The Rain, The Park And Other Things

It rained all day today. It's still raining now. I spent hours in World vs World, mostly defending our one and only T3 Keep or retaking the rest of our stuff after we lost it, which was about every five minutes. 

This week's event must have been wildly successful if the marker of success is how much time I've spent playing, when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I killed close to a thousand players, ranked up more times than I can remember and made it into the final set of skirmish rewards, Diamond, for the first time in years.

Activity was about as manic as I've seen it. For most of the day no side in our match owned more than one upgraded keep. Almost everything was paper. There were players running around all over the place. Crystal Desert were on a mission to overtake us and go up to Tier Three at the weekly reset later tonight. They had close to a full squad runing all day, even at the times when there are normally none of them to be seen.

Just keep telling yourself that.

Despite all that action and chaos and effort, I didn't see a queue on any map, not even once. I've barely seen one all week and even the couple of times I did it was only one or two people. Measured by that metric, things were actually busier a few weeks ago, when there was no event of any kind.

This is Tier Four we're talking about, of course. Maybe the matches above us had deeper queues and more of them. Then again, much of the time when I check, Yaks Bend is listed as "Full" and you can't get any more populated than that. You'd think, right?

It doesn't work that way. No-one knows how it does work, exactly, but we do know it's not a head-count. It's an algorithm or I imagine it is. Everything's an algorithm nowadays. All ArenaNet will admit to is that they calculate how busy Worlds are by reference to a number of factors including but not limited to how many people log in to WvW, how long they stay and what kind of things they do while they're there.

By that measure, earlier this week about two-thirds of the servers were flagged "Full". Today it was just over half. It changes all the time but if there's a pattern to it I don't know what it is. 

I do know that when people wanted to move to a server that was always "Full" they would sometimes stay up until three or four in the morning in the hope they could catch it in one of the brief windows when it dropped to "Very High". Back in the days when people used the forums for more than just arguing and badmouthing developers, you'd sometimes get public-service posts letting everyone know some server or other had opened for transfers, which, naturally, meant that server would be "Full" again at the next update.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had a brief discussion abut it in guild chat as we were running to defend something or other this morning. I was venting my irritation at people who don't care about the match result and Mrs. Bhagpuss was explaining to me why I could go boil my head. She takes the very widely held view that server pride died when ANet changed the rules on transfers and moving to the winning team every six to eight weeks became the meta. 

I can't really argue with that. Server pride doesn't make much sense when there's a whole playstyle devoted specifically to switching servers. Even harder to take it seriously when you factor in the link system, where you don't even know which server it is you're on half the time. 

Just keep telling yourself that.

Even so, a competition is a competition and a match is a match. You don't get a prize or a title for after a pick-up game in the park but I would contend that you do still care who wins. Yes, when you all come back the next day and pick teams again you're probably going to end up playing alongside the kid you were trying to kick in the shins the day before but each pick-up match is a discrete event and each one matters or else none of them do.

That is the problem in a nutshell for a lot of people. None of them do. So why do they bother? Same million reasons anyone does anything in mmorpgs. Loot, gear, achievements, bragging rights, social pressure, fun, boredom... When GW2 began, ArenaNet wanted WvW to be the endgame. They included the maps in world completion and tied a bunch of stuff in the Mists to other features of the game. 

You can guess how that went down with PvE players. Once the dedicated WvW crowd that arrived expecting DAOC 2.0 had left in a huff, ANet moved quickly to pacify the people they had left. The problem was, they had a set of maps, rules and mechanics designed neither for pure PvP players nor monster-bashers. We've been living with a series of passive-aggressive compromises ever since.

Just keep telling yourself that.

All the many, many redesigns have failed. The last one, the supposed mega-revamp that would do away with Worlds entirely and heave everyone into some kind of ludicrously over-complicated parody of high-school, with everything built on popularity and cliques, thankfully appears to have died of lack of interest. What might replace it remains unspoken. 

My guess would be nothing. There's a conspiracy theory, so widely accepted now it might as well be confirmed fact, that ANet make major bank on transfer fees. Another of their dirty little secrets is how the links are decided every other month. Some of the decisions seem so nihilistic that monetary gain appears the only rational explanation.

Whether it's true or not that they couldn't do without the income generated by thousands of people paying to change the name of their team every few weeks, I suspect another well-founded theory will be proven to be correct. There's no-one left at ANet who cares enough about WvW to try to make it less disfunctional. 

Okay, maybe don't keep telling yourself that. And definitely don't tell anyone else.

There was a moment of moderate shock recently when one of the former WvW devs returned to work on it again. That was seen by some as a sign that life might be about to be breathed back into the corpse. It seems a bit of a stretch. It's not like much changed the last time he was in charge. Or, rather, things did change. Just, well, nothing that mattered...

The moment of truth will be when we get to hear the full feature list for End of Dragons. Back when Heart of Thorns was in development it included the biggest shake-up WvW has ever had. That was an unmitigated disaster. Path of Fire didn't even mention WvW let alone change anything there. PoF is generally reckoned to have been a popular, successful expansion. A lot of people still detest HoT. Draw your own conclusions.

As far as I see it, WvW is in maintenance mode now. It's there. It works. If you want to play it you can. People do. Still, even now, quite a lot of them. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it for five or six hours today. It was fun.

Maybe that could be the WvW slogan: "Raining out? Bored? Can't think of anything better to do? Come play WvW"!

There are worse ways to spend a wet friday in May.

What A Difference A Day Makes : GW2

It's not been the greatest twenty-four hours. I had some bad news about my health yesterday that's going to have a significant impact on my life over the next few months, at least. Before my hospital appointment I spent the morning playing EverQuest 2, which kept my mind off the prospect of a procedure I wasn't much looking forward to.

When I got back from the hospital, having received the news I was hoping to avoid, I settled into doing my dailies in Guild Wars 2 and then spent the rest of the evening in World vs World. It very much helped to settle my mood. Generally I don't play MMOs to escape problems in real life but I have to say that, when such problems occur, those virtual worlds do offer an attractive alternative.

This morning I woke up feeling fairly sanguine. I hope to be reasonably pragmatic about health problems and while I'd rather not have any to worry about, if I do then I'm all in favor of having  something done about them as soon as possible. Now I just have to wait for that to happen.

In that mood I sat down to read Feedly, where I found this bombshell waiting for me. The headline reads

"Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet is suffering heavy layoffs, but the game will continue".

Well, that's surprising, disturbing and incredibly unreassuring...

There's a good amount of detail in the MassivelyOP report and also in this GamesIndustryBiz piece. The gist is this:

• ArenaNet is not performing well enough commercially for NCSoft's liking.
• The underlying reason is a combination of decreasing income from aging franchises and insufficient progress on expensive new projects.
• There will be a round of significant lay-offs.
• Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 will continue on their present course. 

Songyee Yoon, CEO of NCSoft, summed up the problem:

"Our live game business revenue is declining as our franchises age, delays in development on PC and mobile have created further drains against our revenue projects, while our operating costs in the west have increased. Where we are is not sustainable, and is not going to set us up for future success."

ArenaNet themselves issued this bland statement on the forums:

"We know you have a lot of questions about the future of Guild Wars 2. We want to share with you what to expect moving forward for the game. First and foremost, we are still fully committed to all of our players and ongoing support of the game. We will be moving directly from Living World Season 4 into Season 5 as promised, and we plan to continue a regular cadence of updates and releases.

We know Guild Wars 2 is important to you, and as our players, you are important to us. Rest assured that we are still working to add great new content to the game. We are deeply grateful to all of you for your support during this difficult time."

Reaction on the official forums is, as yet, muted. There's a fairly short thread filled with some astonishingly smug, uninformed or plain self-deceiving comments, largely from people who seem to know little or nothing about NCSoft or its relationship to ArenaNet. Or about reality, for that matter.

Taken together with the recent layoffs at Blizzard and the speculation that kicked off about the future of World of Warcraft,  it's clear that neither size nor market presence gives much of an indicator towards stability or longevity. WoW is the biggest MMORPG of all and GW2 would probably have featured in many people's top ten most-successful current MMORPGs in the west; maybe top five.

I'll get to GW2 in a moment, but in more general terms I think what underpins both Blizzard and NCSoft's actions has more to do with the impending and inevitable decline of the PC gaming market than a decline in interest in the MMO(RPG) genre itself.  For a long time, MMOs were intrinsically bound up with the platform upon which they ran and that platform was almost exclusively the desktop computer. A handful of games were devised for consoles and there have been mobile MMOs as long as we've had smartphones, but until recently almost everything of significance in the MMORPG field came to us via the PC.

That's no longer true. We read all the time about MMOs being converted for consoles. It's pretty much expected now. Some are created for consoles first then ported to PC.

Mobile is booming. The quantity and quality of MMORPGs available for handheld devices increases every day. And, of course, mobile gaming is becoming not just more profitable than any other platform but vastly so.

At sixty years of age, and particularly with reminders of my own mortality fresh in my mind, I'm starting to feel hesitant about the sweeping statements I've been prone to make in the past about this or that MMORPG outliving me. That's beginning to look like an increasingly weak assurance either for me or the games.

If I stick to straight numbers, though, I'm beginning to question how long the ordinary person will be able to buy a new desktop personal computer. Ten years? Probably. Twenty years? Not sure about that. Thirty? I really doubt it. When the home desktop PC becomes a curiosity of the past, where will that leave the MMORPG?

While I do believe that some MMORPGs, as we now know them, will continue to be available virtually indefinitely, what devices they'll be developed to run on is a lot harder to predict. Trying to see things from the point of view of major games developers, planning for the next five years, it's getting ever harder to imagine major resources being directed towards the combination of a genre and a platform both in evident decline.

Getting back to Guild Wars 2, information coming out as a result of yesterday's news confirms an awful lot of things some of us had been speculating about for a year or two. It's been extremely hard to explain how a company with around 400 employees could be so unproductive, so unresponsive and just so all-round slow.

If most of those people had been working on Guild Wars 2 then you'd have been well within your rights as a customer to ask what the heck they were all doing. The explanation, as many long suspected, is that a lot of them weren't working on either of ANet's Live games at all.

Jessica Price, the GW2 writer who was sacked last year after a very public row, confirmed that while she was still with the company ANet were working on "two major projects", one of which was "indefinitely suspended" even before she was fired.

She also made a very telling statement about what was going on at GW2 while she was still working there:

"For those of us working on GW2, our mandate was essentially to make it look like there was the same level of resources devoted to GW2, when they were actually steadily moving people off of it onto the other projects."

Smoke and mirrors, as many of us suspected. So, where does all this leave Guild Wars 2 players?  That's quite hard to say.

The real concern for anyone hoping to go on playing GW2 for years to come is NCSoft. If ArenaNet was an independent company that had made some poor decisions on future projects and been forced to retrench, we could expect a renewed focus on the one game that does make money. We could expect, as many in the forum thread seem to do, that some of the resources diverted to unnanounced projects would be returned to the core game.

In that scenario, we might even see an improvement in the GW2 experience. Faster response times, shorter content droughts, more attention on meeting cutomer expectations. We might even get an expansion this side of forever.

And, if ANet was an independent company, should things get truly bad we could look forward to an eventual transfer of assets. The Guild Wars franchise might change ownership in a merger or even in some end-of-life fire sale, as we have seen happen to so many other familiar names in recent times. That would ensure at least a few more years.

With ANet being a wholly-owned subsidiary of NCSoft, however, you can forget all of that. The sad fates of both City of Heroes and WildStar tell us that NCSoft has no interest in selling IPs to other potential competitors. If they close ANet, that will be the end of the Guild Wars franchise.

In the short term I'm sure GW2 will persist. NCSoft has culled everything at ArenaNet that doesn't directly support the two Guild Wars titles. The recent, utterly unexpected re-launch of the support website for the original Guild Wars suggests there may even be plans to monetize the older game again.

There are firm statements that planned content will roll out, so I would expect to see Living Story Season Five conclude. That should keep the lights on for the rest of this year. After that, if nothing else has changed, I would expect a final throw of the dice with the announcement of a third expansion.

Looking any further ahead seems futile. At that point it would depend on unknown and unknowable factors including the commercial success or otherwise of that expansion, the health of the PC-based MMORPG market in general and how well NCSoft is doing overall.

GW2 will turn eight years old this summer. Right now, I wouldn't count on GW2 being around for its tenth anniversary. This time yesterday I wouldn't have said that. A lot can change in a day.

Lost Time Is Not Found Again: Rift Prime

Rift Prime launched last Wednesday, with the traditional log-in queues and lag. Or so I read. I wasn't there. I'd forgotten all about it.

It wasn't until Wilhelm posted the day after that I remembered one of the things I was supposed to do on my week off work was decide whether or not to give Prime a try. I was leaning very strongly towards not bothering until he pointed out that the required Patron status is purchasable with Trion's funny money rather than real cash.

Like Wilhelm, I'm still sitting on a huge pile of credits from the F2P conversion years ago. In what was the most ill-judged purchase of my MMO carreer, I pre-purchased the first Rift expansion, Storm Legion, in the version that came with a full year's subscription. When Trion later decided to drop the sub they gave refunds...in cash shop credits.

That wasn't the ony reason I felt I'd made such a bad decision. There was some odd background to it that I'd like to record here for posterity.

The Background Story

Mrs Bhagpuss and I played Rift for around six months from launch in 2011. We had a good time for a while but only a year later we were already playing GW2.

Although we took to GW2 immediately, at the time the first Rift expansion was announced, GW2 was having huge - really, really huge - problems with bots. Just a couple of months after launch those issues were so pervasive and unavoidable that we discussed our options and decided that, if ArenaNet couldn't get things under control, we'd quit and go play the Rift expansion instead.

So I bought two 12 month packages, which seemed like the best deal. Then we went on holiday to Spain for a week. When we came back ArenaNet had cleaned house. The bots were gone. All of them. It was like magic.

I never heard exactly how ANet did it but overnight they either removed the entire population of bots or made it so we never saw them. In a matter of weeks it went from being the number one issue that threatened to destroy the entire game to something no-one even mentioned. Now the whole episode is utterly forgotten.

So there we were, with a year-long sub to a game with a new expansion and no real desire to play it. When it launched we didn't even log in. We probably never would have, only a friend, who was also in both our GW2 guild and our old Rift guild, left GW2 for Rift so she could build houses with the new Dimensions feature.

Her positive feedback eventually convinced Mrs Bhagpuss to go take a look at the housing there, which happened to co-incide with the F2P conversion in 2013. I went along to try Storm Legion. It was dour and dull. I lasted less than two weeks. Mrs Bhagpuss spent all her free cash shop credits on fixings and furniture, stayed for about a month , then left, never to return.

Since then I have dipped in and out, now and again, on a new F2P account and on my old one with all the perks. I never spent any of my store credits, all 19,290 of them. On Saturday, I logged in and blew a couple of thousand on the shortest period of Patron Status available, two weeks.

Two hours would have been plenty. One, if I could have skipped the tutorial.

The "Review"

Rift always had a terrible problem with its opening act. The tutorial is numbingly tedious, full of technobabble and lore twaddle that makes no sense, plus a lot of shouting and yelling and explosions. It's supposed to create a sense of excitement and urgency but it just makes for an extremely annoying roadblock to the game you came to play.

A few years in Trion added an option to skip the Tutorial but that seems to have been removed for Prime. Unless I missed it. Anyway, I slogged through the tutorial for the umpteenth time, rolling my eyes. I think they might have shortened it a bit. It only took me half an hour.

All the time I was "entertained" by a perpetual stream of moaning, complaining, swearing, boasting and arguing in the default chat channel, which seemed to be set to Level 1-29. To call it disheartening would be a major understatement. It was grim.

There appeared to be a very large number of players with nothing better to do than talk incessantly about what a bad time they were having, how Trion could have done it better or what great things they would do when they got past all the annoying leveling stuff to the Raids they came for. That stream of collective consciousness continued unabated for the entire two hours I played. If anyone who was actually between levels 1 and 29 ever spoke about the content in those zones I must have lost it in the static.

Rift's scene-setting problems don't end when you get out of the tutorial. The game dumps you at the wrong end of the starter zone and throws a whole lot more lore nonsense at you before offering you the first of what will be a seemingly endless series of the most mundane, trivial quests ever seen in a major MMO.

At root, Rift is a very old-school quest-hub theme park MMORPG, extremely closely modeled on WoW but with absolutely none of WoW's elan or imagination. I honestly think I have never seen so many lacklustre quests in one game. Even the dullest of imported F2Ps has more to offer in terms of wit or imagination than this.

That doesn't matter as much as it should because no-one comes to Rift for the questing or the lore or the story. These days they might come for the Raids, I guess, or the Dimensions. Back at launch everyone came for two things: the Rifts and Invasions and the flexible, innovative"Soul" class system.

It always took too long before you found your first Rift or got run over by your first invasion. This time I almost logged off in frustration before - almost an hour and three-quarters after I left character creation - I heard the familiar blast of brass that signals a major invasion.

I'd found a couple of Rifts by then. They were disappointing. I did one with two other people and one in a duo. Both failed. There were scores of players all around but no-one seemed interested. Rifts, apparently, were giving really terrible xp when Prime launched and everyone had immediately learned to avoid them. Trion buffed that xp but from what I was getting it was still very poor.

The invasion, when it came, was better. People did join in to do that and I got a very brief and faint reminder of how exciting it used to be. Even so, there was none of the genuine thrill we used to feel, no hint of players co-ordinating defence or working towards a common end. There were no call-outs in chat, no-one organizing groups, none of the desperate racing from Rift to Rift to close them down before the event failed.

By the time the Invasion ended I was just shy of Level 8. I finished a couple of quests to ding just out of a sense of tidiness. Then I logged out. I haven't logged in again.

For me, the lure of Rift in those first few months was always the Rifts and Invasions. For as long as the community was focused on those, taking them seriously and responding to them enthusiastically, I remained involved and committed.

As the months passed, Trion made numerous changes to both Invasions and Rifts that made them less appealing, less exciting, less essential. By the time we had Raids and Crafting Rifts and PvP Rifts and Lures the whole point of the exercise had been lost, for me anyway.

ArenaNet took the concept that Trion had borrowed and expanded from Public Quests in Warhammer Online and blew it up into an entire gaming eco-system with GW2. Going back to Rift now, even a highly populated Rift Prime with actual Rifts and Invasions is like going back to watching television on a 12" B&W portable when you're used to a 48" plasma screen.

I still would play Rift again, if the game could guarantee a steady stream of those zone-wide Invasions along with a population of players ready and willing to do battle with them. And that might happen - for a while - in the mid/end-game zones, Iron Pine Peaks, Shimmersands and Stillmoor. I'd love to see that but I'm not going to grind through forty levels of brain-sappingly boring quests to get there.

Whether Rift Prime will be a commercial success for Trion the way Progression servers have been for SOE/DBG I very much doubt. Rift simply doesn't have the depth or breadth of content of either of the EverQuest games, nor the nostalgia factor. Trion, as Brasse's comment on this Massively OP thread confirms, are well aware that interest in Prime may not be sustained.

Mine certainly wasn't. I might log in again before my two weeks Patron access expires. I won't be buying any more. Not even with credits.

P.S. For a much more detailed and considered review, try this at Endgame Viable. It wasn't up when I wrote my post or I'd have worked it in!

Waiting For The End Of The World : GW2

Far and away the biggest news in MMOs this week was ArenaNet's posting of a discussion document on the proposed changes to GW2's World vs World. Well, it was big news in our house. Or you'd have thought it would have been...

I'm not sure Mrs Bhagpuss has actually read it yet. I drew her attention to it at the earliest opportunity but her interest was, shall we say, muted. She'd been playing WvW while I was at work and the post on the forums had been up for a while but she hadn't heard anything about it until I told her.

I was expecting her to tell me people had talked of nothing else all day in /team and guild chat but apparently it hadn't earned a mention. It didn't get an airing in the session I played that evening either and it wasn't until the next evening that I first heard someone raise the topic.

Priorities.

That was a single question dropped into the guild chat of the 500 WvW member guild I'm in on Yak's Bend. You could hear the tumbleweed rolling by. Since our superstar Commander and guild leader packed his yak and departed for pastures unknown just before Path of Fire arrived the guild has been moribund so the lack of response wasn't surprising. It's rare for anyone to speak in that guild these days.

Eventually a desultory conversation began, mostly between me and the person who raised the topic. No-one else seemed to care. As for Team and Map chat, which are both generally lively, I have yet to hear the subject come up. Maybe this weekend, which is always the peak time for conversation between people who don't play all that much WvW but think they know more about it than anyone else. Or maybe people who actually play WvW are just beyond caring these days.

There are always forum warriors willing to fight any battle, of course. The main thread on the changes is impressively voluminous. As I write it stands at 33 pages, made up of 1.3k posts, viewed 82.9k times. If you read through it, though, as I mostly have, a very large number of those posts are the same handful of people relentlessly bickering amongst themselves. There's even a very lengthy sub-debate going on about how the changes will impact the roleplaying community outside of WvW that threatens to hijack the entire thread.

Vision of the future.

The devs have been fairly active in answering questions and concerns but because a thirty page thread full of giant, nested quotes is extremely hard to navigate those replies are difficult to find, especially using the less-than-stellar "Dev Tracker" function. Fortunately Raymond Lukes, presumably the ANet employee who lost the last office game of one-potato-two-potato, has pulled all the replies into a makeshift FAQ.

The changes themselves are radical and would be shocking...if they weren't by and large a revamp of the "Battlegroup" changes that were leaked several years ago. Back around then, just before he left for good, Colin Johansen confirmed that ANet had spent a year on a "major WvW overhaul".

That plan largely collapsed in a firestorm of protest and controversy after the disastrous imposition of the Desert Borderlands maps that came with Heart of Thorns almost killed WvW off completely. A lengthy period of retreat and retrenchment followed, during which the game mode pulled out of its death dive only to stabilize at a much lower level.

Existential angst.

Following the usual reluctance of MMO companies to own up to the need for server merges, the ongoing issue of falling populations and declining interest was bodge-fixed with the current "Linking" system, whereby smaller worlds are rammed together with bigger ones then re-sorted every couple of months according to some invisble criteria that no-one understands.

That has been unpopular with many. I kind of like it myself because it adds an element of surprise and variety but it certainly does absolutely nothing for community spirit, stability or genuine balance.

Linking does at least have the benefit of being very simple to understand and implement. The proposed new system is neither. It's hideously overcomplicated, ferociously arcane and, in the opinion of many commenters, likely to create hitherto unimagined possibilities for exploitation by the players.

Given Anet's five year history of being entirely incapable of managing either player behavior or expectations, my own take is that this will be an unmitigated disaster. So far players have proved themselves capable and willing to run rings around the developers' intentions at just about every turn. I can guarantee that already the self-appointed movers and shakers of WvW will be organizing the most effective ways to bend the new rules past breaking point.

The proposal does come with the usual caveat that it may never happen. As McKenna Berdrow, who wrote the original proposal, warns: "If the reception is not great for this system, then the other alternative is most likely to continue World Linking."

A bad day.

ArenaNet, more than any MMO developer whose games I have ever played, runs scared of player opinion. Even so, nervous as they always are when announcing them, unpopular changes often do go through. As they float this change for WvW they are clearly in a mood to bite the bullet for what they see as the good of the game because there are also a bunch of potentially unpopular class  and system revamps due in the upcoming balance patch.

I think the WvW changes are mostly a bad idea but if they do go through I'm sanguine. While we will get the class balance patch very soon, whether we want it or not, the WvW revamp, if it ever happens, is probably something like six to twelve months away, so there's no point worrying about it yet.

If, as I expect, based on previous patterns, it gets put to some kind of vote I will almost certainly opt  to keep the status quo. I quite like the linking system and I value the existing world naming conventions over and above supposedly "balanced" matchmaking.

A good day.

I'm far from convinced in any event that "Balance" is a goal worth chasing. Balance in WvW, on the rare occasions it has been achieved, has felt a lot like boredom. My expectation for the new system, should it ever happen, is that it will produce anything but balance.

Should it finally go ahead, what I imagine we'll get is a period of utter chaos followed by a slow apprehension that far from fixing the underlying problems the new system has made them worse. At the very least it should be entertaining.

Whether or not I'll still be playing either WvW or GW2 by then, who can say? It's been a long run and if it wasn't for Mrs Bhagpuss's continued dedication to Tyria in general and The Mists in particular it might well be that I would already have moved on. If she doesn't take to the new WvW then that could be the end - at least of GW2 making up 80% of my gaming.

Sometimes I just sit and think.

Of course, that doesn't mean I would quit. GW2 is the poster child for pick up/put down gameplay among MMOs. People drop in and out all the time, for a few weeks, a few months, a few years. And there would need to be something more attractive to take its place - something else I'd want to play for several hours every day. I'm not sure there is, just yet.

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind, though, that, removing named "Worlds" from the equation will loosen the ties that bind me to the game. I picked Yaks Bend for reasons that have only deepened over the last five years and while YB is very much not what it used to be it is still something.

Worlds that last two months then vanish into the ether, guilds that are pushed around like bargaining chips, alliances that form and dissolve according to expediency, none of that can hope to replace the feeling of belonging that came with a permanent home world.

Currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file.

With the changes likely to come into play around the same time as the release of other Realm vs Realm options like Crowfall and Camelot Unlimited I feel this is very much a desperate last roll of the dice for WvW. Whether it can do anything to halt the slide I very much doubt but I guess it will be interesting to watch it try.

The bigger question is how much longer does GW2 itself have? We all realize now that MMOs can go on for years, decades even, but if even Blizzard are wary of hitching the company fortunes to a single title, how much more uncomfortable must ArenaNet grow as each year passes with nothing new to offer beyond some skins and lockboxes and the occasional expansion for a single, aging game?

Something to come back to in a while, I'm sure. For now, I'm off to play some old-style WvW - while I still can.

Triple Threat: Smed, Domino, Dociu

For many years one of the things I found most confusing about the MMO scene and the people who follow it was the way individual game developers would sometimes be talked and written about as though they were rock stars. It seemed to me as peculiar as if the owner of a refrigerator were to praise the vision and skill of the factory worker who put the parts together.

It seems odd, my attitude, in retrospect. Not only did I come to MMO "fandom" fresh from a couple of decades reading comics, during which time I attended conventions, presented panels, interviewed artists and writers and wrote extensively for fanzines, but also I played video games throughout the 1980s.

Those were the days when the typical media representation of a video game creator was either a precocious social outcast coding his way (and it was always a "he") to a million from his teenage bedroom or an eccentric, bearded quasi-hippy expressing the kind of offbeat individuality more usually found in second division provincial prog rock.

The twin ideas, then, that a collective, commercial enterprise could be driven by the vision of individuals and that video games were a form of personal, creative expression, should have been well established in my worldview. Nevertheless, by the time I came to understand that MMOs weren't simply the inevitable byproduct of technological progress but something made by humans, those logical links seemed to have fractured.

It used to annoy me quite a lot when, on forums I frequented, people would refer to developers, designers or producers by name, according them the kind of stature, respect or admiration that a music fan might routinely give to a favorite songwriter or instrumentalist. It seemed deeply inappropriate, uncomfortable, embarrassing. To be frank, I thought it was gauche.

Over time, as I became embedded more and more deeply in the MMO milieu, some of the discomfort faded. I became familiar first with the names and later with their achievements. I began to develop some knowledge and even understanding of the history of the medium and the form and with this context the constant name-checking began to feel less like bizarre affectation and more like technical jargon.

Although I adopted, almost by osmosis, the coloration of the environment within which I now moved I still struggled badly with the overwrought emotional intensity that sometimes came with that territory. I was comfortable with reference but not with deference. I recognized that the games were made and that named individuals made them but still it seemed to me that this was a technical rather than an artistic achievement and should be addressed accordingly.

This persisted for a long, long time. It can't be that many years ago, certainly in the life of this blog, when I first came across "Developer Appreciation Week" and felt my hackles rise. Why I might have reacted that way, only five or six years ago, somewhat mystifies me now.

Over the intervening years I have, at last and not before time, come to share most of the opinions and attitudes towards the people who make these games and this hobby possible expressed so well by Rowan in his opening paragraph here. While I, too, may criticize as much, or more, than I praise, even that criticism comes, these days, with full recognition and understanding that everything we see, hear and do in our MMOs derives directly from the imagination, effort and endeavor of named individuals.

All of which is a very long preamble to contextualize my reaction to a trio of apparently unrelated news items from the past week.

First there was the announcement that John "Smed" Smedley, last seen going down with the good ship "Hero's Song" as captain of the doomed PixelMage Games, had bobbed up, not clinging to the wreckage but safe on board a much larger vessel, indeed back in the Captain's chair, at Amazon Games.

Second came the departure of Daniel Dociu, GW2's art director and the man who "has been defining the art direction for ArenaNet since 2003". Shamefully, until I read the news that he was leaving, I could not have named the man whose influence and oversight led to what I have frequently referred to as the jewel in ArenaNet's crown, its ineffably confident, secure and professional visual style.

Thirdly, freighted with the most emotional heft by far, came the news that Emily "Domino" Taylor is leaving Daybreak Games. Domino is not only my personal pick for the most consistently reliable MMO developer with whose work I am directly familiar but also the one who is most clearly emblematic of what I believe a developer should be.

Her work is not just sprightly, lively and fun but also logical, coherent and constructive. In two lengthy stints, first with SOE and then with DBG, she both created a wealth of excellent content herself and inspired an extended period in which development around her appeared to take a healthy, positive direction.

Also she once posted a comment on this blog, which, apart from being pleasing for my ego, demonstrates a degree of involvement with the wider hobby that exemplifies why my own attitudes towards the people who make it all possible have changed so much over time. We really are all in this together.

What these three personnel changes mean for the industry as a whole and the MMOs I play in particular is not yet clear. That. naturally, won't deter me from speculating.

As far as impact on existing games goes, probably the move that will impact players the least is Daniel Dociu's departure. The look and feel of GW2 is by now surely too established to change significantly. What's more, Daniel is succeeded in post by his son, Horia, who has himself been working on the same team for as long as his father. I would expect business as usual to be the watchword there.

Domino has left Norrath before. Based on previous evidence I wouldn't expect to see any radical change of direction in EQ2 either. Last time crafting, Domino's prime, although not sole, area of influence, carried on by and large along the same heading. You don't just slot in another visionary of Domino's class, though, and while it was steady sailing without her last time the difference when she returned was immediate and marked. She will be missed but how much depends on who replaces her and what resources they are given to empower their own vision.

Smed, of course, doesn't leave a game behind him from which he could be missed. Hero's Song crashed and burned. The MassivelyOP thread following the announcement is filled with conspiracy theories pondering the timing and the provenance of that simple, uncomfortable fact. Not to mention how very closely the staff of Smedley's new San Diego operation reassembles that of Pixel Games. Oh well, at least everyone got their money back. Somehow.

Looking to the future, the prospects for us as players and the three developers (if we can call Smed that) seem more vague. There seems to be no information available yet about where Daniel Dociu might go or what he might do. All that's said is that he's leaving ArenaNet. He's 59. He might be taking early retirement. He might be ill. He might be changing career paths.

Dociu certainly has no shortage of options. To quote his own biographical details, "Daniel is a prolific freelance artist, contributing to numerous publications, advertising, film and world wide educational and public speaking engagements. With his skill and talent any MMO would be lucky to nab him but I'll be quite surprised if any does. Even Amazon.

Domino already has a new job. She's just not ready to tell us what it is. Unless she's remote-working it won't be Amazon for her, either: "it feels like time to return home to Canada, and remember what shoveling snow is like" she commented with typical whimsy. With her management background it could easily be any kind of supervisory position but her heart always seems to be set in gaming so it would be a surprise to see her re-appear in an unrelated industry. Does Canada have any MMO developers though?

All of which just leaves Smed, who one Massively commenter memorably described as a cross between a cat and a cockroach because he always falls on his feet and would probably survive a nuclear war. I savored that comment because otherwise it's disturbing the way the tone of the comments on Massively have veered of late towards some kind of rehabilitation for Smedley.

The previous knee-jerk reaction that could be relied on to paint the industry veteran as some kind of mustachio-twirling villain from a Victorian melodrama is being replaced by an equally un-nuanced picture of Smed as The Old Lion brought down by hyenas. To me he seems more and more like a management executive who, whether by inclination or imperative, has donned the clothes of a creative. He reminds me a little of the great Rock Managers of yore - Peter Grant or Colonel Tom Parker or, perhaps most tellingly of all, Malcolm McLaren.

What games Amazon want or expect him to make we have no idea. It would seem odd if it was anything entirely different from the games he's famous for but whether it will be something old-time MMO players will want to acknowledge or own as an MMO I wouldn't be so sure. Early talk of "an ambitious new project that taps into the power of the AWS Cloud and Twitch to connect players around the globe in a thrilling new game world" suggest something most people reading this probably will only download out of curiosity.

Whatever the future holds for these three significant players in the field I wish them all well. Even Smed, although where he's concerned I mostly hope Amazon keep him the hell away from any MMO I'm trying to play. Oh well, I guess if anyone has the infrastructure to shrug off a DDOS attack it would be Amazon.

Video games in general and MMOs in particular are strange. Here we are, talking about these people and the impact their job changes may have on our entertainment and yet the youngest of the three, Domino, must be in her early 40s, while Smed is in his late 40s and Daniel Dociu almost 60. The average age of the people who make our MMOs seems out of kilter with what I see in other media I consume, where the drive and innovation comes mostly from people twenty or thirty years younger.

If there's to be a real step-change in MMOs I'm not sure it can ever come from giant corporations like Amazon or industry veterans like Smed. While I'll watch what they do with interest it won't be with any great expectation. When change comes it will be sudden and from a direction no-one's looking.

Or we can hope so, at least.