Up The Hill Backwards : GW2

Sometimes, I wonder if I'm playing MMOs the wrong way.

It all started the day before yesterday, when I finally hit exasperation point with the state of the inventory on my primary GW2 account. No matter how many bags I give my characters they will insist on filling them up.

I'm used to working with limited storage space in every MMO I play. My playstyle involves acquiring much and using little. I like to do the activities that get you rewards but I don't like to use those rewards unless I have a very good reason. I'd rather tuck them away for when they might be needed.

That causes an inevitable storage problem that I always deal with first by acquiring bigger bags. Sadly, that doesn't work forever. You can only upgrade your bags so many times and then all your bags are as big as they come (or, in the case of GW2, as big as you can afford).

The next stage is more inventory slots, if the game allows. Games with cash shops always allow. ArenaNet have made most of what little money they've seen from me on bag and bank upgrades.

I'm not a fan of wearing things when they're still on fire but this seemed to fit the look.

In extremis I make more characters (mule is such an unfortunate word), start new guilds, buy extra houses - whatever the MMO in question lets me get away with, but once again it can't go on forever (except in EQ2, where it really can...). In the end, whatever the upgrade path, however generous the storage options, if I play long enough there always comes a time when there's nothing left for me to do but clean up the mess I've made.

It takes a while. Hours. Sometimes days. Honestly, I never finish. I just get to a point where I can breathe again, then I call it done. With luck a good spring clean might buy me another three months.

This time, when I hit the wall, my first idea was to buy another bank slot. I thought I'd clear some bags, throw in a whole load of stuff, slam the door and forget about it. Only it turns out I've bought all the bank vaults ANet is willing to sell me. You'd think they'd want more of my money but apparently they have standards. Unlike me.

So many new stat combos. I can't keep track of them all.

Next I thought about buying more bag slots. Those come per character not per account and I have plenty of leeway left there, but the idea was to get this stuff off my characters, not enable them to lug around more. Also bag slots cost too much.

So I buckled down and started tidying and that was when I had my bright idea.

This might not sound conected but earlier in the week I'd finally decided to put my Elementalist, the character I play in WvW most of the time, into full Ascended. She was nearly there already. I just needed three more pieces of armor.

I got her sorted out quickly enough. It seemed easier than I remembered. And cheaper. That tends to happen when you already have all the mats lying around and the mat economy has tanked due to oversupply.

With her finished, I turned to my Charr Guardian. A few days ago, playing my Elementalist (Tempest, technically) as usual, I was following a Commander I like when something happened. After several highly embarassing wipes he began begging someone - anyone - to swap from DPS to Heavy Support. No-one did. Eventually the Commander tagged down with one of those "I'm not angry I'm just disappointed" sighs that always leave you feeling it was somehow your fault.

Lookin' good after a trip to the bank.

I rarely play a Guardian; never in WvW (due to complete incompetence), but I have all the classes. So ,why not? Well, I can think of two reasons: 1) I may have the classes but I don't have the skills and 2) I am so far from the meta these days I'm not sure I could find it with a map. Learning is fun, though, isn't it? Or if not it's at least supposed to be good for you. And (here comes the connection, at last) I thought maybe if I geared up my Guardian for WvW I could clear some inventory space doing it.

It's at times like this when a tendency to hoard really comes in useful. I've been doing dailies in WvW for years and when Living World Season 3 started, giving us a new map every chapter, I did those dailies too. I did them for months until I gradually fell out of the habit.

My bank is full of unopened gear, loot and currency boxes from all aspects of the game  I have most of the armor and weapon boxes from various story stages and major events, along with stacks and stacks of LS map daily chests. I even  have separate stacks of some of the various map currencies from when I used to potter around there doing stuff just because. I spent some at the time but I saved a lot more.

What's more, because I spend at least some of my time in WvW every single day, I have stacks of Skirmish chests and over a thousand unused "Potions of WvW Rewards". It only takes 80 of those to complete a WvW Reward Track and there's a reward track for every LS Map so if I ever need more of anything in a hurry...

Speaking of WvW reward tracks, that's how I came to have a dozen or so Triumphant Armor Boxes lying around unopened. Each of which can be used to obtain the Precursor pieces you need to buy ascended Triumphant Hero armor, assuming you have enough Skirmish tickets, which of course I do because I've been getting them for months just for enjoying myself and I've never spent any...

And, well, I won't go into excruciating detail about how it all works. I play the game and it took me hours of reading to understand it all. The point is, I've spent the last two days working on kitting out first my Elementalist (Tempest, going to swap to Weaver soon) and Guardian (now a Firebrand) in full Ascended gear, then swapping my Ranger (the one that's not a Druid) into a mix of Exotic and Ascended using the new-fangled Marauder stats.

All of this came about just because I wanted some space. I've ended up with one bank vault cleared and a much better understanding of how the gear system works. In the game I've been playing every day, several hours a day, for five and a half years, that is. You might have thought I'd already have known. I did, kind of. I just never felt it until now.

This turned out handy.
Instant travel to all the vendors I needed for my Ascended accessories.

I'm starting to see that there is some point to doing these dailies, farming these currencies, running around taking towers and keeps, generally doing all the stuff I do every single day, beyond the sheer fun of doing it. This stuff is actually for something! Who knew?

Well, I guess, everyone but me. That's why GW2 has gained a reputation as a super-grindy game, where everything revolves around doing repetitive activities to earn currencies to spend or materials to craft.

It's no wonder people get fed up or burn out. Who'd want to go round the same set of bushes with ten characters every day, picking berries? Who'd want to play a game mode they don't enjoy for hour after hour just because it's a bit faster or cheaper than the alternatives when it comes to getting upgrades?

Not me. But maybe that's how I'm supposed to play. It seems that's how the people creating this "content" expect me to play. It's how plenty of people do play.

Now I've worked out what it is that I'm supposed to be doing - at last - I think I'd rather carry on as I was. Bimbling along doing this and that and letting stuff pile up, then having a big clear-out and a spending binge every few months seems like it would be more fun than chipping away at the gear mountain a piece at a time.

Of course, the only way I've been able to come to this realization is because I've been doing the grindy stuff all along without even noticing. I wouldn't have had all those boxes and chests ready to open if I hadn't. Imagine if I'd finally gotten around to reading it up and discovered I was two years behind...

Two days work...

Then again, you have to ask, would it matter? I'm not "gearing up" because of issues with content. I'm still one hundred percent certain that, outside of Raids and high-level Fractals, no-one needs anything more than Exotics to play GW2's "end game". I was only doing it because I needed the bank space and I only carried on doing it after that because, like a lot of other things in GW2, once I'd started it turned out to be fun.

In the end, I guess there's no "right" way to play. Just so you're enjoying yourself. It's supposed to be entertainment, after all.

I might be a bit more focused from now on, though. I read up the path to WvW Legendary Armor while I was doing my research and it doesn't look as impossible as I thought it was. Maybe, if I carry on playing the way I do, in another six months I might be able to binge-make a whole set of of that on a whim!

That really would be something.

You Can Get The Staff : GW2

Among the really quite surprisingly large number of things I've found myself enjoying in Heart of Thorns are the Ascended Weapon Collections. Before the expansion launched I never gave them a thought but it seems that I should have. For once, ArenaNet seem to have found my personal Goldilocks zone .

The Collection system was intended to provide a framework for horizontal progression. Over the year and more since it debuted in the September 2014 Feature pack it has sprouted seven sub-sections including Basic, Rare, Black Lion and three flavors of Legendary but the only one that has really caught my attention is Specialization.

For my tastes, most of the Collections fall into the "pointless time sink" category, a place where a great deal of GW2's "content" seems to reside, but the Specialization Collections have managed to pitch themselves just the right side of busy-work, landing squarely in the realm of  "I could do this and it wouldn't be horrible". What's more, the final reward is something simple, straightforward and clearly desirable: an Ascended Weapon.

The Ascended gear tier has been in the game for so long now that the controversy that greeted its introduction seems almost forgotten. Working through the various routes to acquire a full set of Pink Quality armor and weapons has become routine for many players. I am  not one of them.

I'm happy to cherry-pick the quick and easy Ascended option where it presents itself. My
considerable Badge of Honor surplus (currently standing at just under 13,000 on the main account) provides instant access to all the rings, amulets and trinkets I could want. I've been lucky enough to acquire a smattering of weapons and armor pieces from drops here and there, something that has become a much more feasible means of acquisition since the change that allowed us to change the stats using the Mystic Forge.

The most straightforward way to fill out the set is, of course, by crafting. I do have some 500 skill tradeskillers who could get the job done but it feels far too much like throwing money on a blazing fire and I generally can't bring myself to do it. These new collections, though, are not just relatively economical, they're fun too.

There's a weapon for each of the nine classes. Each weapon requires the collection of fourteen "items". It sounds like a lot of work but since Collections are account-based and some of the items are shared between two or more classes the total is less daunting than it might be. Moreover, while a number of the items are gated by certain Masteries (primarily Itzel and Nuhoch language and Exalted Aceptance and Gathering), once those Masteries are in your book, getting your hands on the items themselves becomes trivial.

The first I knew of the existence of the Specialization Collections was when items I received early in the HoT Personal Story caused a window to pop up telling me I'd started one. I didn't pay much attention but then more updates appeared as I killed my way across Magus Falls and even Core Tyria.

That was when I took a look at the Collection and found myself thinking "Y'know, this looks doable". Over the last few weeks I've been picking away slowly at the first Collection I discovered, the Druid staff Yggdrasil. Other than a couple of trips to obscure Karma vendors around Tyria I haven't needed to do anything much other than things I'd have been doing anyway.

It's not to say that pursuing the vague goal of someday owning Yggdrasil hasn't directed my day-to-day choices at all. I probably wouldn't have Map Completion for Verdant Brink if I hadn't needed at least one Magus Falls map completed by a Ranger. I might not have bothered to do the sub-collect for the Machined Staff or the Mystic Forge combine for the Mystic Forge if they weren't needed for The Project. I might have taken some of the Masteries in a different order.

And so on and so on. The point is, though, that nothing I ended up doing was anything I wouldn't have done at some point, maybe, probably, randomly. All the collection required was that I change my focus: do this particular thing now rather than later. That's the kind of directed activity in MMOs that I find not just acceptable but welcome. If there's one thing I often need but find hard to find it's a bit of focus.

On Christmas evening I finished up both the Machined and Mystic Staff requirements and took possession of Yggdrasil. It looks rather good, I think. A neatened, tidied version of the exotic Druid's Staff that marks a ranger's transition to the druidic life and which appears to be a sapling pulled up by the roots from some public park.

Mrs Bhagpuss, naturally, finished her Yggdrasil weeks ago, following it up with the Thief's Bo, which, being a staff, shares some of the steps. Thief is the only class I don't have on the main account and I have no plans to add one so I'll probably move on to Ydalir, the Dragonhunter's bow, next. Of all the new Elite specs the Guardian's Dragonhunter is the only one for which I prefer the new weapon to any of the old choices.

Over time, though, I expect to complete all the Specialization Collections. They're neither too easy nor too hard. They're just about right.

Orange, Pink Or Purple? The Legendary Future Of Heart Of Thorns: GW2

One aspect of GW2 that has never interested me in the slightest is the acquisition of Legendary weapons. For the three years since launch they have had little practical appeal since their stats are identical to those of Ascended, the tier above Exotic, which was so controversially added to the game within a few months of launch.

GW2 was always touted as an MMO without a gear grind. It was suggested that all "endgame" content could be successfully and enjoyably completed in Exotics, the original, if short-lived, uppermost rung of the gear ladder. Legendary weapons merely offered a supposed visual and aesthetic advantage. They glowed with particle effects and also added a particle effect to the player's footsteps, but a player was no more powerful wielding one than he would be with an exotic.

The visual appeal was always lost on me. In my opinion,
most Legendaries look like they would be better employed as props for the late Liberace's stage act if not the accouterments of an especially demented children's entertainer. Timmy Mallet comes disturbingly to mind and just be thankful I decided against a YouTube link. Call me a traditionalist but I rather like weapons that look like weapons and bows that fire arrows not unicorns.

Legendary weapons do have one, minor practical advantage over the more easily obtained Ascended and the common Exotic in that you can change their stats. For a long time only Legendaries offered this option and, even now that it has become possible to re-forge Ascended items in the Mystic Forge, Legendary weapons retain an edge since only they can be re-modelled on the fly.

The occasions when you might have wanted to change the stats on your weapon, however, have always been few and far between. Most players pick a build and stick with it. A berserker does not change his meta. Tweak it, perhaps, but only when the change has been duly authorized by MetaBattle.

With the imminent arrival of Heart of Thorns, and particularly the raids that will follow close behind, the practical advantages of Legendary weapons may increase. There is some indication that players may be required to become more flexible. Sticking with the same build through thick and thin may not be the sound strategy it has proved for so long. Being able to swap the stats around on your big stick between raid bosses or even during the long open-world event chains could, theoretically, come to be considered optimal play.

Weapons are extremely important in GW2 but a weapon, Legendary or not, only occupies one slot. You can hardly change your entire build just by swapping the stats on one item. Which is where Legendary armor comes in. The announcement seems rather to have slipped in through the back door, tucked away in the last paragraph of a dev blog on Raids, but yes, the game is getting another tier of gear:

"...raids will introduce the very first ever set of legendary armor. This isn’t any ordinary armor set! Similarly to legendary weapons, you’ll be able to change the stats that the armor provides."

It may take a while but Full Legendary will become de rigeur for serious raiding guilds. Raid leaders will certainly require key roles to be able to swap seamlessly from one build to another, without leaving the instance, as and when circumstances and Bosses demand. There must also be the risk of Legendary Creep if devs choose to design (or revamp) some of the larger open world events to use the supposedly more advanced AI of HoT mobs in a way that assumes players are able to hot-swap builds.

All that's required to complete the transition would be the addition of a feature that's been demanded, almost half-heartedly, in the past but which is now beginning to appear essential: the ability to save traits and skills to a specific template. With that in place we could potentially see a de facto gear grind after all.

Or we could if the bar for raids hadn't been set so extremely high. So long as Legendary armor stays behind the skill wall of raiding, where, lest we forget, "Only the bravest of heroes will be able to collect and craft these legendary threads" then I'm guessing the bulk of the game, and the bulk of its players, will either have lug several sets of Ascended around with them in their bags or just do what I do and ignore the whole darn thing.

Ding 720! : GW2

What do people do when they hit the level cap in GW2? Wait! Don't tell me, don't tell me - I know this one!

I should do, at least. It's hardly a novelty. I have the full set now, all eight classes. The guardian crossed the finishing line this weekend, just behind the spare ranger, the two of them running neck and neck most of the way. That makes nine Level 80s so far.

It's at this point that I usually start to think about getting them into something more suitable than the random grab-bag of yellows and greens they leveled up in, some of which really should have been upgraded weeks ago. The first time at the cap, way back last autumn, the whole process took a couple of weeks - planning, scrimping, saving, hustling up Ectoplasm, hunting down bones. Arrangements were made, crafters enlisted, decisions worried over at inordinate length as though they really mattered.

Earlier this year it was still taking most of a weekend. Yesterday it took less than half an hour. Although the guardian's a 400-skill Armorsmith and the craft bank overflows with ectos, a quick glance at values and costs put paid to any idea he might have had of making his own Exotics. Not with 2000 Badges of Honor, mostly from the achievement backlog, taking up valuable inventory space, more than enough to pay for six pieces of Berserker's Chainmail from the Armor Master in Yak's Bend Citadel and a Berserker's Greatsword from the Weapon Master standing next to her. A few rings and accessories out of the guild bank, one or two odds and ends from the Trading Post - job done.

It'll go the same way for the new ranger later on today. Level cap to full exotics in minutes. Yes, there's Ascended gear for some slots, with crafted Ascended, which will presumably cover the rest, waiting in the wings. That's enough time-gating to keep someone busy for a good long while, but to what end? Is there anything at all in the game that requires Ascended gear other than as a container for Infusions, and do Infusions have any purpose other than to allow you to do the same content again only with bigger numbers?

No, for any foreseeable purpose, Exotics should be more than enough, Exploring, world events, crafting, Living Story, WvW, that's what my characters do while they level up and that's what they go on doing at the cap. ANet claimed it would work that way and by and large it does. Given the lock on expansions there's really no reason that situation can't persist indefinitely.

With no real gear progression after cap and no gear-locking of content provided by the game itself, it's somewhat amazing to see the wholehearted way players have created a treadmill for themselves. People throw themselves into the grind, willingly or not, just for new skins or items with a different look. The tiniest differences in stats - differences not upgrades - kick up lengthy arguments over which is essential, which useless. Whether there's any material difference in what people can or cannot do with any particular combination that doesn't primarily come down to player skill I beg to doubt, but if it keeps them happy...

Having all eight classes to choose from my preference is the same as it was from the very first beta weekend: Ranger. Widely reckoned to be the weakest, considered broken by those who don't play it and most in need of fixing by many who do, still there seem to be more rangers running around Tyria than any other two classes added together. Currently my go-to class for both open-world PvE and WvW, I understand I won't be getting many dungeon invites but hey, that's probably a bonus!

So, is that it, then? Two rangers, one each of all the rest. Are we done? Hmm... Stand up straight, you lot, asuras at the front. Where's the Charr Engineer? Well that's just not good enough, is it? We're going to need another character slot...

Direction Of Travel: GW2

I wanted to slap Saturday's breathless, Herbie inspired gasp of approval up because it occurred to me that a lot of what I write about GW2, both here and in comments on other blogs, not to mention much of what I say out loud at home, may come across as overly negative. If so, that doesn't accurately reflect the experience I'm having in game. I'm having a whale of a time.

I woke up this morning intending to carry on in much the same vein. That was until I read this  excellent piece at Healing The Masses. It helped quite a few things fall into place and made sense of some confusion I've been having lately over why it is that I find myself disapproving of so much about the way GW2 seems to be going yet at the same time having so much fun playing it.

GW2 is turning out to be an entirely different experience than I anticipated, and indeed than the experience I was having in beta and for the first few months after launch. It's no longer the game we were "promised" or the game we were sold and far from breaking any molds or creating any new paradigms it increasingly appears to be looking back to long-established MMO tropes for inspiration.

...and over the next hill? Another hill...

In beta GW2 gave me one of the best open-world exploring experiences I've ever had in an MMO. Skeptical though I remained, it did seem that there was at least the prospect of an ever-changing world.  That optimism continued in the whirl of Headstart and through the first few weeks after launch. Looking back at my posts from that time there's plenty about exploration and the surprises it brings.

Then came the Karka and with them Fractals and Ascended gear and we all know where that went. What hadn't really sunk in with me until today was how much my own expectations have changed as a result of what happened back in November. Effectively, GW2 turned into roughly the same kind of MMO as EQ2 or Rift and my approach to playing it adapted accordingly without my really noticing.

Might have been better if we'd let them win

Most MMOs have an "end game" with which I don't engage. Usually it's raiding, usually it involves a gear grind. Before the Karka the nearest GW2 had was Legendaries, which I took to have been included merely as an ironic nod to the established obsessiveness of some original Guild Wars players. I fully expected 95% of GW2 players to ignore Legendaries completely.

That they seem to have been accepted as a rite of passage by a substantial segment of the playerbase shouldn't surprise me, given that I was there when Epics were introduced to Everquest. Epics, however, were extremely powerful weapons that made your EQ character substantially more capable in combat. Legendaries just look pretty. So, yes I am surprised. Apparently Barbie went Hardcore while I wasn't looking.

Life begins at 40

Legendaries aside, it was with the arrival of a whole new tier of gear that everything changed. It's been discussed to death so suffice it to say that no matter how many new routes to Ascended Gear may be added and no matter how accessible it can be made, the gear grind genie cannot be forced back into the bottle. J3w3l makes this point very clearly indeed. A lot of people are likely to find themselves increasingly boxed in by this one change and the prospects for players playing even the traditional Main and Alt look bleak.

Bleak, that is, if they are the kind of players who value efficiency, who want to be the best they can be, who are, for want of a more elegant term, Min-Maxers. I'm not. Never have been, never will be. And that's part of why I'm still having a roaring old time in Tyria.

J3w3l comments on leveling alts "The different classes are a lot of fun to play even if leveling them isn’t..." but of course for me it is. I love leveling and GW2 offers enormous variety and potential. My seventh run through, Mesmer, is half-way there. She dinged 40 yesterday. I'm already impatient to get her to 80 so I can start my second ranger, an Asura this time, and play him or her up through a lot of the Southern areas I don't really know very well. And since I have no intention of getting Ascended gear for any of my characters, there's no sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at the prospect of adding another to the roster.

Why would you want to?

GW2 for me has turned into a still-new, still-shiny version of every other MMO. There's an increasingly big part of the game, the part the developers seem mainly focused on and to which players are expected to aspire, from which I have largely opted out. Even though I've had very thoughtful and welcome invitations in the comments here from readers and bloggers like Ursan and Phil to join them in doing some of the content I appear to be missing out on, I haven't taken the offers up so far because I really don't feel I am missing out.

Like many MMOs before, where I had ample opportunities and offers to go raiding, for example, I find I have more than enough things I want to be getting on with already. As Calvin and Hobbes would say, the days are just packed. I still don't like or approve of the direction GW2 has taken, something I may examine in more detail another time, but I absolutely can live with it so long as I keep finding this much content that I'm both eager and able to do.

Don't need to tell me twice!

There are unexpected, possibly unintended side effects to the New Direction. I purely love the new loot changes. It embarrasses me to admit not just that my current gameplay revolves around a completely artificial, un-immersive map-hopping circuit of lag-ridden loot-fests but that I'm loving every minute of it. Everything from studying the timers to riding the event wave to the banter in map chat while we wait to the frame-rate killing firework display when the Boss spawns to the "what's in the box?" reveal - fun fun fun fun FUN!

I have a lot of max level characters to dress. Most of them were in Masterwork greens with a smattering of Rare yellows before this change. Steadily those greens are being replaced by yellows and the yellows I can't use are being converted into ectos to become exotics. Mrs Bhagpuss has looted Final Rest twice, along with a couple of other named weapons. I haven't been so lucky but I open every chest in the knowledge that this could be the time.

It's exciting, it's satisfying, it's entertaining and it's easy. I think it's time I admitted to myself that after a decade and a half that may not be all I want from an MMO but it's enough to be going on with, at least until something better comes along. And if nothing better does come along, well I'm having fun and that's the important part.

Everyone loves fireworks

As for where the game is going, I suspect ArenaNet are painting themselves into a corner with an increasingly restrictive, coercive, hardcore end-game bolted onto a free-wheeling, roistering, genuinely casual-friendly open-world leveling game. Unless they have better solutions than anyone else has come up with so far this is a road that can only lead to a fractured, dislocated playerbase where different interest groups lobby hard for their individual, incompatible aspirations.

Same place as every other MMO, then.

Battle Plans: GW2

I spent half an hour before work and most of my lunch hour scanning the recent Ask Me Anything interview Chris Whiteside from ArenaNet did for Reddit. There's a quick-read version with just the questions Chris and others from ANet actually answered, which Ravious also links to in his piece about it at Kill Ten Rats, but I think it's worth browsing the whole thread because many of the questions that didn't get answered are more interesting than those that did.

It's clear that the whole Ascended fiasco has had repercussions that we'll be feeling and hearing about for a long time to come. Most of the answers are damage-limitation and conciliation around that and the effect is reasonably soothing. The gist seems to be that Ascended gear is not step one of a gear ladder, that there will be ways to get Ascended gear to suit a number of playstyles and that access to these will roll out next year. If we do get another tier it will come in an expansion or a content drop of expansion-like proportions. Wiggle room there, then.

Chris also acknowledges more than once that the way Ascended gear was introduced was not done well. I didn't feel, though, that a convincing case was made for why it needed to be done at all, nor was any case made for why it had to be done in such a tearing hurry. Something doesn't add up.

Among the few questions on other topics that did get answered, apparently it is confirmed that the recent addition of supposed better loot drops to the loot tables of Veteran and Champion mobs isn't working as intended and is being investigated and that there is still an intention to get something done with Personal Instances (AKA housing). More interesting open-world loot and somewhere to hang my incredibly limited selection of hats (fix that, ANet!) would certainly help to wash away any lingering bad PR taste for me.

My conclusion is that ArenaNet's ultra-consistent pre-launch plans did not survive their first encounter with live players. So it's an MMO after all, then.

Ascended vs Ascended : Rift vs GW2

Oh what a kerfuffle. Our lovely flat-leveling-curve-no-trinity-whole game-is-end game-mold-breaking MMO turned out to be just another vertical progression gear-grinder after all. Maybe.

There's a thread the size of Jupiter about it over at the official forums and the MMO blogosphere spontaneously combusted. Over at ArenaNet damage limitation protocols have been activated with  limited success.

KTR has the skinny and more revelatory links.

In other news, as Potshot observes in a welcome return, Rift has a pending gearpocalypse of its own, something I noticed on accepting my very first quest in the New Continent.



The difference?

Rift players are getting what they expected and almost certainly wanted. GW2 players...aren't.

There's absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with making a solid, end-game focused, dungeon-oriented gear-grind vertical progression theme park MMO. Make a good one and that's fine. Just don't say you're making something totally different then morph into one five minutes after launch.

Of course it makes only the most notional difference to me since I rarely get to end-games in the first place and have no intention of even setting foot in the dungeons in question, far less grinding in them for gear to let me grind in them more. If this wasn't just a video game I might say it's the principle of the thing but it is so I won't because that would be fatuous.

We really shouldn't be surprised when this stuff happens. But then if we weren't, we'd all be SynCaine. Then where would we be?