School's Out : GW2

As we walked through some local woodland this morning, enjoying the welcome, warm summer sunshine after yesterday's storms, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were chatting about the current glut of activities on offer in Guild Wars 2. She was of the opinion that games companies like to try to get the attention of bored kids on their summer break from school, whereas I wasn't so convinced that kids are interested in the kind of games we play.

Since almost no games companies like to release demographics, all evidence is necessarily anecdotal or observational, so take that as a warning, but it's my impression that school-age players are a vanishingly-small  minority in most of the online games I play. GW2 does probably skew as young as any but even there it seems as though anyone under college age stands out as the exception.

I was more of the opinion that interest in gaming drops off during the summer, when better weather, vacation time and the competing attractions of outdoor activities from kayaking to barbecues draw players away from the keyboard and into the great outdoors. Or at least the back yard. The plethora of events, I contended, is designed to mitigate that loss, to claw back some ground, dissuade people from putting their subscriptions on hold, keep the cash shop registers ringing.

This year, of  course, is about as atypical as it could get (we hope). You might expect some extra activity. But it happens every year. Summer comes and every MMORPG lights up like the carnival's come to town, which in some games it literally has.

ArenaNet were slow to cotton on to the pattern but now they've twigged they seem keen to make up for lost time. There are currently no fewer than four major events running concurrently.

In World vs World we 're enjoying the return of the popular-with-many, loathed-by-some No Downed State.  This is a switch-flick event whereby ANet turn off whatever flag it is that lets your character fall to the ground and twitch like a swatted wasp for anything up to half a minute while your enemies try to put you out of your misery.

This has all kinds of implications, some of which apply to most everyone, others which only affect individual classes. I won't go into details or we'll be here until long after the week-long event has ended.  Suffice to say, some people like it because it makes clashes between large groups fast, furious and above all decisive, three things they usually are not. It also makes ganking people a lot more efficient, if less fun for the ganker, since a favorite tactic has always been to make the downed victim squirm for as long as possible before finally administering the coup de grace.

It's hard to say exactly how popular No Downed State really is because every time ANet employ this crowd-pleaser they accompany it with a bunch of bonuses. This time we're getting

• 25% bonus to reward-track progress
• Gain double WXP
• Receive a 50% bonus to magic find

All of which bring the PvXers in by the coachload. On reset night there was reportedly a queue or almost 200 to get in to Eternal Battlegrounds in my Tier 4 match. By the time I got to play over the weekend that was down to around fifty and during the week it's sometimes dipped as low as half  a dozen. All of those are way higher than normal.

That event's going well, then, but it pales into total insignificance compared to the return of another of ANet's favorites, the PvE juggernaut known as World Boss Rush.

This is a gimme by anyone's standards. It involves no changes to the game at all other than the addition of some bonus rewards. If you're in on a World Boss kill you get some extra boxes to open and that's it. Oh, and there's a series of  "Community Goals", whereby the server keeps track of... erm... something... it's never been clear to me what... and when the event ends everyone gets a care package based on how well the "community" did. Or something. It's vague.

But it's evidently quite clear enough to bring in the crowds. I got swept up in the Rush yesterday and ended up doing a whole bunch of World Bosses. I just missed the Frozen Maw when I logged in but I caught it on it's next pop so that was a straight two hours.

I did Modniir, Fire Elemental, Golem Mk II, Great Jungle Wurm, Claw of Jormag, Shadow Behemoth, then I skipped Taidha so I could empty my bags before finishing up back at the Maw. There were so many people that most of the fights presented as a slide-show and I failed to get credit at FE altogether because my screen froze completely. By the time I had contol of my character again the caravan had moved on to Jormag.

It's a popular event, then. Only, you can do it every day, all year, every year. Those same bosses spawn at those same times forever. On any given day, any month, there's always  a "boss train" running. This event is literally "what we do every day" and the bonus rewards are literally "more of the same things we always get".

For me, the attraction is the crowds. Obviously I don't love screen-freezes but I do love being in zergs so big they cause screen-freezes. To me, GW2's USP is a huge, chaotic, disorderly rabble charging across the countryside in an explosion of neon fireworks. That's what I don't pay my money for. So I'm happy.

I also really like the third event on the card, the Queen's Pavillion. This is a double-header holiday event in which Divinity's Reach is twinned with Labyrinthine Cliffs, of which (not very much) more later.

There are three attractions in the Queen's Pavilion. One is a mount race. I hate mounts but I love mount races. Don't call me on it or I'll bring that quote out again.

The second is Queen's Gauntlet, a series of one-on-one cage fights between your character and a named NPC. I did that the first year it appeared and got as far as the penulitimate opponent. Couldn't beat the very last one. Haven't really bothered with it since other than to tick off one of the easy round one challenges for the daily.

Third and by far the most enjoyable in my book is Boss Blitz, a round-robin event in which you have to defeat six Legendary bosses in a set time. This one has all the things I like about group events in GW2 - it takes tactics, organization, communication and discipline. If you use the LFG tool to get into an organized squad it can go like clockwork. If you just pug it in a random map it can be anything from a hysterical clownshow to a name-calling debacle. Fun for all the foul-mouthed family!

I got into an excellent squad on my first try and knocked off several Gold runs in a row. Yesterday I happened on a random PUG map that was both good-natured and intelligent and we peeled off a string of silvers. I'm waiting for my disaster map. I'm sure it won't be long in coming.

Last and very definitely least in the tetralogy is the aforementioned Labyrinthine Cliffs. Technically both it and the Queen's  Gauntlet are part of the same event, Festival of the Four Winds, but the two share nothing in common other than some daily achievements so I think of them as entirely separate.

And so, it seems does everyone else. Mrs. Bhagpuss was complaining that so far she hasn't been able to find a single group, let alone a squad, advertising on LFG to do anything in the Cliffs. I was there for a few minutes this morning and in that brief time I heard two people complaining in map chat that the zone was dead and no-one was doing any of the events there.

I must say I haven't bothered this year. The Cliffs events tend to be on timers long enough to make hanging around waiting for things to begin feel very annoying. Plus they last quite a long time and the map is very awkward to navigate. Compared to any of the other three all-you-can-kill buffets in the current feeding frenzy, Labyrinthine Cliffs feels creaky and old.

World Boss Rush and No Downed State each last a week, although they started at slighty different times. According to the wiki, Festival of the Four Winds goes on a bit longer than that, until 1 September. Maybe that will give Labyrinthine Cliffs a chance to come into its own for a few days.

I kind of doubt it. We'll be into the Eighth Anniversary celebrations and the underwater mount by then. Remember when we didn't have anything to do in GW2? Remind me. When was that again?

Get Smart : GW2

Festival of the Four Winds ends today. I had to be at work by eight in the morning so I thought last night's session was the last I'd see of The Crown Pavilion and Labrynthine Cliffs until next year.
I spent most of the evening on the newest of my three accounts, the only one that wasn't around last time we saw this content, grabbing bundles in the Treasure Hunt and doing any event I could find to earn Festival Tokens.

I just managed to scrape up enough treasure to by a kite and with my tokens I got a hot air balloon on a string and that yellow flower that goes on your back. The sense of satisfaction when I was finally able to buy them, just before the clock passed the absolute latest I could stay up and still be half-awake in work the next day, was disturbing. I haven't been that keen to get something in an MMORPG for a long while.

Then I get home tonight, have my tea, read Feedly, log in and find the Festival's still there! I'm  listening to the sounds of preparations for Boss Blitz in the background as I type.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I had something to say about Boss Blitz. I really enjoy it as an exciting, involving event  but I also find it fascinating as a social and psychological experiment. Or perhaps it's a demonstration.

Boss Blitz isn't hard to understand or to do. The optimal way to run the event is for everyone to split into six teams of eight to ten people. Ideally, certain classes or builds concentrate on particular bosses that suit their abilities. There are some mechanics that need to be explained, such as Boom Boom Baines' healing turret, but most of the bosses are tank&spank with a lot of dodging.

Once set up, preferably under six Commanders using different colored tags for clarity, each team goes to its designated Boss. All teams then attempt to bring their Boss to 10% health at the same time. Some inevitably get there first, meaning they have to "hold" the Boss at that point without doing further damage.

Someone needs to call out the health of each boss at frequent intervals in a public channel. I often took it upon myself to do that bit. I like yelling. I got suppressed a few times for spamming map chat, something which is all too easy to do in GW2, where you can be banned from sending items to your own characters after two deliveries in quick succession. I should have used /squad which doesn't use the same anti-spam mechanics.

Once the slowest team gets their boss to 10%, their Commander gets to give the "Burn" command, whereupon everyone goes flat out to kill the boss in front of them as fast as possible. The reason for the co-ordinated kill is that each boss passes its signature ability (bombs, adds, banishment) on to all the other bosses when it dies, meaning each kill makes every other boss more difficult.

If everything goes to plan a good, organized map can complete this in about five minutes. The timer for the Gold award is eight minutes. This year I didn't get one Gold in three weeks. Four and five years ago I got plenty. I'm not sure what to read into that. Have GW2 players got worse? Is the event harder? Was I just unlucky with the maps I picked?

I did get lots of high Silvers (time limit sixteen minutes, we did it often in nine or ten) and any number of Bronzes (no time limit). I used the LFG tool to swap maps often until I got one that was at least trying to get Gold or Silver. There were fewer of those than you might expect.

Most of the maps were barely organized at all. Instead of doing it as described above (a description that I saw repeated in map chat many times by patient or frustrated players) people did what they do everywhere in GW2 - ran around in a huge zerg trying to overwhelm all opposition by weight of numbers. Some of the squads advertizing in LFG even said "zerg" or "bronze" in the description, indicating an active disinclination to make more than the minimal effort.

Of course, zerging means that not only does each boss get harder as it acquires the abilities of the ones who died before it, but GW2's scaling mechanic means every boss also gains a gigantic health pool to reflect the army of players opposing it. An event that is self-evidently intended to take between eight to sixteen minutes often stretches out to half an hour or more.

The fascinating part is that by the second week of the Festival everyone knew this and yet the majority of players carried on doing it anyway. Angry and embittered experts railed against the idiocy but it seems clear to me that most players preferred to zerg. They knew it would take longer and they just didn't care.

After all, it's not like they had anywhere else to be. This is the event of the moment so they were doing it. The rewards for finishing faster weren't significantly better so there wasn't much incentive to organize. And in any case, zerging is a social activity, not a competetive one.

Watching this drama enacted over and over again was instructive and entertaining. Some people were so angry they must have had steam coming out of their ears in real life. The accusation was almost always that those who wouldn't organize were too stupid to know what was expected of them but the replies very clearly indicated the opposite. Everyone knew what they "should" be doing - they just didn't want to do it.

I very much did want to do it properly. I love organized content. I like events where everyone has to get into teams and go to different places and do different things to achieve a collective success. I love Dragon's Stand and Auric Basin and my favorite event of all time in GW2 was Scarlet's Marionette.

And yet I still enjoy a good, mindless zerg, even when I'm well aware it's inefficient and even counter-productive. Running around in gang of fifty, taking on massive hit-point sponges and wearing them down by sheer bloody-mindedness has its own appeal.

I guess you can have smart, clever fun or dumb, stupid fun. Either way you're still having fun.

Give me the choice and I'll go for the smart option, though. Well, eight times out of ten.

Christmas In July : GW2

Hands up who saw this coming? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Here's the press release.

It's tempting to be ultra-cynical and say ANet really needed a crowd-pleaser about now but surely they can't have thrown this all together in a week? Can they?

Then again, people have been asking for the return of The Festival of Four Winds, Boss Blitz and The Crown Pavilion for years now with absolutely no sign that anyone was listening. Now here they all are at once. Coincidence?

Whatever. I'll take it. I've lost count of the number of times I've said GW2 needs more in-game holidays. I never understood why Four Winds wasn't an annual event in the first place. There was never a lore reason against it that I could see, even after the destruction of most of the Zephrite fleet. The festival grounds were mainly earthbound or entirely separate from the airships after all.

As for The Crown Pavilion and Boss Blitz, it always seemed they were dropped because they were too popular, if anything. No-one really did anything else when they were running.

It all kicks off in just seven days! Doesn't say how long it lasts but I would guess two weeks.

Bring it on!

You'd Have To Pay Me To Do That : GW2

ArenaNet's response to the howls of justified outrage/whines of selfish entitlement that followed the return of the heavily re-vamped Queen's Gauntlet was surprising. Rather than return the event to its old form (never on the cards), tinker with the mechanics (always a good bet) or tweak the difficulty (pretty much odds-on) they decided instead to refurbish the reward structure.

Here's the new version from the patch notes:

• The Crown Pavilion’s Boss Blitz event has had its rewards adjusted in the following ways:

• Bronze Tier
  • Increased the number of champion loot bags from 2 to 6.
  • Increased the number of Festival Tokens from 15-21 to 40.
• Silver Tier
  • Increased the number of champion loot bags from 4 to 8.
  • Increased the number of Festival Tokens from 30-36 to 60.
• Gold Tier
  • Increased the number of champion loot bags from 8 to 10.
  • Increased the number of Festival Tokens from 46-52 to 80.
  
  

Intriguingly, this change is listed under "Bug Fixes". Hard to imagine that the original version simply shipped with the wrong numbers attached but swiftly skating over that particular stretch of thin ice...

As long as I've played GW2 people have complained loud and long about the risk vs reward structure. When the game launched Veterans and Champions were just harder, not more rewarding. They had, as far as could be ascertained, the same loot tables as normal mobs. Mostly they dropped nothing. Consequently people didn't fight them if they could avoid it.

After a while and a lot of complaining on the forums Vets and Champs got a loot pass so they at least dropped a blue or green item every time. Whoop and indeed dee-doo. Still no-one killed them.

Time passed. Complaints continued. Eventually ANet threw up its collective hands. In came The Champ Revamp. In a seeming fit of passive-aggressive "Is that what you want? Cos that's what'll happen!" overnight Champions became freighted with loot - items, skill scrolls, crafting mats, coin... you name it, they had it. All across Tyria the Champ Trains chugged out of their forgotten branch-line stations onto the main lines where hordes of eager passengers were waiting to ride them to fortune, if not to fame or glory.


In update after update a very large segment of the playerbase has demonstrated that if there's easily accessible content that can be zerged down for a reward even slightly better than five copper pieces and an Unidentifiable Object, out they will turn, in numbers. In update after update ANet have demonstrated that much, most, of the content they create is amenable to being mobbed even if that wasn't the intention. We did The Southsun Stroll, Scarlet's Invasions of Convenience, Queen's Gauntlet Mark One, Edge of the Mists Never The Teams Shall Meet 24/7 Champ Farm and many more now forgotten.

Eventually ANet appeared to tire of the players endlessly innovative ways of turning finely-tuned content into the zergfest du jour. In came Tequatl, the Marionnette, Three-Headed Wurm, the Fall of Lion's Arch and now Boss Blitz, all sending out the message loud and clear - play the damn game the right way, not the lazy way. To which the general reply has been "make it worth our while and we will", the problem most players having with these events not being, on the whole that they are too hard but that they are too hard for the time and effort they take.

There does seem to be a fundamental disconnect between the GW2 players and developers on what constitutes a fair reward. Developers remain convinced, for example, that a handful of green quality Mastercrafted items provides a suitable and satisfying reward despite all evidence to the contrary.

The policy even extends beyond simple loot drops and event rewards. Look no further than the vendor just added to swap out surplus Blade Shards. To quote ArenaNet some weeks back when they trailed it thus:

"Please don’t delete them!

You can hold on to your extra blade shards, as the team will be adding something later which will allow you to convert the shards to something of value."

What was the something of value? A green item. The very same item, that is to say, which will either be sold to a vendor for a pittance or deconstructed for crafting mats and Essence of Luck, which builds Magic Find, which is desired because it increases the chances of getting better loot than Greens, which no one wants to get if they can avoid it.

Players do not, as a rule, enjoy getting poor quality items as a reward for a big fight. They'd rather have an item of reasonable quality or a fixed amount of currency with which they can buy one. Hell, they'd probably take a choice of nothing at all most times against a good chance of a much better item, so long as that item dropped at a frequency that felt fair.

In the absence of anything genuinely desirable being offered, however, many pragmatic players are willing to settle for a pile of intrinsically useless junk so long as it can be sold or converted into something useful and, most importantly, so long as the pile is big enough to make them feel they haven't completely wasted their time. The pile now on offer for running the Queen's Gauntlet has been weighed and found to be just about adequate. The sputtering, failing festival is, fitfully, back in business.

I did the Gauntlet three times last night. I had to Guest to change megaserver maps to find one that wasn't utterly shambolic. I lucked onto one filled with good-spirited, polite, pleasant, conversational players. First run was a shambles but instead of everyone leaving a big discussion began on how we could do better, commander tags were popped, people co-operated, we took another run at it and had five bosses down with two minutes to go on the Silver timer.

We failed that one and took Bronze but everyone was upbeat. Several people commented it was the closest they'd ever come to Silver. I hadn't planned on staying but it was such a pleasant environment I changed my mind and lined up for another try. After a shaky start we went into Silver Time two bosses down. With two minutes left we still had two bosses to go but unlike last time, when the Ogre was at full health and proved too much for the half-dozen players trying not to scale him, both were around 30%.

When the last boss went down there were three seconds left on the clock. It was exciting, satisfying and entertaining and I'd had enough and so had most everyone else. The commanders tagged down and people drifted off. I de-guested and went to the Borderlands, where I remained for the next four hours until bedtime.

It's not that I don't, won't or can't enjoy ANet's new direction, then, even though my personal preference remains very strongly skewed towards the open, inclusive, come-as-you-are approach that we were promised in the long run-up to launch. You may remember it as the paradigm shift in gameplay that would change MMOs forever. Well, they tried that and it came out very differently to how they expected so now we all have to revise our expectations.

That's okay. MMOs change. This one's changed a bit more and a bit faster than most but never mind, buckle up, let's get on with it. As the Marionnette and last night's QG run demonstrate, there is indeed fun to be had here if you're willing to adapt.

Except that if we're going to revamp the game to fit in structured content that requires organization, don't we also need to revamp the UI so that we can, y'know, organize? At the moment it feels like some kind of management bonding game where a bunch of people who only met ten minutes ago have to figure out a way to get across a river using a pile of planks and a yo-yo.

The current bad feeling around the game most likely isn't caused by players' lack of interest or willingness try new things. No, more likely it's the sense that we're being taken for mugs, treated like a resource not an asset. We shouldn't have to scratch and scrabble for fun in a game, especially one that likes to bill itself as open and inclusive.

Sort out the risk vs reward (and in GW2 "risk" really means "time spent"). Sort out the mechanics. Give us raid frames and instances and in-game voice chat. Design content that we want to play and give us the means to play it instead of having to play against it. Turn your game into the kind of game you said it was going to replace if you must, only at least do it well.

Maybe then the rage will subside and the whining will die down. Then again...