In Which I Give Myself A Good Talking To : GW2, EQ2

It's one of the fundamental tenets of massively multiple online roleplaying gaming that everything is subject to revision. The imaginary worlds we pretend to inhabit aren't static. They are meant to grow and alter as though they were real.

We understand that each time we slip on our pixel skins and step out under those familiar, unfamiliar skies something may have changed. In this way it mirrors our lives outside. The walk you take each day is never the same walk. Businesses open and close, the traffic shifts, whole communities change character around us without asking our consent.

For the longest while this was a great part of what attracted me to the form. The mutability. The potential for wonder and surprise. The thrill of the new, the unknown. Of late, though, I find I weary of it all. Instead of yearning for the new, the fresh, the unforeseen, I log in hoping to find things much the same.

The nature and purpose of the changes seem themselves to have changed. Casting back, more than a decade, to a time when rude individuals set up their rough huts across Qeynos Hills and the agents of Bertoxxolous worked secretly in the shadows to bring the plague for the Plaguebringer, in that the long, golden age of mystery and suspense, I had no real understanding of what was happening around me.

Over what seems in memory to be a very long time indeed, a slow, obscure narrative played out, bringing great disruption and a clamor of excitement. Places that had been safe became deadly. Great forces contended but for what prizes it was not ours to know. Opportunities arose for those quick enough to grasp them. Change was all around and it felt right and good and natural.

Why we cannot have nice things: Fig. 1.

Today all change comes forewarned. It arrives on schedule. From the rote formality of the Living Story, inching forward a notch every second Tuesday unless holidays intervene, to the sporadic Issues and Updates of The Secret World or EQ2, anticipated, awaited, advertized and analyzed before ever they are played, little reaches us unheralded.

Change you know is coming is very different from change you don't expect. Even should you choose not to visit websites, click on links, watch Twitch streams and YouTube presentations, open emails or engage with social media, on the day of the Update your characters will certainly receive direct notification inside the game. There is no option to arrive unaware at the point of crisis, to walk in innocence into the line of fire, the way I did the day I became suddenly and fatally aware of the Dark Elven invasion of Firiona Vie.

Change is unavoidable but the greatest changes, while vital, used to be contained. Boxed expansions brought whole new continents to explore but largely left the known lands alone. If you wanted to go on as you had always gone on then that option was open for you to take.

In a geographic sense that remains, largely, true but over the years a miasma of minor and major visual polishes and makeovers has settled on the glories of the past, leaving an unattractive patina, not of neglect but of mismanagement. The endless attempts to update appearances - better textures, new character models, improved graphic engines - often sit on the surface of older games like the fashions of youth on an aging narcissist, fooling no-one but disturbing many.

Once reviled, now revered.

Then there are the repurposings. The villages of Freeport and Qeynos, instanced and questlined; all those new New Player Experiences, those zone revamps that follow no logic or lore beyond that of the extended focus group and the metrics report.

We always had upheaval, of course. How many times did Splitpaw change hands; or Grobb? Even ailing worlds like Telon, where one might have expected the tide of change to flow slowly if at all, saw heavy-handed tinkering along its fringes, time and again. If change feels more ponderous, less organic now, perhaps it's merely that the stardust is off our eyes.

Even when the terrain remains unaltered, to revisit often feels false because our characters do not. Beneath their surfaces writhe changes wrought by hands other than their, or our, own: adjustments made by the Gods of Design, who bring endless alteration to the physical laws of the worlds in which our characters and their own frangible, powerless Gods reside.

Through no exercise of theirs our characters strengthen. Unborn imaginary generations outstrip the fantasies of their fancied ancestors. Learning curves flatten, enemies weaken, skills and abilities are handed out as of right. Weapons that would have graced a knight in a former age become fit only for farmhands. Nothing stays the same.

Well, why should it? Time moves on, the world changes, you can never go home again and all the rest of that dismal, defeated claptrap. Only...

To be retained for F2P players as a default 50% xp reduction. Thanks for that.

Recently I read several proofs of novels to be published this winter and next spring. They were all very good and they were all very bleak. I was exhausted both by novelty and despair so I went looking for solace in the familiar. Instead of another new novel I picked out an old favorite and began re-reading. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. Everything was familiar. Everything was in its place. Some things remain immutable. Time runs off them like rain. You can go home there and they have to take you in.

Were I to begin to feel, like Stargrace, weary of MMOs yet still not weary of gaming I could, fathomably, return to an offline favorite and find it exactly as I remembered. Perhaps that might be a little harder to do than picking up an old copy of a book; complex hardware mitigates against reusability, over time. Not impossible, however; just harder. In MMOs, though, there truly is no going back.

Next week the daily achievement system in GW2 gets yet another reset and WvW gains a new ruleset for a month. The two things I most enjoy doing in that game right now will no longer be what they were. Also next week EQ2 implements a radical overhaul of both the Dungeon Maker and AA systems, something that will bring profound change to the game experience of just about everyone playing there.

Like it or not change is on the way; change followed by change followed by change. Yes, I weary of it. Yes, I often wonder if I wouldn't be happier playing an MMO where nothing ever changed. Well, wonder away. That MMO doesn't exist. It never has and it never will.

Our boats drift with the current, borne onward ceaselessly into the future. Tomorrow is always another day. Get used to it.