You're Not Going In There, Are You? : City of Steam, GW2

Three months in, my sum total of dungeon runs in Guild Wars 2 is stuck at one. Is that because I don't like dungeon play? Nope. Maybe it's the terrible reputation GW2's dungeons picked up right from the start? Not really. Perhaps there's just so much else to do? Well, there is that, but no, that's not the main reason.

It's too much trouble. There, I said it. Back in the day we thought nothing of leaving our characters standing around in Lake of Ill Omen, watching the Sarnaks lope past like so many saurian Grouchos while we called " lvl 27 druid lfg" for as long as it darn well took. On a good day someone might send a tell or just /ooc "Druid come to windmill" and that was Saturday morning sorted until lunchtime.

A crate is not a chest. As I found out.

Later, with more confidence, it became clear it was faster and more efficient to start the group yourself: "Need tank and 3 more for ToFS, have cleric and chanter already". As "fast" global travel permeated many MMOs, even going to the zone where the dungeon happened to be dropped out of fashion. Much easier to find a critical mass of players in a central location, first The Nexus then Plane of Knowledge, then port out to where the action was.

This remained the status quo for years, until WoW dropped the still-controversial Dungeon Finder bomb in late 2009. As with many of Blizzard's innovations, the effects rippled across the MMOsphere and nowadays many virtual worlds come complete with some stripe of automated assistant that takes away tedious admin (and vital social interaction along with it, some would say), leaving adventurers free to, well, adventure.

Y'know what? I just can't be bothered.

We all got lazy. Alright, some of got lazy. Some of us just got out. The Dungeon Finder dropped in WoW just as I was about to finish my few months in Azeroth. I hung on just long enough to try it out. It was a huge novelty then, hard though that is to remember. I did three groups using it, twice as healer, once as DPS, all at lowish level. Can't say I liked it much but it wasn't awful.

Since then I've used similar systems in a few other MMOs, occasionally, but mostly I've just stopped doing dungeons with pick-up groups altogether. It's strange in a way because much the same mechanism is used to queue for PvP Battlegrounds and Warfronts and I've played the skin off some of those. For PvE, though, I've never taken to it.

Doesn't that take you back?

Guild Wars 2 doesn't have a Dungeon Finder. For an MMO so gung-ho for inclusivity, so keen to strip away all barriers to commitment-free socializing, that's quite weird. In GW2, if you want to do a dungeon you either go with people you already know or party up like it's 1999. The new fractal dungeons are all the rage and handily the Asura Gate for those stands in Lion's Arch, so map chat there now serves as a permanent LFG channel.

Turns out that I don't like that much either. Too much hassle. Can't be doing with all those tells and typing and meeting strangers. Don't like the new ways, don't like the old. There's no pleasing some people.

Well, maybe there is. Which brings me to City of Steam. Got there in the end. Yesterday I did three "dungeons" in CoS. I say dungeons. Timed two-minute instances is what they were, with hardly any mobs and a lot of chests to open to find a bomb. Which I never found. It's not what I did that matters, though, it's how I came to be doing it.

City of Steam is structured rather like the original Guild Wars, with a number of open, multiplayer hubs leading onto many instanced areas. Quests happen in the open areas, which are very world-like and comprise the "MMO" part of the game. Fighting and breaking things (there's a lot of breaking things) happens in the instances.

That's a fail.

Each instance can have several functions. There's always a general mode in which the instance operates like any part of a virtual MMO world, where you can wander around at will and in which there may be quests. Then there are various Challenges that use the same instance but populate it differently and ask you to perform certain tasks. These Challenges seem to fulfill some of the functionality that both Daily Quests and Achievements provide in other MMOs.

It's all very neatly and attractively done and I look forward to getting down to it when I get a persistent character. The really clever part, though, is how the game deals with pick-up groups to take these Challenges, all of which appear to be tuned for more than one person.

There's no separate Dungeon Finder or LFG interface.

Stand on the mat, fool!

What happens is this: if you stand on the black and yellow hazard stripes that mark the entrance to every instance with the selection window for the various dungeon modes active and click on the one you want, the game checks if anyone else is standing next to you doing the same. If they are, up pops an invite to enter the dungeon with that person.

It's simple, effortless and organic. You're at the door, you clicked on the option, you must want to go in. Why wouldn't you accept? Of all the ways to automate instance run pugging this is the most elegant I've seen. In a game like GW2, where there is famously no Trinity and a viable group is anyone who turns up, this would be just perfect. Just wait at the Asura Gate with the relevant option highlighted until the team fills up and in you go.

It would just about be guaranteed to get me back in the dungeon. Even I'm not too lazy to stand on a doormat and click. Well, not on a good day...