Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em : Pre-Tourney Strategy And Tactics In GW2

I was going to say something today about the upcoming September Feature Pack for GW2 but Jeromai just covered it in such exhaustive detail I don't think I'll bother. I'll just say that most of it looks pretty good in theory and I look forward to trying it all out in practice.

Instead I'll just say a few words about the upcoming WvW Fall Tournament. The third of these, announced on the fly with no forewarning, it again features a wholesale shake-up of the rules, making comparisons between performance season by season shaky at best.

The initial tournament lasted seven weeks. It felt too long. The second ran nine weeks. It felt much too long. This one is four weeks. Will that feel too short? We'll know soon enough.

With April's move to a Megaserver structure for PvE and the upcoming globalization of guilds, World vs World stands out as the only remaining, anachronistic holdout for server pride. The ruleset for the forthcoming tournament renders even that fig-leaf transparent by allowing free transfers throughout the four weeks. Your server losing? Don't worry! $10 or $20 dollars will see you back on top!

And those are our good points.

Yak's Bend may be unusual in that most of the Commanders and many of the players competing under our banner in this tournament will be exactly the same ones who flew the YB flag in the previous two. Same as the year before we even had tournaments for that matter. Mrs Bhagpuss and I follow the same tags and play alongside the same names, by and large, as we did nearly two years ago.

We have had one significant addition. A small but strong and focused WvW guild transferred to Yaks Bend a couple of months back. We call them The Hair Bear Bunch or The Bears for short because they have three enormous Charrs with the new bouffant hairdo. Oh, and they all wear pink.

Their commander has managed something no other commander was able to achieve in two years of hectoring and cajoling: I finally cracked and installed Teamspeak. This will be the first tournament we've done where both of us are in voice coms. So far it's been interesting but not especially effective.

Everyone speaks so softly and calmly, even when things are utterly frenzied and chaotic on screen, that sometimes I don't quite realize how serious the situation has become.  When I can pick out their quiet, understated tones from the explosions, battle cries and music of the game (and I'm not turning my in-game sounds down for anyone) I still don't always understand what they're saying. There's a lot of jargon that I'm slowly assimilating. Finally, when I can hear and I do understand it still doesn't mean I'm able to react fast enough to do whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing. All the same, better to know.

Good to know your own strengths

The announcement of the tournament has thrown up a whole meta-game around positioning for places at the start. There's a lengthy and revealing thread on the forums about "tanking" which, in this context, doesn't refer to the Holy Trinity but to servers making concerted efforts to lose matches so as to avoid ending up in the wrong division come Friday the twelfth.

There was a little of this last time around but this season it's rampant. Out of tournament, WvW uses a glicko ranking system across the full two dozen NA servers, which split into eight "Tiers" of three servers each. Weekly results and wildcard draws see servers moving freely, if usually slowly, between tiers. Come the start of the event all servers will be locked to spend the full four weeks in one of three Leagues - Gold, Silver and Bronze. For some this is a terrifying prospect.

Camouflage? What's that, then?

Gold League comprises the top six servers. Silver and Bronze make up the following two sets of nine. In practice only five of the servers in the Gold league are competitive with each other. Arguably only three. The sixth spot is seen as The Hot Seat of Doom. Whoever is in sixth place at reset on the appointed day can look forward to a month of being spawn camped by huge blobs, getting no points and having no fun. At all.

No-one wants that, least of all Maguuma, the server sitting in sixth place right now. They have, by most accounts, already been worn down to a nub by weeks of predation by the bigger beasts in the Tier 2 jungle and many of their active players and guilds had transferred off the server or stopped playing even before the Tournament was announced. Of course, this is Maguuma we are talking about, the masters of disinformation. That could all be part of the plan.

Whatever is or isn't going on behind the scenes, over the last couple of weeks Maguuma hasn't just been losing, it's been losing by a huge margin. If they keep it up they stand a good chance of dropping to seventh and spending September in their happy place. This has not gone unnoticed by the bunch of five servers packed very tightly directly below them - Stormbluff Isle, Devona's Rest, Dragonbrand, Crystal Desert and Yak's Bend - none of whom want to be the one left holding the parcel when Maguuma's music stops.

As a result recent matches have been...strange. Also fascinating, both to watch and experience. Some regulars are simply absent, taking a break, hoping the reduction in numbers will be sufficient to ensure a protective glicko slump. A few have been doing the rounds actively promoting a defeatist agenda, advising against trying too hard or, god forbid, actually winning during these lead-up matches. Most have been using it as an opportunity to wreck around having fun, looking for trouble and causing mayhem. Tactics have been peculiar, strategy often indecipherable, on all sides.

Spot the odd one out

Despite all the malarkey, as things stand now we go into the final week with fewer than 40 points between 7th and 10th place. No-one is safe in Silver yet. This may turn out to be more nerve-wracking than the tournament itself. If I had to put money on it I'd bet on Maguuma staying in sixth. They're losing as badly this week as last but they aren't dropping enough glicko points doing so. The problem with tanking under the glicko system is that the worse you do each week, the less is expected of you the week after.

Next week's match will be the clincher. There's a random factor in the weekly draw so until we see the line-up going into the final week predictions are impossible. And then there's the huge spanner of Tuesday's Feature Pack update to throw into the works. I think we've done enough to ensure a spot in Silver already, falling from 8th to 10th, but I can't be sure. No-one can.

That's the fun of it all.

End Of The Season : GW2

It's been a long nine weeks and this week the longest of them all. Back before it all kicked off most pundits had Yaks Bend set to place mid-table in Silver League. Fifth was a common prediction though some observers, looking back at our Season One record, speculated that, if we could bring our PvE crowd out, we might push for third.

Last night the final whistle sounded while I was sleeping the sleep of the justified. The result  was already decided. No need for me to stay up deep into Saturday morning to add my marginal value to the cause. Yak's Bend tied for second place alongside Fort Aspenwood.

It's been a rough ride. For the first few days of the final round we went flat out for an unequivocal, unshared runner-up slot. That meant targeting bolted-on winners of the overall Silver League Tournament, Henge of Denravi. The plan looked sound as we hammered at them relentlessly across the Labor Day holiday weekend and pushed them into third place.

Then, with inexplicable lack of judgment, some Isle of Janthir guilds purportedly entered into an alliance with others on HoD and we got double-teamed. While it gave us one of the most exciting days of the entire Season as we tried everything just to hold on, eventually hunkering down in the north of our own borderland to weather the storm, it did look grim for a while. There were dark mutterings and open questioning of our previous strategy as people asked why we hadn't just focused Isle of Janthir from the get-go and nailed down our second place.

But not, apparently, to stop.

Perhaps predictably, once HoD had ensconced themselves safely back in first place, thereby ensuring a perfect record of nine matches, nine wins, they immediately reneged on whatever partial promises they might have made and set about their usual hobby of taking any and every easy target that presented itself, regardless of color. Yak's Bend, meanwhile, rallied and refocused, directing our considerable ire towards Isle of Janthir. By Thursday we had everything back under control and we ran out the week over 50k ahead in second.

Was it all worth it? For the "rewards", not really. Some more very ugly skins I'd never use. A mini-pet I'd never remember to summon. I'll probably take the Ascended accessories and some crafting mats. Meh.

For the fun, excitement and entertainment value, though, it absolutely was worth it. No question. It's been enormous fun but more than that having a defined purpose and a set time in which to achieve it gives a focus to World vs World that it otherwise lacks. Moreover, it tends to skew the whole enterprise towards the team-based competition I believe it was clearly intended to be and away from the "good fights" and "guild vs guild" crowd, whose agendas tend to dominate out of season.

I'm in a golem. I said I'M IN A GOLEM!

I'm biased of course. I see WvW primarily as a siege warfare simulation set in a magic-rich environment. That means I'm in my element on Yak's Bend, a server whose least offensive nick-name is Yak's Bunker and whose reputation rests at least in part on our willingness to place more siege machinery in a single tower than most servers place on an entire borderland.

Despite our propensity for bunkering up, however, this season has seen a huge amount of open-field fighting. I've been involved in running battles that lasted for anything up to a couple of hours and my manual dexterity and motor skills have sharpened up considerably as a result. I also have the muscle memory at the moment to play a Staff Ele effectively, which adds enormously both to my usefulness to the team effort and my own satisfaction .

Sadly, that won't last. These are use it or lose it skills and after nine weeks of a diet consisting largely of world versus world I'm in need of both a palate cleanser and some new flavors. In The Mists every day dawns with a fresh battle but if the first Season is anything to go by most Yaks Benders will have woken up with a hangover (both metaphorical and physical in many cases) and many will be abstaining from WvW for a week or several, myself among them.

Or that's the plan. The whole damn thing is so addictive I can't be certain I won't fall off the wagon and get back on the warhorse (not that there are any horses in Tyria. I guess we could saddle up a moose. If we were allowed mounts...) . Just logging in this morning I see that although our post-Season Glicko score puts us back in Tier 3 we've drawn a wild card and ended up in Tier 4 along with Isle of Janthir and Borlis Pass, which should make for a fun week...only we're coming third! All of which makes me feel like grabbing my staff and heading out to do my bit. Again.

Before that happens, some post-Season observations:

Too Much Of  A Good Thing - Season One was seven weeks long. I don't know why ArenaNet decided to extend the follow-up by another two weeks but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because players complained the first one was over too quickly. I'd definitely prefer more frequent, shorter seasons.

Nine And A Half Weeks - The Season finished last night and the little UI reward chest popped up when I logged in this morning. Inside it were a few odds and ends and the thing we've supposedly all been fighting for - our Tournament Claim Tickets. I ran around a bit looking for the vendor; no sign of one. A quick trip to the forum revealed the following:

"The Tournament Rewards will be available on the Battle Historian NPC, located in all of the portal keeps, as of June 3rd."

That's going down about as well as you might expect. Given the number of New Build warnings we get after every update this seems positively designed to irritate and vex.

Pretty to think so.

Your Megaserver Broke My WvW - I'm still ambivalent about the Megaserver project. It does have its ups but one of the obvious downs is the way it wiped out, overnight, the entire concept of "rallying the troops". It used to be a big thrill to be sorting my banks in Lion's Arch and suddenly see a familiar name from WvW pop up in map chat calling for reinforcements to defend our Garrison or recruiting ground troops to support a golem rush on Stonemist Castle.

The effectiveness and alacrity with which a server was able to call in its PvE irregulars at key moments used to be a significant factor in the outcome of some matches. Yak's Bend's better-than-expected performance in Season One was put down in part to our ability to get our PvE forces onto the field when it mattered. Now, if you port back to LA or Divinity's Reach or the current World Boss map and yell for help all you'll be doing is announcing your plans to your enemies.

It could be addressed simply by adding a World Chat channel that would only be seen by people on your home world, something which would be useful in many contexts other than WvW, but sadly I suspect ANet would prefer the entire concept of "Home World" just quietly wither and die. I'll be quite surprised, although very pleased, if even WvW still uses the concept a year from now.

It was and we did.

Third Time's The Charm - I believe ANet have already confirmed there will be a third WvW Season/Tournament/Barn Dance - whatever they decide to call it. My definite feeling is that the second improved on the first in most respects but there's still a lot more that could be done.

The Swiss System did give more balanced matches than the pre-set version but it was far from perfect. It was highly predictable and tended to encourage clumping. There was also concern that there could be some match-fixing as it became more advantageous at certain times for servers to lose a match to get a win the following week. In the end I didn't see much evidence of it happening but it remained an uncomfortable possibility lurking in the background.

The Achievements, deemed too long-winded in Season One, were overtuned for ease of use this time. Some people finished the meta in the first few days. I finished one account by the end of Match Two and the second a week later. It might do more to keep the PvE crowd coming back if new achievements appeared each week rather than front-loading them all in the first match.

Pre-season transfers, especially free transfers to low-population servers, failed to take human nature into account. The idea was to encourage more equal numbers across the board but both Silver and Gold League were won by bandwagon servers filled with carpetbaggers who moved there with the specific intent of taking an easy ride to the top. Unbalanced population is a serious problem for the format but there needs to be a less-exploitable solution than this.

All of these things and many others need re-thinking so that Season Three can be the best one yet but for now let's stop and savor the many pleasures of the Season just passed. Well done Anet and well done The Yaks. Silver medal in Silver League twice in a row and best of all we did it Yak Style!

The Honor Of The Yak : GW2

Cancel all leave! Put all plans on hold!. We're in the penultimate match of the nine-match WvW Tourney and all hell has broken loose on Yak's Bend.

While undeniably an improvement on the system used in Season One, the much-ballyhooed Swiss matchmaking system turned out to have certain...flaws. After the first three weeks we had fallen into a comfortable pattern. We'd face two worlds ranked above us, come third, take one point. We'd drop a tier and face two servers ranked below us, come first and take five points. Rinse, repeat.

This would have left us tying for third place at the end of the season, a better result than had been widely predicted. Most people on YB, if they were paying any attention at all, probably assumed, as I did, that we'd just roll merrily on like this until the season hit the buffers. Only someone else had other ideas.

The charismatic commander I referred to a while back took a couple of matches to warm up but these last couple of weeks he has been incandescent. Two weeks ago, a week when we should have come third according to the pattern, he launched an all-out blitzkrieg on Fort Aspenwood, at one point wiping them completely off their own map and reducing them momentarily to a PPT of zero. As a result we came second that week and the pattern was broken.

Are you sure this is a good idea?

Unsurprisingly, this caused some murmurs of concern among the troops and even a few of of the other Commanders. There are posted rewards for placement in this Season and some people care about them. Others care about where we rank. By breaking the pattern we put ourselves, potentially, in a more difficult position.

Last week, the general feeling was, we needed to beat Stormbluff Isle and come second just to keep ourselves in contention. Even if we were up to that task, and most of us felt we were, there was a certain amount of concern that our fate might not be entirely in our own hands, because Henge of Denravi, the bandwagon server du jour, was perfectly capable of putting enough bodies on the ground to crush either opponent at their whim and quite possibly both at the same time.

Or, rather, they used to be. That was how they operated for the first six weeks of the season, crushing all opposition, racking up six straight wins and nailing down an unassailable first place come Tourney's End, which is, once again, how a pattern came to change. For a server to which huge numbers moved specifically so they could place first overall the job had effectively been done. Why go on fighting when the war is already won many of them must have reasoned. The HoD hordes thinned, leaving behind a hard, skilled but much-reduced core.

Golem flying a kite - always a sign things are going well

So, we beat SBI and came second. All the Commanders now seemed to be on message. We have spies so strategy no longer gets discussed in open channels and most co-ordination between commanders goes on in voice chat, inaudible and unexplained to field grunts like me. The results, however, much tighter co-ordination, better response times, a clear if veiled sense of a plan being carried out, seem quite apparent.

All of which meant that, going into week eight, we were in a more precarious position than ever. HoD are a busted flush. A couple of their guilds apparently did some name-calling that our Glorious Leader took to heart so we spent the last few days of Match Seven sitting in their Garrison while holding all their Keeps. A few weeks back they'd have swarmed us like army ants. Now they simply can't bring those numbers out.

For the first 48 hours of match number eight the assault on The Henge continued, driving the broken steamroller into third place for the week, where it looks like it will remain. The upshot of which is that we need not just to come second this week but first. It's a hard road that leads to the exact same place to which we could have slouched comfortably but if we make it, oh the tales we'll have to tell.

You can never have too many Omegas : old Yak's Bend proverb

Late Sunday evening my time we shifted gears and turned on FA. Four hours of the most intense defense I've ever enjoyed in WvW followed before I had to call it a night. FA tried over and over to take Bay on our borderland to establish a foothold to swat us down like the upstarts they undoubtedly think we are. They couldn't do it. Nor could their other teams take Hills or Garrison while we were hunkered down in Bay.

They came again and again, getting as far as the Lord's room, where we wiped them every time. I was on my full zerker Ele and the destruction was glorious. Of all the classes and builds I've played in WvW, which is a lot, it's the one in which I feel most effective. I've never been a big fan of DPS classes but when you're in a pressure situation like that and you can see your rain of fire wilting the attack it's very satisfying. I also die far less than I thought I would and there's always the option to switch to Water and pump out the best healing in the game (faint praise, I know).

It's not a great screenshot but its the only one I remembered to take.

At one stage we had the full FA zerg in Bay along with about twenty or so HoD doing their hyena opportunist thing. When I went to bed Yak's Bend Borderland had been queued for an hour. Waking up this morning I see we've closed the gap on FA from the 12k it was when I logged out to less than 5k. It's going to be a tough week with another like it to follow.

If we pull it off, our reward will almost certainly be an out-of-season ranking we can't sustain and a series of heavy defeats as we slip back down. Just like last time. Yak's Bend is clearly what, in football terms, would be called a "Cup Side". If there's a structured competition with a series of vital matches we'll bring our A-Game. Week after week in the leagues - not so much.

SynCaine, talking about why TESO's PvP hasn't worked for him, said recently:

"The huge PvP zone is a giant improvement over GW2’s WvW. Bigger map, better siege equipment, better combat system, better performance; just all around superior. Yet I’m as excited to spent time there as I was in GW2; not much. Other than PvP for the sake of PvP, what am I doing there? I really don’t feel connected or care about the outcome, large or small."

This is the core of it. For many of us playing WvW in GW2 we do feel connected to the outcome. I'm fighting alongside many of the same players on Yak's Bend now as I was in the weeks right after launch and even more who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me during some of our astonishing achievements during Season One.

You can say that again. And again. And again.

I chose Yak's Bend for emotional reasons before GW2 even went into the first beta weekend. I have never played for any other server and unless they merge us I never will. I know exactly what I'm doing there. I'm defending the Honor of the Yak. As time goes on it becomes apparent that almost all other servers can't stand Yak's Bend. Good. It would be awful to be "that plucky little server". We're bloody-minded nuisances and proud of it. We'll ruin anyone's day if we can (although unlike some servers I might mention we'll do it without cheating, hacking or exploiting). If we win, all well and good. If not, well we gave the other guy some bruises he'll remember for a while.

This is why SynCaine is both right and wrong at the same time. PvP does need to matter. If you don't feel it then what is the point? But you can't assume that just because it doesn't matter to you it doesn't matter to anyone. Emotional commitment is earned, yes, but it's also given.

Yaks Bend may finish the Season in glory or we may end it in ashes but we'll know one thing either way: we didn't just sit back and work the odds, we gave it our best shot. Can't ask more than that.

Time Of The Season : GW2

Everyone's off playing ESO. A bleak wind blows across all the other MMOs, making NPCs clutch onto their pointy exclamation hats as they wonder how they'll ever get those ten rats out of the old barn now.

Or something like that. A few weeks (or was it months?) back, when ESO was having beta weekends twice a week and three times on Sunday, it was widely believed that you could see the drop in GW2's population, particularly in World vs World. The topic came up in map chat quite often. Some reckless individualists even admitted to a personal desire to go try the thing for themselves. We burned them as witches, naturally.

Finally we got to the  Five Day Head Start, then the Three Day Head Start and eventually the velvet ropes came down altogether, the doors opened wide and in poured the desperate millions long-starved of quasi-naturalistic earth tones and fixed-cursor mouse-click combat. Or so I read. The only problem is, no-one seems to have told Henge of Denravi.

She said through a mouthful of moss...

A week and a half back, GW2's second WvW Season, aka The Tourney, aka Spring Tournament, began. Not to be confused with the second Season of GW2's Living Story, for which no date has been revealed, nor with GW2's sPvP Tournament of Legends, which begins either at the end of April (EU) or the beginning of May (NA). Really, someone at Anet needs to buy a thesaurus.

The second WvW Season (I'm going to stick with Season) follows a different format to the first, which had a fixed schedule. What's now good enough for dragons is no longer good enough for players, so we're going Swiss. It seems that in addition to cuckoo clocks, Heidi and negotiable neutrality the Swiss are apparently famous for a system of competition that irons out differences and matches like with like.

Who knew? Well, chess nerds and ANet's WvW dev team, it would seem. I imagine there's some kind of a Venn diagram that could be drawn there somewhere. The upshot is that after the first couple of weeks it should all settle down with top worlds playing each other, the middle playing the middle and you get the picture.

The importance of accurate, detailed intel cannot be overstated.

We had to start somewhere, though, so the first week used the existing Glicko system (invented by one of the lesser-known Marx Bros. or so you could be forgiven for thinking, given the results it produces). Yak's Bend, following an increasingly desultory and lacklustre performance, largely the result of burnout on the back of the extreme effort expended by all during Season one, had slipped to the bottom of Tier 4, landing us solidly in Silver League again for Season two.

The first match was a repeat of the last pre-season teaming - Yak's Bend, Borlis Pass and Sanctum of Rall. We'd won that match handily and we improved on our performance in Round 1. Six points in the bag. Under the Swiss System that gave us the other two six-pointers as our opponents in Round 2. Step up, bookies' favorites for the title, Fort Aspenwood, and dark horse, long-odds gamble, Henge of Denravi.

FA we know of old. We played them often way back at the beginning, when matches turned over much faster, and we've run into them many times since. There's fairly good feeling between the two servers, certainly no history of grudges that I'm aware of, and we respect FA as a borderline T2 server that has almost always been more than a match for us.

NPCs - they really do care!

HoD are a completely unknown quantity. I imagine we must have fought them at some point but no memory of it remains. For as long as I can remember they've been in a tier below us but in the weeks preceding the season it became apparent that something strange was happening down there. HoD were consistently racking up scores that emphasized their dominance in Tier 5, something that became increasingly relevant as Yak's Bend appeared to be hanging on to the edge of T4 by our fingertips.

I did a bit of research. Henge of Denravi, it seems, is the latest in a long series of Bandwagon servers: lower tier worlds to which a bunch of large and/or powerful guilds, disenchanted with or disenfranchised from the organizational hierarchies of their higher tier homes, move en masse, hoping to bootstrap a failing team back up into the big leagues. The most famous example is Kaineng, a server that propped up the other 23 North American worlds for months until, in a move resembling performance art more than competitive gaming, a huge influx of T1/T2 guilds pushed it almost all the way to the top before the inevitable crash and burn sent Kaineng tumbling all the way back to the bottom of the pile.

When the tag is down the tag is DOWN. No backseat driving.

By the accounts of the unfortunate players on Crystal Desert and Northern Shiverpeaks, who had to face them week after week, HoD have incredibly high numbers and incredibly low skill. Screenshots showed how they could queue a map like a T1 server (meaning they had so many players trying to get into WvW that they had substantial queues on all four maps simultaneously) but the consensus view was that once they ran up against a well-organized, seasoned, close-to-T2 force like Fort Aspenwood those numbers, largely representing a disorganized, opportunistic rabble capitalizing on the work of a much smaller core of experienced transfers, would melt away.

And at first it seemed that was how it would go. Early in the weekend the sheer size of the zergs HoD were able to bring to several maps at the same time was staggering. Mrs Bhagpuss's PC gave up in despair, sometimes requiring her to roam the Northern towers, refreshing siege and lobbing poisoned cows at distant supply camps, while her GPU had a little lie down and a quiet cry. I had a field day (and a camp day and a keep day) raining meteors on the never-ending waves of HoDs who seemed willing, happy even, to stand in the fire and die then run back to do it again and again again.

Gradually, though, their zergs thinned out a little and their organization, marginally, improved. The numbers were still enormous all the same. On Yak's Bend we all knew this would be a very different week to the previous one, when at one point we briefly held the full 695 available points for the tick and when, on average, we ticked over 400 throughout.

Every hour after after midnight counts double

Like all matches where one team runs rampant things were far, far less entertaining than you might imagine on the winning side, although I doubt it was a barrel of laughs for the teams being trampled over either. I have to say that I always feel a lot more motivated to log in and Fight for the Honor of the Yak when we are getting a drubbing than when we are running tedious, boorish Karma trains for hour after hour.

In magnificent contrast, this weekend was largely one of stolid, sometimes desperate, defense against overwhelming numbers and it was more enjoyable and very, very much more exciting because of it. I've always enjoyed keep defense and we had ample opportunities to savor it in all its flavors this weekend. Could have done with the repair bill thing happening a couple of weeks early but otherwise it was all good.

With Henge of Denravi an unknown quantity, we did entertain hopes that our acknowledged strength in defense might see us holding second, should HoD turn out be as disorganized as we'd been led to believe and should FA tear through them as expected. After the weekend it seems clear we are looking at third place with our much-vaunted defense at best making defeat appear respectable. No points for style, sadly. Much more surprisingly it seems FA might not have the measure of HoD after all.

Bringing in the Yaks, Bringing in the Yaks, We'll come rejoicing, Bringing in the Yaks.

WvW matches have a variety of interlocking rhythms. Reset night, weekend, time zones, all can have significant impacts on the relative performances of the teams involved. Consequently it's too early yet to be certain of the result. Nevertheless, as I write this, just after midday on Monday, Henge of Denravi have a solid lead over Fort Aspenwood of twenty thousand points with Yak's Bend gamely hanging in there 15k behind FA.

A win for HoD would be a real upset. If it happens I wonder if FA will call on TESO to take the blame. I see absolutely no sign whatsoever that it's had any impact at all on Yak's Bend. All the familiar names are there (except one, the charismatic commander who arguably led the entire server to victory (well, second place but it felt like victory) who's allegedly left for good in favor of playing StarCraft) and there are countless names appearing that I haven't seen for weeks or even months.

No second place for us this time round I fear. Pre-season predictions mostly place us fifth but I think we could do better than that. There's a long way to go yet so don't go counting those North Camp chickens just yet, HoD.

Journeys and Tourneys : Landmark, GW2

Landmark Closed Beta arrived this week, whipping up a flurry of blog posts as it blew in.

StarShadow's finding it fun, Syl's already planning her own private Kelethin and Ald seems to be having the same problem I did on day one of Alpha (use shift-scroll to zoom, Ald!)

Tobold senses disrespect for the Great European Vacation Tradition to which I say if you think that's disrespectful you ain't seen nothing yet! I refer you to the Alpha Screenshot Competition (NA Only - Rest of the World not invited), Player Studio (ditto but "we're working on it") and the whole PSS1 debacle. Rowan also has reservations about the upkeep system, all of which will, I believe, be satisfactorily resolved in due time. This is Alpha Beta, after all.

Liore queries the crafting and questions whether front-loading gathering is such a good idea. The entire crafting system is going to change, so the Blueprint (formerly known as The Roadmap - SOE on a name-change roll, evidently) tells us. It's a good point all the same. SOE are determined Landmark's going to be a full-on MMO, not just a building set but how that's going to play out remains unclear. Will the hordes of casually interested free-to-players want to spend the first week or two gathering to make the tools they need before they can build anything? Is that how Minecraft and all these other build-your-own-castle games work? I don't know - I never played any of them.

Be glad you don't have to log in every day. I could name a couple of games...

Jaedia got a free key from Bhelgast, who likes Landmark so much he bought a new video card to play it on Ultra. Oddly, the game seems to default to ultra, or it did for me, so I've had it that way since Alpha and it mostly runs okay even though my PC isn't much over minimum spec for the game. At least, it does when I'm out in the wilds or on my own claim. Around people, not so much...

While we're on the subject of free Landmark beta keys I still have one left (two if Corpserun doesn't get in touch soon). There seem to be so many floating around that I imagine most anyone who really wanted one is fixed up already, but if not, first to ask in the comments gets one - just be sure and leave some means of contact so I can send it to you!.

Last but definitely not least, Jeromai's first thoughts on Landmark turn out to be as detailed and considered as some people's full reviews.

That's just a quick round-up of some of the posts that popped up in my Feedly and Blogroll. There must be many, many more. As for me, I haven't had much time to play or post so far. There's really no rush. Two things occurred to me as I was feverishly searching for Agate to (which it turned out I didn't need anyway) and getting all stressed about not finding any.

Can we craft safety goggles yet? These woodchips really fly.

The first is that Landmark is not a casual game. It really isn't. It does not benefit from a quick hour here and there, which means it may also not be the best game to play in the evenings after work, even if the actual "gameplay" can be so relaxing it becomes almost mesmeric. To get anything done requires big blocks of time and some serious commitment. If you're going to power down at the end of a session with a feeling of satisfaction you need to realize that everything you do in Landmark is going to take you a long time and progress will be slow and incremental. In that regard it really is an Everquest game, even if it's no longer officially part of the franchise.

Maybe that will change when achievements, combat and loot are all in but for now I'm saving my energy for one of those long European holidays that Tobold mentioned, something of which I always get plenty around this time of year since I have to use-or-lose all my unspent vacation days by the end of April.

The second is that, while SOE may call this a "Closed Beta", it might as well be launch. Yes, there is one guaranteed wipe coming, when caves and water are added and the world finds the form it will take from then onwards, but it's a wipe for the world, not for the players. When the servers come back up you will log back in as the exact same character with all the items you had, all the progress you have made, all your materials and props, everything.

All your claims will have been auto-templated and the one thing left for you to do will be to reclaim and one-click rebuild. If any other wipes are needed we are promised the same service. If my character and all his possessions are persistent from here on, how is that any different from the game being Live? All MMOs are in constant flux - this one will just fluxate more than most for a while.

That's me, dead in the middle, in every meaning of the expression.

So, if this week marks the first step on a journey that may last many years, there's really no need to set off at a dead run. Which is just as well because I have something else distracting me.

The Tourney aka WvW Season 2 began last night at 1 am UK time. I said I wasn't going to stay up for reset but of course I did and it was three in the morning and a couple more brandies than I was planning before I finally called it a night. I plumped for homeland defense and the battles to hold Hills as Borliss Pass and Sanctum of Rall pounded us with catapults and wave after wave of footsoldiers were some of the best I've had in WvW.

I love keep defense and this was real horatio-at-the-bridge stuff, with a handful of Yaks wedged in the corridor to the Lord's Room, holding off much greater forces outside. It did look as though BP and SoR were co-ordinating strategy, although from what I saw when I was lying dead on the bridge and a flying wedge of SoR hit BP square in the back as they were pressuring us, the message may not have gotten down as far as the troops on the ground.

Hey, I have the longest range - it makes sense for me to be all the way back here...

As Yaks learned in Season One, it's hard to set up a cross-server Alliance but much, much harder to keep one up and running effectively for a prolonged period. The tripartite structure of WvW invites double-teaming but it hardly ever happens, or not in any organized or prolonged fashion. It makes the whole enterprise so much more exciting and vital when servers can pull off a coup by combining their efforts, though, so I hope we'll see some such strategies brought to tactical fruition somewhere in the Leagues over the coming nine weeks. Looking at the score this morning, though, there's no hint of an alliance working out for BP and SoR just yet...

The structure of The Tourney means that if we storm the first week (the way we stormed last week versus the same opponents) we'll be matched next week against other high points-scorers. Chances are that would mean Fort Aspenwood and Henge of Denravi, strongest and most-improved servers in Silver League respectively, which would mean a very tough week for Yaks Bend and one in which we could well come a distant third. After that, who knows?

It's going to be a very interesting nine weeks and that's not even mentioning the Feature Pack and all the chaos that's going to bring. How much time all that will leave for building imaginary houses I wouldn't like to say.