerable individuals and minors but other than that I don't have any particular problem with items being available either only for real money or via a form of randomization or, indeed, both those things together.

Unless and until regulation applies I think we can safely say that developers will continue to make their decisions on how far to go with this approach based on how much money it brings in. If lockbox sales are outweighed by lost revenue from people leaving the game to avoid them then we'll see fewer lockboxes. If not, then we can expect such sales to continue apace.

Polly want a cracker!

When it comes to these particular lockboxes, I have more of a problem with what's in them than how they're sold. The addition of mounts to the game had an immediate and, to my mind, unflattering effect on the visual landscape. If we're to expect a steady stream of garish and bizarre mount skins - and we are, since that's clearly what sells - it doesn't bode well for what little immersion we have left.

Oh, well. It's no more than  bringing the look of Tyria in line with the looks of Azeroth and Norrath. I guess if I really wanted visual consistency I'd go play LotRO.

As for the commercial future of GW2, it would appear from the first financials since Path of Fire that Gem Shop sales will have to take up most of the heavy lifting over the next year or two. Expect ever flashier skins and even sneakier sales strategies.

I think I'll put my gold in tar and feather futures.

Skin In The Game : GW2

ArenaNet's revelation that mounts would be the defining feature of Path of Fire, GW2's second expansion was widely seen as a spectacular climbdown, one of an ongoing series of U-turns made by the company since launch. Indeed, I find it hard to recall another MMO I've played where statements of policy are laid down so firmly only to be rescinded so comprehensively.

Some of this fundamental restructuring appears to rest on initial misunderstandings arising out of poorly-expressed principles. Others seem to owe their existence to purely commercial considerations or, in a few disturbing cases, panic.

Mostly, ANet's representatives take considerable care in their public statements to leave themselves at least a sliver of room to wiggle. The company motto might as well be "Never say Never".

For good or ill, mounts are with us now and likely to remain so. As Blizzard discovered when they tried to impose a flight ban in Azeroth, once granted such benefits are difficult to withdraw.

The inclusion of gliders in Heart of Thorns can now be seen as a toe dipped in the water. Gliding came out of the blue. No-one asked for it. No-one expected it. Most players were agnostic about it until it arrived but it turned out to be an immediate hit with almost everybody.

Gliding also opened a fresh revenue stream. In a game in which cosmetics represent a substantial element of both the gameplay and the business model, having a new visual adornment to sell is a big deal.

I forget exactly how long it was before the first purchasable glider skins appeared in the Gem Store but I'm pretty sure that record has been roundly beaten by mount skins. The first set popped up as part of the Halloween celebrations barely three weeks after the expansion's launch.

The sheer number of mounts in fancy dress demonstrated the popularity of that enterprise and with Halloween on the way out ANet wasted no time in building on success, choosing instead to double down on it then double some more.

Yesterday's patch saw Evon Gnashblade adding a slew of skins to the stable. Thirty to be precise. They cost 400 gems per skin or you can buy all 30 for 9,600 gems. That's over a hundred dollars.

With the exception of the Reforged Warhound (pictured at the head of this post and actually a skin for the Jackal mount), which is sold separately at a cool 2000 Gems, you can't buy the precise skin you want. In much the same way that DBG has been selling EQ2 Mercenaries for years, you buy an "Adoption Certificate" that grants you a random skin. Massively, predictably, attempted to equate this with lockboxes but there's a very significant difference that largely invalidates the comparison: you cannot duplicate skins by this method. You are guaranteed a unique skin that you do not already own every time you redeem a certificate.

One of the very, very few skins that actually makes the mount look like a different animal.
Credit to Dulfy for the image - that's her riding it, too.

Dulfy has a preview of all the skins. Most of them are so dull I find it hard to believe I would even know anyone was using one. A few are a lot more obvious, usually because they're on fire or have some kind of aura effect, but the underlying problem from my perspective, other than that I don't like mounts to begin with, is that they are skins.

"Skin" seems to be a concept derived from outside of MMOs entirely (other than EVE, but repainting a spaceship has a very different philosophical import to reskinning an animal). In every MMO I've played before GW2 mounts are individual creatures or devices.

The idea that you could keep the same mount but slap a different look on it just seems weird to me although the extreme commercial benefit it represents over having to make actual new mounts is obvious. And, of course, it is exactly what other MMOs do when they add new mounts that use the old frameworks - they just don't present it so baldly, artificially and unromantically.

It's all part and parcel of the ANet approach that makes resisting the temptation to give them money so very easy for me. I actually like the random element of the Adoption Certificates. I love the idea of not knowing what I'm going to get. 400 Gems is a fair price. I can afford it and I'd pay it - if I was told I was buying a new mount.

For a skin for the mount I already have,though? Nope. Not interested. I managed just fine with the basic glider until I bought the Magic Carpet and the Broom and in both cases it was the fact that the purchase added the function of flight to an item I owned or wanted that attracted me, not the ability to add the look of the item to a function I already owned.

It's a fine difference I know but it matters to me, if not so much to the many, many people excitedly discussing the new skins in Lions Arch map chat last night. One player said it was the best $120 he'd ever spent. Another said that getting the new skins was the most excited he'd been about a present since he got a bike for Christmas when he was eight years old.

However sniffy I might be about them, I think we're going to be seeing a lot more mount skins from now on.

Same River, Different Water : Everquest, GW2

Following my introduction to Heroic Level 85 characters last week I find myself playing Everquest regularly once again and very happily so. Today my magician dinged 86. A level in a week is astonishingly swift progress by the standards I'd long become inured to on my 84th Beastlord. It feels very satisfying.

The difference between the two characters, invisible if you look just at their levels alone, lies in the gear and in the AAs. I kitted the Beastlord out in the best  tradeable gear available back in the autumn, when I had my last flurry of leveling. I checked the Bazaar last night and almost everything remains Best-in-Slot for buyable gear with any possible upgrades being marginal at best. By contrast, the armor that the mage was gifted by the Heroic upgrade is vastly superior, matching the non-tradeable equipment available in current group content.

As for AAs, when I was leveling her my Beastlord had around 800. Heroic characters start with 4000, something the Beastlord can at least emulate with the February update's separate innovation of auto-granted AAs for Gold-Level accounts. Since such a huge proportion of a character's power and survivability in Everquest comes from Gear and AAs, that accounts both for the increased speed of leveling and how much fun I'm having.

Call yourself a Lookout? Didn't see that coming, did you?

So far I've been playing cautiously, doing Franklin Teek's tasks in the level 75 and 80 Hot Zones, currently Oceangreen Hills and Hills of Shade. Using the once-a-day Veteran Reward "Lesson of the Devoted", which doubles XP for thirty minutes, the mage has time to travel via Steamfont and Loping Plains to kill dark blue con Blackwater residents in the gloomy Hills of Shade then gate back and pass through the Plane of Time to the Void portal that leads to the timeslipped version of Qeynos Hills that is Oceangreen for some light-blue Grizzlies.

Even allowing for bad pulls and having to clear annoying treants that see invisibility, it's easy enough to run this cycle with a few minutes left in the Lesson, coming out with somewhere around 10% of the level done. It's only possible, though, because of the many quality of life improvements that fifteen years of changes and updates have brought to this dowager of MMOs, while leaving her essential personality unchanged.

You ain't seen me, right? Oh, never mind...

For example the Perfected Invisibility and Perfected Levitation AAs mean the magician can travel in a straight line across entire zones, high above the agro range of all mobs, landing unseen at her chosen destination without fear of invisibility breaking unexpectedly. Her pet and mercenary are both ignored as well even though they remain perfectly visible.

It would be very easy to argue that the removal of requirements for reagents such as bat wings for levitation, plus the absence of risk inherent in invisibility that can fade without warning, reduces the granularity that made Everquest so compulsively immersive in the first place. I'd be one who'd argue that. Except, of course, all that granularity still exists if you want it. Just make a new character and there it all is, or most of it, same as it ever was.

No, I feel with increasing certainty that the time for such creative restrictions comes during the early years of an MMO's life, within the original levels and content with which it began. There they add much-needed texture and grit for a plyerbase still eager and willing to be drawn in to a fresh, new world. Later there comes a point when what was once involving risks becoming offputting. And anyway, it's not as though surprises and pitfalls don't lurk around every corner, even with all these modern contrivances and conveniences.

Bloodmoon Keep from the air. Safest way to see it.

Take my mage's little jaunt to Wall of Slaughter today. She'd taken Franklin Teek's Simple Task for level 70s just on the off-chance it would still give a dab of experience. Wall of Slaughter, a spectacularly ugly zone from the Omens of War expansion, is at the very lowest margin of zones in which she could expect to gain even a smidgin of xp, the mobs being mostly green or grey. Still, it's a 50 plat single from the Guild Hall portal to get there and a minute or two to complete the task, so why not?


Knowing it as a zone the Beastlord can solo with ease I didn't bother with a mercenary. Just a magician and her air pet with a rag-tag of fading buffs from The Pile (jargon for the fifty or more characters always found huddling together in the Guild Lobby hoping for free buffs). She killed a couple of greens at the port-in just to calibrate - extremely easy - then headed out onto the baked mudflats, where the first thing she saw was a massive Bazu going by the name of Cipheron.

At this point two things flashed through my mind; firstly NAMED!! and secondly a memory of the infuriating zonesweeper that made all our lives such a misery in WoS back in the day. With a combination of lust for loot and desire for payback I cast a debuff to pull and sent in the pet.

It was only after half a dozen nukes, just as I was beginning to wonder why the mob's health had only dropped to 98% and why my pet was taking such a beating, that I realized my target was an even con. This is a moment to make an EQ player's blood run cold. In Everquest you do not blithely pull a boss mob of your own level, about which you know nothing, not if you expect to live for more than a few seconds longer.

Oh, I'm so sorry. I mistook you for someone else.

But Kabobn was holding up well enough, or at least he was now I'd noticed I needed to heal him. There was time to assess the situation. I decided not to gate, to carry on and see how things might play out. There followed one of the kind of fights I so relish in Everquest. It lasted about ten minutes as I juggled the responsibilities of keeping the pet upright, whittling away at Cipheron's mountainous health, managing my mana and agro, while choosing and using AAs to keep the pair of us on top of things.

There was some kind of AE to avoid and once I lost valuable seconds wondering why I couldn't heal the pet before I noticed Cipheron had forced me to feign death so I was lying on the ground. It was tense for a while but in the end it was Cipheron on the deck and he wasn't feigning. When I searched the massive body there was no special loot, just a blank sheet of parchment the game told me I wasn't allowed to pick up.

After I'd summoned the Merc just in case Cipheron had any friends, taken the victory shot and finished Franklin's task, which dinged me 86 so it was worth coming, I looked old Cipheron up on Allakhazam. Turns out he's part of the Enchanter 2.0 epic. In 2005 it took a 40 man raid to knock him over. Five years ago that was down to a single group and now he's soloable by a rusty, unprepared player on a false-premise pull.

Things change. Reading today's twin blogs promoting the upcoming revisions to the Dye and Skin systems in GW2, in which I can see both losses and gains, I find myself acutely aware of Heraclitus's dictum "No man ever steps in the same river twice". Poor old Heraclitus. Born two and a half millennia too early to play MMOs. He'd have made a great dev. Or a forum troll...