Fifteen Again

Paeroka has a helpful post up running through some of the many free gifts and bonuses available in various MMORPGs during this time of trouble. She mentions the free questing in Lord of the Rings Online, now extended to May 31st, something I tried and found I didn't like. I find that particular game suits me better the fewer quests I do.

She also has also a nice picture of the free cape available in the Guild Wars 2 Gem shop. I logged all of my accounts in today to grab that one, including the third account that's largely dormant these days and my free to play account that I haven't used in several months. While I was there, I took the opportunity to credit the F2P account with the Saga of the Icebrood episodes, a totally pointless excercise since a) it would require Path of Fire to play, which I have no intention of buying even with the current 50% off and b) I only ever play Living Story/World/Saga content on my main account anyway.

Still, free stuff is free stuff, a point I believe I have made many times before. There's certainly a lot of it about right now but, for once, the giveaway in GW2 isn't related to the lockdown. It's part of ArenaNet's celebrations for the fifteenth anniversary of the original Guild Wars.

That set me thinking. I can't remember precisely when Mrs Bhagpuss and I decided to play Guild Wars. I know it wasn't at launch. We thought it was a PvP title and although by then we'd both had plenty of PvP experience in Dark Age of Camelot and elsewhere, we weren't really interested in another round of virtual fisticuffs.

By April 2005, though, our love affair with EverQuest II was very much on the rocks. Almost everyone we knew had left and we were finding it a real grind, leveling solo and duo in a game that was still designed almost entirely for groups. Plus EQII ran like a pig with a broken trotter on my PC.

My memory tells me we went from EQII back to EverQuest and I also seem to remember that when we were playing Guild Wars it was late summer or early autumn. That would fit the timeline, being maybe four or five months after Guild Wars launched.

I recall reading a piece on some gaming news site about the way the game had taken an unexpected turn from PvP to PvE, attracting a much greater number of players interested in the latter. That piqued my interest. I remember suggesting it to Mrs Bhagpuss as a game we might try as a direct result of that news item.

She agreed, I bought two copies, we tried it and we both liked it. It wasn't really an MMORPG. It arguably became one but in its initial form it was definitely a lobby-based dungeon crawler for PvE players with a well-developed PvP battleground alongside.

Belghast has a post up about what a mistake it is for developers to mix PvP and PvE in the same game. I don't entirely agree but I do think it's definitely better to keep the two modes separate where possible. Guild Wars and GW2 both do that very well but one thing that people rarely mention about the first game was that, at one time, you literally couldn't play the PvE campaign without first playing a little PvP.

Someone will probably pop in and correct me if I'm remembering this wrong. It was around eight years ago when I last made a new character in Guild Wars so my memory is hazy. As I recall, if you're playing Prophecies, as the campaign in the original base game is now known, when you reach the end of the pre-Searing introduction (itself one of the greatest bait and switch openings in MMORPGs, and there's some heavy competition for that), you have to enter a PvP battleground and complete a match.

If you don't you can't carry on to the campaign itself. It's a fairly harmless trial by fire. I don't think you can fail it in any way. You just have to endure it until it's over and then you never have to think about PvP again. But just that once you have no choice.

I remember being mildly irritated but not because I objected to the intrusion of PvP in principle. No, my problem was that PvP in Guild Wars is so insanely fast I can barely even understand what's happening when I watch a match, let alone do anything meaningful if I'm in one.

The game has a spectator mode which I used to use quite often when I played. Watching a match gave me the impression of two teams of tasmanian devils having a fight in an exploding fireworks factory. I did try playing a few matches but it was utterly hopeless. Given that, over the years, I've played with reasonable facility and moderate success in battlegrounds in DAOC, World of Warcraft, Warhammer, Rift, The Secret World, GW2 and EQII, just to name the ones I remember, I think it's fair to say Guild Wars PvP is on a different skill plane altogether.

Guild Wars is currently in maintenance mode but it still celebrates whatever anniversaries and holidays it had running when it was under active development. I read on Massively:OP that for this notable anniversary the handful of people keeping the lights on and dusting the furniture have made a special effort, adding a new boss and some elite skills.

I did think I might make the effort to see that for myself, which is how I came to be back in old Lion's Arch earlier today, but although I managed to find the NPC who hands out the doohickey that lets you fight the new boss it all looked like considerably too much work. I always forget just how complicated everything in the original Guild Wars has to be, involving all kinds of items and NPCs and fiddling about in menus and inventories.

Instead I contented myself with watching the hourly firework display then finding the Xunlai Gift Giver so I could exchange my Birthday Present Voucher for actual birthday presents (told you it was fiddly). I had this year's and last year's in my bag and I was fortunate enough to get a gold and a purple mini for them.

I took those to my Hall of Monuments and placed them on the podium. I'm not sure how many more I need to place there to get another HoM point for my Hall of Monuments in GW2 and it's rather a moot point these days anyway, but you do these things, don't you? Or I do.

It did surprise me that after I'd done that I still had both minis in my bag. I thought placing them meant you lost the use of them for good. There's even an in-game warning that suggests as much. Maybe they've changed it.

If I can summon up the willpower I might log in all my other characters. I believe they all get individual birthday presents. The minis are tradeable so I could, if I was feeling particularly insane, log in both accounts simultaneously and hand all the good minis from my old account to the one I have linked to GW2.

That might be taking the whole free stuff idea a little too far. I don't mind logging into games I don't play to get things I won't use but I have to draw the line at logging in to games I don't play to get stuff I don't need so I can use it to get stuff I still won't use in different game altogether.

Let's Jump The Broomstick : GW2

GW2's business model is based in large part on selling "cosmetics" in the Gem Store. The idea is that players pay real money to purchase Gems with which they then buy outfits, pets, skins and the like. Utility items like harvesting tools are gussied up with effects to appeal to players' vanity and a way has even been found to add visual flair to services such as in-game mail - for a price.

It's not just the business model that runs on looks. With no real vertical progression to speak of, either in gear or levels, bragging rights, such as they are, come as much from how you look as what you can do.

Legendary weapons and armor, which take a very great deal of time and/or money (usually both) to acquire are no better at killing mobs or protecting players than their much easier to get Ascended equivalent. The point (apart from stats that you can switch on the fly) is for other people to see you wearing or wielding them.

My problem has always been that I think most of them look bad and would make my characters look bad. The Legendaries, with a handful of exceptions, are either pompous and overwrought or downright idiotic. Almost all high-level armor skins are even worse. Just browsing the style tabs of the Wiki or Dulfy is enough to dissuade me from making the effort and as for the never-ending stream of tat coming out of Evon Gnashblade's Emporium aka The Trading Post aka The Gem Store - well, the less said about that, the better.

So, when something finally does appear that fires my imagination and makes me reach for my wallet I think it deserves to be mentioned. And it happened this weekend.

Or to be accurate I noticed it this weekend. It probably happened when Halloween arrived a couple of weeks back but since I'm not in the habit of browsing the fashion shelves and since Mrs Bhagpuss, who is, hasn't played for a month, it was pure chance that I happened to catch sight of the promotional banner when I opened the store to start selling.

In five years, apart from upgrades to my account like extra character or inventory slots, about the only things I've ever bought from the Gem Shop have been "toys". Toys, in GW2 parlance, include Minis (short for Miniatures. which is what ANet call vanity pets), musical instruments, kites and balloons.

The  category also includes things that you ride around on that are definitely not mounts, oh no! In the long years when ANet denied such a thing would or could ever become a feature of the game, players jonesing for a ride had to make do with a Magic Carpet that moved at regular running speed.

As well as the carpet there was a tunneling drill and a sparking electrical storm... I bought them all. The only one I didn't buy was the broom. Either I kept missing it when it was around (because Evon likes to swap things in and out of his warehouse to create imaginary scarcities) or I just wasn't in a buying mood when it appeared.

Then yesterday morning I happened to see a cat. See a cat, want a cat is the way that goes, for me and for a lot of people, which is why you see so many cat-shaped things in stores both real and virtual. And it works. All Anet had to do was put two small triangles on top of the existing Commander tag and call it a "Catmander" and people were queuing up for WvW who'd never killed a player in their life.

This time it was "An Elonian Familiar", a strange black cat with orange "whiskers", ready for Halloween in a witches hat and riding a broomstick. Cats wear hats in Tyria. Last year I got the "Feline Familiar", a sleek, midnight-black cat that also wears a witches hat, albeit with significantly more elan.

Last year's cat has been padding alongside my Necro ever since but since she's the one who does all the busywork every Halloween she thought she deserved the new one, too. It was then, as I was looking at the price and deciding whether to stump up the 400 Gems, that I noticed the same cat looking at me from another store window.

ANet like package deals. They're always bundling things together, usually things that seem like a worse deal in a bind-up than they would be on their own. This one was different. It was good.

For 1000 Gems you can get the new mini, the Riding Broom and a broomstick skin for your glider. Now that's a decent offer, especially when you consider I was already going to get the mini, I've on-and-off wanted the broom for five years and I have had more fun and enjoyment out of the Magic Carpet glider skin I bought a while back than pretty much anything in the game ever.

A thousand gems is a lot. I don't think I have ever spent a thousand on a single item before. If you were going to buy them with real money it would cost you $12.50 - except you'd have to buy $20 worth to get a thousand because ANet only sell Gems in multiples of 800.

Are an imaginary cat, an imaginary broomstick and another imaginary broomstick worth $12.50? I don't know and I don't care because, of course, I bought them with Gold. I still don't entirely understand how game companies make a living selling virtual goods when they also allow you to buy said goods with virtual money as well but I'm not complaining.

Due to the aforementioned extreme shortage of anything I want to buy I have a lot of savings in my Tyrian bank account. Until yesterday I had over 6,000 gold on my main account and about 2,500 across the other two. It's a bit less than that now.

Before I bought anything, though, I went and told Mrs Bhagpuss. As I said before, she hasn't played GW2 for a month. In fact, since we got back from Italy she's played exactly once.

I had a suspicion she'd be somewhat miffed if she decided to start up again in a few weeks only to see me promenading around on a genuine flying broom with a cat on the front (did I mention the cat rides on the broom you use as a glider? No? Well it does!). So, I told her about it and she took a look.

Then she logged in, graciously allowed me to gift her the pack since she was, as always, broke, did the Halloween dailies, interrogated me about the new Halloween weapon skins and armor set, farmed the Labyrinth for about five hours and logged out. When I woke up this morning she was already in the Lab doing the dailies again.

I bought the pack on two of my three accounts. The screenshots are from my second account, the Ele modelling.

It's remarkably hard to get screenshots of Minis since they move about to keep a certain distance form your character. It's even harder to get screenshots of a glider in flight. And finding a clear, uncluttered backdrop is the hardest thing of all. Consequently it's not as easy to point out the best features as I wish it might be.

There are several really excellent flourishes in the detail. With the broom equipped as a toy and selected as a glider skin you appear to be broom-mounted at all times. The transition from ground to air is neatly covered in a flash of lightning that works wonderfully to distract the attention in true sleight of hand style.

In flight, the broom trails bats but the very best part - the thing that above everything sold it to me - is the outrageously joyous expression on my Asura's face. It makes me happy just to look at her. Whether it will look so convincing on a Charr I have yet to discover. I suspect not but it should be funny.

So, there we have it. That one item got me to spend 3000 Gems (actually about 750 gold at the current, very reasonable, exchange rate) and brought at least one wandering player back into the fold.

Here's hoping we get something as appealing for Wintersday. I should have replenished the coffers by then.

Anyone Want To See Some Pictures Of My Pets?

Atherne observed in a comment to my last post that she had no idea I played so much PvP. Ravanel said that her blog doesn't accurately reflect what she does in game either.

Meanwhile, Gevlon, who's recently been trawling the entirety of Syp's extensive blog roll in search of something worth reading (sooner him than me!) likens most of the bloggers he's found there to people who put up pictures of their breakfast on Instagram.: "They are alike the facebook pages of random nobodies that are full of everyday busywork that no one cares about (not even the poster) and literal photos of food. Why does someone cares to share a meal? Or a minipet? Or a storyline."

When I was growing up, one of the very many aspects of the adult world that mystified me and made me mildly apprehensive at the thought I'd one day have to learn to do it was "small talk". I was nervous about small talk without really knowing what small talk was. The concept came up occasionally in books that I'd read but it never seemed to be properly explained.

I could tell it was something that the characters were instinctively either good or bad at but being good at small talk didn't seem to confer any great value or status, while being bad at it was often pointed up as a problem or a drawback, even for those characters who clearly found the entire idea an anathema.

In retrospect I recognize this probably says more about the authors than it does about either the characters or about small talk itself, but as a teenager I found a lot of adult life looked like that: opaque, mysterious, worrying. Then, when I finally worked out what the grown-ups were talking about it often often turned out to be an anticlimax; usually it was something I already knew how to do, had been doing all along, without even thinking about it.

Writing a blog turned out to be very much the same. It took me a good while to decide to start one and even when I'd picked a platform and a title and a layout it was well over a year before I found the nerve to upload my first proper post.

Once I'd got started, though, it ended up being just about exactly the same as several things I already knew how to do and had been doing for a long time. As I've mentioned before, blogging is really nothing more than the internet-enabled version of the APAzine scene that took up so much of my time and energy throughout the 1980s. All I was doing was picking up where I'd left off about a decade before only now I didn't have to keep buying glue.

Writing a blog is also not a huge step up from commenting on the blogs of other people or even on pontificating or arguing on Forums, which is how I'd bridged the gap between my last zine and my first blog. Honestly, now I look back it's like I started with my first fanzine in 1977 and never really stopped.

Blogging is an activity that also fits extremely well into the Bartle gaming schema . Bloggers can be Explorers, Achievers or Killers (that would be an interesting way to subdivide a blogroll) but they pretty much have to be Socializers. 

Or do they? Certainly the kind of blogs that puzzle Gevlon are very heavy on the socializing, which is, I guess, why he finds them so puzzling.

Posting pictures of your mini-pets is the blogging equivalent of small talk and as such it's both trivial and essential. The success of any social gathering (and for many of us doing it, blogging is a kind of social gathering) often relies not only on preparation and organization but on the willingness and facility with which those attending are able to engage with each other by finding common ground on which to stand. Small talk is the grease on the party wheel.

Which is all very well as far it goes...only there are some of us who really do love to talk about the weather - not because it's a safe, neutral topic but because weather is bloody amazing!

I grew up in a house with a barometer in the hall. My grandfather would tap it every day and tell us
what the weather was going to be. It wasn't a very good barometer so he was mostly wrong but I grew up with an understanding that talking about the weather was just something people did because weather was something worth talking about.

I love weather. I could talk about it for hours. Mrs Bhagpuss would tell you I do talk about it for hours. It's still my go-to topic for small talk but if I sense the slightest flare of interest then "small" drops out of the picture.

When it comes to MMOs and blogging about them, storylines, mini-pets and everyday busywork are exactly like weather. Yes, they provide a simple, uncontroversial backdrop for a little mild socializing, which is what many people want from their blogging, as well as their MMOs, but to some bloggers and readers they're not the sauce but the meat.

I do want to see pictures of other people's mini-pets. I do want to hear their accounts of quests they've done and how that turned out. I find reading this stuff and looking at the pictures entertaining. The fact that it also gives a warm burr of social inclusion is a welcome bonus.

It is indeed a warm, pleasant feeling and as I  blog, I increasingly feel an obligation to pay it forward. When I began Inventory Full I was writing almost entirely for myself but as the years pass I have come to accept that, as Ravanel says, all of us who publish blogs are "writing for (some sort of) an audience". 

An audience is not compulsory. There is an option in Blogger to make your blog accessible only to people you permit to read it or even to make it entirely private. There will be people out there writing MMO blogs that no-one has ever read but them.

If I truly only wanted to keep a diary of my MMO adventures then I'd be one of those people. When I took the plunge six years ago and submitted my first post for the approval or otherwise of the entire world (I got 13 page views) I was crossing the threshold to join a party already in full swing.

The party's still going on and having chosen to hang around it's on me as much as anyone to help keep the plates spinning. Some days I just feel like slumping in a corner of the kitchen, letting the buzz of conversation filter through from the next room. Other times I find myself talking too loudly and spilling my drink over someone's photos of their mini-pets.

So, I try not to bang on too much about the weather or how we lost Garrison last night because it was Reset in four hours and everyone was goofing off. I try to think of interesting conversation starters but I always have my wallet-full of pictures of the pets to hand in case there's an uncomfortable silence.

Whatever it takes to keep the party going.

It's The Little Things : GW2

Looking back across the year GW2 has seen a lot of changes. Living through this stuff month by
month, day by day, it's easy to forget just how often the boundaries shift. From Megaservers and fixed timers to the Wardrobe and a Trading Post that (almost) works, so much has happened that it scarcely feels like the same game we were all playing this time last year, let alone the one we began with way back in 2012.

It's the way of MMOs. Some change fast, some more smoothly, but unless population and popularity drop far enough for the mothballs to come out (and no-one likes to smell of camphor) they all do change.

The Nosy Gamer today posted a transcript and commentary of an address given by CCP Seagull at the EVE event taking place in Las Vegas, the gist of which appears to be "change is coming, like it or not (but don't worry, you'll like it"). Perhaps the most interesting thing about the speech, at least for someone like me who has never played EVE Online and most likely never will, is CCP Seagull's assertion that "we need to make more changes where we can't predict what's going to happen". 

Forgive my cynicism, if that's what it is, but isn't that all changes in every MMO ever? Fifteen years of experience is more than enough to convince me that most Devs can't predict what's going to happen when they bring a server back up from routine maintenance, let alone the day after they release a major update.

Still, letting that ride for a moment, the idea of intentionally changing the game-world in ways whose outcome is  unknowable is rather attractive. It's enticing to imagine logging in to a world where wikis no longer work and veterans feel at sea like newbies.

Then again there's the NGE and Monoclegate to consider. Those, like countless other less-celebrated PR disasters, amply remind us that one person's unpredictable outcome is another's blindingly obvious inevitability. What, you really didn't see that one coming? Oh, apparently you didn't...

All of which lengthy and ponderous pontificating on the interface between possible and probable brings me to my tiny princess. Of all the year's changes I'd be hard-pressed to think of one that's had more impact on my enjoyment of the game than the March of the Minis and I certainly didn't see that one coming.

Prior to the most recent Feature Pack, if you wanted to run around with a Mini in tow you had to have a separate, individual copy of said Mini in the inventory of each character who might want to call on it. You had to open your bags and click the icon to summon the Mini and you had to keep your minis in a "Safe" bag to prevent them being whisked away to the Vault every time you used GW2's handy "Deposit All Materials" button. On top of all that nonsense Minis couldn't leave the map on which you spawned them so you had to go through the whole rigmarole every time you went anywhere.

Eyes without a face. Wait, what eyes?

Unsurprisingly, about the only place you ever saw Minis in numbers was Old Lion's Arch, back in those halcyon days when, as though in some glorious Edwardian summer, now lost, people would stand around for hours on a single map just passing the time of day and admiring each others' frocks. Thanks to Scarlet, those days are over, but to no-one's greater surprise than my own I find I'd willingly trade the chatter and bustle of Old L.A. for our new, go-ahead, go anywhere Minis. (Although, come to think of it, wasn't there supposed to be some kind of reconstruction project? Whatever happened to that?)

It's not as though I even collect minis. The Miniature tab in the Wardrobe tells me there are 270 of them. On my senior account I have just two: Evon Gnashblade and Princess Doll.

The best ones, in other words.

Evon is best because, well, he's Evon. Why didn't they listen to him? He was the favorite! And Princess Doll (Pwincess to me - don't judge!), she's best because she's full-on crazy.

Pwincess has no face. In extreme close-up you can see her blank sackcloth weave. Even so, featureless, she has more personality than any ten storyline NPCs you care to name. She curtseys, she sways, she sings and she screams and somehow she has become the inseparable companion of my gruff, manly (catly?) Charr Ranger.

Her wordless, borderline personality outbursts spur him on through keep sieges and open-field skirmishes. Her piercing voice penetrates The Mists, bringing a fervid, febrile cheer to the endless snows. Her movements are mysterious. He often jumps from a high place only to find her behind him when he lands, yet at times he can turn and watch her skip along a ledge and jump down to join him.

 Last night, in a quiet moment as I was guarding our second Hills (we always try to keep one spare), I spent some little while trying to catch her out, running along the parapets and jumping down, trying to see if I could find some place she wouldn't dare to follow. There is none. She is fearless.

Of course stepping out unpartied as a ranger these days feels more and more like leading a team than going solo. There's the pet, naturally; always a Lynx or a Wolf for the Borderlands. Then there's Pwincess. Finally, when the rune procs (and the rune always procs) there's Rock Dog.

It wasn't the Charr that discovered Rock Dog. That took Asuran genius. When reports filtered back, how that peculiar hound saved the Junior Ranger from certain death, holding off enemies while Pet Number One licked his master back to life, nothing would do but the Charr should have one of his own. Indeed, so impressed was I, it's a wonder I stopped at the Rangers and didn't slap a set of Ogre Runes on everyone. The stats are pretty handy all round after all.

What have you seen, boy? Is it Grawl?

 Where's all this going? Nowhere much. Only to say that, repetitive and predictable as it can so often seem as you grind away at your faction or your dailies or your rep or your status, all of these games, these worlds, are already unpredictable. A small change here, a revision or a tweak there, something you never considered and scarcely noticed, yet next you know your character has altered, his personality too, and your gameplay along with both of them.

So, yes please, all you CCP Seagulls out there. Go ahead, make changes whose outcomes you can't predict. Better yet, make changes whose outcomes you admit you can't predict. We'll roll with them. Unless it's another NGE or Monoclegate of course. But that's a lesson that's been learned.

Hasn't it?

It's The Little Things : GW2

Of all the changes that came with the Fall Feature Pack the one that seems to have been an unmitigated success is the Liberation of the Minis. Where other MMOs have vanity pets the Guild Wars franchise has Miniatures; knee-high (or shoulder-high if you happen to be an Asura) copies of mobs and NPCs. It's a great idea but the original implementation, up with which we have had to put for two whole years, was dismal.

You needed to keep the Mini in your bag and re-activate it every time you changed map. On top of that, Minis had a tab in the Materials section of the bank, which meant that if you forgot to put one of  your many Queen Jennahs in your Safe Box or Invisible Bag then the first time you hit the "Deposit All Materials" button to clear your packs of copper and green wood, off her royal highness would fly to a bank slot on the other side of the world.

All in all it was just too fiddly to be fun. Unlike in EQ2, where I often travel around pursued by a duck or jelly mound desperately trying to keep up with my unfeasibly speedy mount, in GW2 I rarely bothered to "have a mini out" as the jargon has it. That's all changed now.

The new implementation, which is blindingly obviously the way it should have been from the start, sees a mini, once summoned, stick with you from the jungles of Maguuma to the snowfields of the Shiverpeaks. Their new state is so persistent they even re-appear beside the character who summoned them each time he or she logs back in.

The slight downside is that they are now one-time consumables incorporated into the wardrobe system rather than permanently tradeable items. They have become account -bound on use, although they can still be freely traded provided no-one actually uses them, and they also have a test-drive function, whereby you can have a good look before you commit. I can live with that. Happily.

It's jolly to see all the strange little creatures milling around. They look particularly, charmingly, out of place in WvW, where a Princess Doll and a Candy-Corn Elemental hardly fit the theme of eternal internecine warfare.

It was in WvW, at Askalion Hills Keep (our spare Hills to be precise, the one we keep on SBI's borderland for convenience) that I discovered something about minis that I didn't know. They can talk.

Well, one of them can: Evon Gnashblade. Scared the bejeezus out of me when his gravelly baritone ground out "I was the favorite". He still hasn't got over that rigged election but then neither have I. I had to tab out and check the Wiki to reassure myself I wasn't having a psychotic episode.

Whether he's the only one that talks I'm not sure. I hope not. Persistent, talking minis ares something I could definitely imagine making some effort to collect.

So Sue Me: Guild Wars and GW2

Hall of Monuments? Pfeh! Not interested. Don't care about that stuff. Can't be bothered. When I play Guild Wars 2 I'll just start from scratch. New account, nice and clean.

That's what I said or something like it on several blog threads over the past few months when people were banging on about their plans to collect this or achieve that or maximize the other. Meant it, too, at the time. Then ArenaNet had to go and make their Hall of Monuments Calculator.

One Point Walking

Yes, well, it's different when you can see it all laid out like that, isn't it? Suddenly it all gets a bit "Look at what you could have won" . And it's such a nifty little toy. You play with it for a while and cogs start whirring in your head and you google around a bit and see how you could hoover up a few points for doing next to nothing. Honestly, it would almost be rude not to, wouldn't it?

Look! I have three points already and I didn't do anything! How did that happen? Oh, that's because it can see I already have a Guild Wars account since I just typed in the name of one of my characters and it's assuming I'm going to use the same account in GW2. Well I hadn't planned on it but alright, if it makes you happy I suppose I could.

Don't do that! It's tinder dry!

Only, which account? I have two. It's that Clean Start thing again, you see. When I got the Complete Collection summer before last and thought I'd play through all the campaigns I didn't want to use the old characters so I started over. Then I got distracted by something, EQ2X probably, and last I saw of her my new ranger was Level 14 in Lion's Arch.

Quick check. Yep, that's where she still is. What's she got in her bags? A present? And inside it a little hydra. That must be one of those minis I read about. Whirr go the cogs. If she has a one-year present, what do the six-year old characters on my old account have? Bags full of presents? Yes they do! All four of them were made in the first month after launch so that means six birthday presents each!

Does he ever stop buffing himself?

Slight problem - that account doesn't have Eye of the North. Got to have that or you don't get a Hall of Monuments, can't place the minipets, don't get any credit for them in GW2. Putting the complete collection on a new account is looking like a really bad decision right now. Except, wait! People keep going on about buying these pets. That means they must be tradeable! 

Two dozen unwrapped presents, some map-clicks and a flurry of furtive exchanges in Ascalon City later, problem solved. Why Ascalon City? It's the furthest two of the four Elders ever travelled. And ever will, most likely. Warp back to Eye of the North and in we go. Talk to Gwen (what's she doing in there anyway?) hang a tapestry, place the pets.

Oh! A Kitten!

Another point! That's four!

I just need five points for a title. Traveler. That's a good title. I'd use that. And I have M.O.X. He's a free point if I can place him on his pedestal. Only to place him I have to hang another tapestry and that pool in the middle of the Hall isn't spitting out any more free ones.

Which is how I came to spend most of yesterday afternoon working through the primary quest sequence in the Eye of the North campaign. Made almost two levels. Wiped on Scorch Maulclaw about ten times. Gave up. Going back today with different tactics, if I can think of any. I'll get him in the end. Then it's on to Doomlore Shrine, rescue Pyre's warband and get my tapestry.

Because he'll get me a Tapestry, Gwen! Try to keep up!

We've got, what, three months before GW2 is likely to land? I want to finish the main questline in Eye of the North by then, learn to see the Charr as something more than the faceless monster hordes I remember from Prophecies. Meet the Asura. Those are the two races I plan on playing in GW2 so I probably should.

Not to mention I have my eye on that Orange Tabby Cat siting there waiting at nine points.