Keeping Things Regular: GW2, Everquest

Keen has a post up in which he observes that in their slow and steady progress through The Elder Scrolls Online he and Graev "are what you might consider ‘regular’ players.  We put in 3-4 hours a week". This attracted some surprise, even disbelief, in the comments, not least from me. It also made me think.

On my desktop there are twenty-four icons that I could click to launch an MMO. That's not all the MMOs I have installed, merely the ones it's likely enough I might want to play that it's worth keeping them patched up and ready. In my head I think of myself as a current "regular" player of maybe half a dozen of them, an ex-regular, currently on hiatus, of half a dozen more and merely a curious observer and occasional visitor of the rest.

How many, though, am I really playing, even enough to meet Keen's liberal definition of "regular"? As of this last month or so: two. That's probably the smallest number of MMOs I've played concurrently since GW2 launched, a figure only ever normally reached when I'm in the throes of that passionate obsession that comes with a brand new world to explore.

If only I'd gotten that far...

It should have been three. I planned to spend a few hours looking a little deeper into the WildStar beta this weekend. That didn't happen. My key still worked, in that I was able to open the launcher and patch the game, but when I hit the big green PLAY button instead of spitting me out into the bubblegum-bright world of Nexus the screen greyed out and "No realms are available at this time" appeared stamped across the middle like a "Rejected" mark on an unsavory cut of meat. What's more, it left me hanging there and I had to open Task Manager to escape.

A little research informs me that WildStar is going to be one of those irritating "Region Locked" games that checks your IP address and blocks access if you smell funny have the temerity to try to play outside of your own backyard. It seems this is keeping some players out this weekend, me among them, although I didn't entirely follow the reasoning. Come open beta (supposedly there will be one, no dates or details yet) the key will work again. Whether I'll be interested enough to use it is another matter.

Fortunately for me I've no plans to play WildStar at launch so I can afford to just shake my head and move on. It's bad enough when a company like SOE decides to license out its properties to different publishers in various territories but at least there's some kind of commercial imperative there that can be understood if not accepted. When a company like NCSoft retains direct control and yet splits its customer base up along regional lines, enforcing strict isolation, it just mystifies me. Why would they even want to do that? Does it save money? Avoid legal issues? You'd think it would be more expensive and create more work.

So, anyway, not playing WildStar.

The walls....they're...breathing...

As usual the bulk of my playing time went on GW2, where the sheer pleasure of leveling my not-quite-so-new guardian continues unabated. She dinged 50 last night with 29% of the world "completed". That's exactly the same as my Asura Ranger, who dinged 80 months ago and who I've played quite a lot since.

I never really paid much (or any) attention to World Map Completion. My first, Charr, ranger, also my first and probably most-played character, sits at 69%, by far the highest of any of my nine (soon to be ten) max levels. I still think the gimmick detracts from involvement with the world as a world and actively mitigates against immersion but at this stage, coming up to two years in and with no new territory to explore, it feels like this might be the time to give it a go. We'll see how long I can keep it up...

Progress along the Trait trail is interesting. As anticipated it is incredibly slow. Nineteen levels after unlocking the tree my Guardian has four points. That said, I'm not finding it off-putting at all, indeed I quite like it. Yes, it's a long wait between points, and feels it, but the impact of each of those points is significant and I notice it in a way I rarely did under the previous system. Because opening each one is a relatively unusual event I look forward to it and pay it more attention when it happens.

I explored all of Blazeridge Steppes
and all I got was this lousy Trait

I suspect the new system will better suit people like me, who aren't especially interested in builds and min-maxing, than it will the substantial body of MMO players who dote on that kind of thing. I rather like having the opportunity to stop every few levels and re-assess my options, then close the window and forget about it. I'll reserve final judgment until I reach cap but so far I think it's an improvement.

The Megaserver effect seems to have calmed down somewhat. World Bosses are still crazed zergs, but then they often were under the old system. In maps with no World Boss or where no WB is due for a few hours, sometimes it seems almost as quiet as it used to be. Well, perhaps not that quiet but certainly not manic or overcrowded.

The Sorting Hat still resolutely fails to match me up with anyone I know, regardless of whether I am guilded, friended or even grouped with them. That needs fixing. Community remains fractured if not entirely broken. There may be no fix for that. And yet, as with almost every change that comes to an MMO, no matter how disruptive or ill-judged, those who don't leave get used to it and within a disturbingly short time everyone behaves as if things were always this way.

The Tourney rolls on. The Swiss System seems to have spun up a yoyo where Yak's Bend is concerned. We play Isles of Janthir and Northern Shiverpeaks one week and come top, then Henge of Denravi and Fort Aspenwood the week after and come last. Unless anything amazingly unusual happens that pattern looks set to hold for the remaining few weeks. It works well for me. We get lots of good fights, plenty of tower and keep defense and while the results may be predictable the margins aren't, which keeps things fresh. I think we'll place either third or fourth.

Some people are so easy to please.

That's GW2. It is what it is, as the mantra goes. The Living Story seems to have fallen off the table, taking its bi-weekly updates with it. Evidence for anyone missing it, in or out of game, seems hard to find. Looking back, it must seem like an awful lot of work was done to no real purpose. Much has been said and written about the endless stream of here-today, gone-in-two-weeks temporary content and how players do or don't take to it but I wonder just how the developers who have to produce it feel. Are they happy to see weeks of work so swiftly consumed and forgotten or would they rather be making something a little more substantial, something that might still be around, giving pleasure and generating feedback, in a year or several?

Speaking of things that have hung around for a while, when I'm not playing GW2 I'm over in Norrath, slowly chipping away at the mountain that makes up the 100 levels of a modern-day character in Everquest. Thanks to the Heroic leg-up that jumped my Magician from the 60s to the 80s, my highest level character is now only a baker's dozen away from that cap.

SOE finally hit "Go" on the long-discussed All Access changes with the predictable result: lots of unplanned downtime and a slew of messed-up accounts. Having been here before, many times, I chose not to log in until the worst of the debris had been cleared and (touch wood!) seem to have avoided any weird and unpleasant side effects. One account even got an unexpected benefit in the form of several extra Legends of Norrath packs.

Chop him up for kindling wood

In compensation for the inconvenience we got a Double XP weekend that I was frustratingly unable to take full advantage of due to work. In most MMOs these days I tend to try to slow my leveling down but EQ remains the exception, especially after about level seventy or so. There, any boost is more than welcome.

I managed to get in several hours, mostly in the level 75 and 80 Hot Zones, Oceangreen Hills and Hills of Shade. I keep trying the level 85 Hot Zone, Old Bloodfields, but it's more trouble than it's worth solo, even at my new exalted level of 87.

With the weekend's Double XP, plus Double XP from my veteran's Lesson, plus the unspecified but significant Hot Zone bonus, plus a 25% xp potion, all running together and stacking, and doing Franklin Teek's tasks for the large XP rewards, in one half-hour burn I managed almost 30% of level 86. I could actually see the xp, if not from individual kills then at least from runs of two or three! Unheard of in Everquest at that level.

It was a lot of fun and very satisfying, even more so because of the contrast with my normal, stately pace. Of course, the nominal XP rate is only one of many factors in how quickly you progress in Everquest. Of all the MMOs I have ever played it has by far the longest set-up times. Even with all the many enhancements and accelerations that have been added across the years it still takes a significant amount of time to buff, to travel, to get established at a safe spot and to recover after a fight.

If anything goes badly wrong then, particularly as a mage with a pet to re-equip, you're looking at 20-30 minutes just to get back to where you were. Although in these days of Mercenaries and corpse-summoning NPCs the actual loss of xp on a death is trivial, the much greater penalty comes from the half an hour it takes to get up and running again, half an hour with no XP coming in at all.

Even without a death there are significant gaps in the XP flow. In the zones I'm comfortable soloing a single add is fine and two perfectly manageable. With a very powerful pet and a Mercenary healing I've even had some great fights with half a dozen adds and managed to come out on top. Only, though, if I have room to maneuver. In confined surroundings like tunnels or buildings I'm constantly conscious of the consequences of a bad pull or a runner. I tend to keep my cursor hovering over Gate if there's any doubt as to the outcome.

Franklin Teek, curse him, set me the task of killing five Rotcaps in Hills of Shade yesterday and they only hang out in tunnels. I got a runner that took a left-turn round a corner, breaking line of sight so I couldn't burn him down fast enough and he found half a dozen friends and his courage with them and they all came barreling back around the turn, looking for revenge. That meant a hasty exit and five or ten minutes just to get back for round two.

In contrast, a death while leveling in GW2 might delay you by, oh, as much as five or ten seconds. Just one example of how the pacing between these games is so different. The ryhythms don't even begin to match. I love them both but it takes a big re-adjustment to move from one to another.

Perhaps it's not only a shortage of hours to play that limits the number of MMOs a person can realistically play "regularly". Maybe it's also the effort required to adjust and re-tune as you move between them. For all the complaints that MMOs are too samey, interchangeable even, it really isn't so. It takes a significant amount of time to pick up the "feel" of a game after even a few days of not playing and it just adds to the disconnect if you need to drop the "feel" of another MMO to make room.

Even so: two MMOs? Not good enough. Must try harder.