The Coming Of The Megaserver : GW2

If Year Zero can have a Day One then, for GW2, tomorrow is it. Just another twenty-four hours, give or take coffee and do-nuts, and we'll know everything there is to know about Megaservers.

Except we won't, will we? It was all quite clear at first - start at the beginning with the 1-15 maps, see how that goes, work upwards from there. Then there was a hoo-hah, retrenchment ensued and we were told the least-populated maps would get Megaserved first. That didn't stick either.

The current position appears to be...fluid. From the most recent Dolyak Express thread:

Q: Since the megaserver changes will initially affect a few areas, will the World Boss schedule table be true just for the light yellow bosses or are the rest of the World Bosses also going into the new schedule even if their areas are still not part of the megaserver?

Samuel Loretan: No, the World Bosses schedule will be released globally on April 15th. Note that the order of rollout of the MegaServer system may still change, as we’re still conducting tests, and as we will be adjusting the parameters depending on our monitoring. While I know that it isn’t what was in the blog post, we’re adjusting this to ensure the best experience for everyone, and the smoother possible rollout of this feature, which has a very large scope and requires careful operation.

I just bet it does.

It's behind you!

Anyway, all this got me thinking about World Bosses (horrible descriptor that it is, although possibly not as horrible as World Metas, which is what they often get called when the Train is running). For the first few months of GW2's existence the big ticket events like the three dragon lieutenants, The Maw, Shadow Behemoth and Fire Elemental, had no specific rewards attached to them. A chest would pop but inside it you'd find just a litter of blues and greens, with a low chance of a yellow rare, a vanishingly small chance of an orange exotic and the purely theoretical possibility of the Pre-Cursor to a Legendary (are they purple? I wouldn't know).

Even though there was very little in the way of tangible rewards people still did those events. I did Claw of Jormag any time it happened to be up and I knew about it, which wasn't as often then as it would be later because if there was any equivalent of GWStuff or its predecessor the Dragon Timer, then I hadn't yet found it. Everyone moaned bitterly about the vendor trash but there were always enough people to get those dragons down.

You can criticize his spelling all you like but you can't fault him on his accuracy.

Then Fractals came and overnight it seemed like half the population had vanished. For a while the Claw of Jormag became all but unkillable and even the Shaman at The Maw scoffed at the feeble turnout, although I notice he never actually managed to summon that Elemental no matter how long he hung around.

For many, though, the fractal attraction didn't last and people were soon back at the large-scale set pieces that were supposed to be the jewels in the crown of GW2's dynamic events system, doing what they enjoyed most - complaining bitterly about the terrible loot.

Finally ANet bowed to the pressure to make the Dragons "worth doing", added guaranteed rares, fixed a few bugs and juggled the RNG. The Risk vs Reward ratio suddenly looked an awful lot better (as well it should, seeing that with the numbers turning up there was now no freakin' risk at all!) As I wrote here , by February 2013 a World Meta Train was already in place, although no-one back then was calling it that.

Um..is anyone else still here?

Reading my own words, I'm quite surprised to find just how disenchanted and cynical I already was, just six months or so after launch. I guess that, since I thought even then that "Each event has a margin of error, presumably in an attempt to create some spurious sense of spontaneity but in practice all of them pop at numbingly regular intervals." it's hardly surprising the upcoming change from fake-spontaneity to an openly fixed schedule has had less impact on my sense of immersion than might have been expected. That fragile vessel shattered into fragments long ago.

The details are hazy now but somehow that first iteration of Guaranteed Rares got out of hand. I think you got one per character per day per boss and take-up was so great it was crashing both maps and the economy. By mid-March the train had picked up such momentum that the tracks were beginning to melt and ANet took the opportunity of the beginning of the Living Story to add some brakes.

Things calmed down after that and we all settled into a routine. I even put up a series of guides for the lackadaisical  that still work to a degree, although a number of much-needed passes on difficulty in the following months have meant that almost all the events now take a lot longer to complete than they did when I wrote the guides and the possibility of failure is now a lot higher.

If all these people are here, how come the only paw-prints in the snow are mine?

That long, rambling, inaccurately-recalled  trip down memory lane brings me up to yesterday, when, as is my wont of a Sunday (and most other days of the week come to think of it) I did several of the Dragon Events on both my accounts. I say "Dragon Events" because people still call them that once in a while. I didn't, of course, do any of the three actual dragons. What would be the point?

Tequatl, who so impressed me waaay back in September 2012 now needs an organized raid of a hundred people. Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer mostly work out their anger issues unobserved except when the train runs at Reset, the extended time taken to kill them being widely considered no longer commensurate with the rewards.

Even at a busy time on a Sunday a good turn-out is no longer guaranteed for the easier options but that scarcely matters because of one of GW2's dirty little secrets: barring the very biggest, almost all Dynamic Events are at their best when seen with as few people as possible.

Should have stopped half way through that sentence.

I did The Maw twice yesterday, the first time with four people and the second with about ten. It was exciting, well-paced and fun. People got knocked down and picked up, people kited the Shaman around, pets tanked. For a while it was touch and go but in the end we won in good time. I'm not saying either was as thrilling as the two times I've completed it with just two other players but sometimes you just have to share the fun. As I was glad to do at Fire Elemental, an event that's often hard enough to complete even with a good turn-out, but which we managed to knock off successfully with just four of us.

When the Megaserver beds in, extending its tentacles across all maps, there should be some definite benefits. It's been weeks since I last did Jormag or Shatterer and I miss them both. It'll be good to see a crowd gather for those. On the other hand, though, I wonder if there will ever be another Three-Man Maw. Melting the Shaman in seconds with a massive zerg may be a spectacle but it's not going to create many "I was there" moments, is it?

And maybe if no-one does turn up there could be consequences? Oh, silly me. 

I hope that, despite ANet's promise (or is it a threat?) that "the MegaServer system is just the beginning, and we are exploring all sorts of approaches in creating meaningful and solid social units for the system to use" there will still be the odd empty map here and there. They may have designed Dynamic Events to scale for scores of players but I get the distinct feeling that the  playtesting was carried out by an individual or a small group, because that's really where the detail and the love and attention that went into them all shines most brightly.

However it turns out, though, I'll still be doing the Maw every chance I get because I know another of GW2's dirty little secrets: you always get a Rare in the Big Chest at The Maw. Okay, almost always. I do it every day, often several times a day. Last time I didn't get a Rare was back in November. Often I get two. Or three. None of the other World Bosses pumps out the Yellows like the Svanir Shaman. I probably owe him for about a quarter of my Ecto Mountain.


Only being able to do him once every two hours is going to cut my income considerably so I just better make sure I don't miss any of my limited openings from now on. See you at The Maw, every other hour on the quarter.

You're Not The Boss Of Me! : GW2

On paper, my take on Tequatl Rising, the latest of GW2's inexorable biweekly updates, ought to be diametrically opposed to Jeromai's. That was certainly the case for the preceding two week's worth of 8-bit hell that he both completed and chronicled so exhaustively but which I scrupulously avoided to the point not just of skipping The Box itself but of not logging in to the game at all for the entire two week period during which it was the starring attraction.

The current offering eschews casio tonalities and kindergarten color schemes, offering instead a whopping great "evolved" dragon and a difficulty pass for all his Bossy pals; not just his dragon buddies Shatner and The Claw but all the rest of the Pinata Gang from the Fire Elemental to Megadestroyer. These bosses have been favored content of mine since the first of the various loot passes turned them from sideshows to main events, so having a whole update complete with Achievements and Dailies based around them would appear to be right up my street.

Well, you'd think so, but there's a catch. The one carry-over from Super Adventure Box seems to be the idea that if players like to do something they'll like to do it even more if they have to do it while someone sprays them with a fire hose and throws stones at their head.

Being in no particular way unhappy or discontent with the difficulty level we've had for the last few months, I was not clamoring for the Tequatl fight, nor any of these fights, to be made harder. I was not bored with them. I found them relaxing and fun. Believe it or not, I didn't do a few of them every day because I wanted the loot but because I knew if I went to The Frozen Maw or Jungle Wurm I'd be guaranteed a good time.

Last night I logged into GW2 for the first time since I got seriously stuck into FFXIV. My Necromancer virtually lives either in Sparkfly Fen or Mount Maelstrom so she got the call. She found herself in a vile green mist. Taking stock of her somewhat unfamiliar surroundings she noticed the inelegant addition of dozens of four-foot tall rotting fish-heads sticking out of the sand and being an Asura she began immediately to investigate.

After a kind bystander revived her, then revived her once more after the fish-head respawned and one-shotted her again just as she was thanking him for reviving her the first time, she took up a judicious observing role on a nearby podium until the traditional Hylek call of "Therrre's somethning in the waterrr!" announced the arrival of the star of the show.

A lengthy and quite enjoyable battle ensued, during which she adopted the traditional Necromancer role of area denial, keeping wave after wave of Krait and sundry undead from overwhelming the cannons, so long ignored but which now perform a vital, nay essential task. Lose the canons and you've had it, basically.

That went well enough, although it was already beginning to wear out its welcome by the time a clangorous sound announced the charging of no fewer than four Asuran megalasers. The Dynamic Event teleprompter warned that to lose even a single laser would spell disaster, which was exactly what happened not much more than a minute or two later when the first one fell to the mindless hordes of undead that had appeared out of nowhere (or possibly the sea).

Tequatl kicked up a vast tsunami and sent it rolling across the beach, leaving every player quite literally dead in the water, along with the event itself. Someone must have hung back because the revives began, along with the post-mortem. Guests from other servers said we'd done well to get the dragon to somewhere around two-thirds health, or maybe it was eighty percent. Hard to count when you're fighting for your life in two feet of filthy water, especially when you're only four feet tall. It was deemed "a good try", anyway. Apparently the best any server had managed at the time was half-way.

On a single exposure my feeling was "that was quite amusing but once is probably enough". From the comments in map chat that was an opinion shared by many, although sometimes without the "that was quite amusing" part. I'm not sure if this version of Tequatl is a one-week only performance, after which he will revert to something closer to his former punchbag persona, but if by any chance it does turn out to stay this way then I'd say the chances of gathering the required 80+ people to give him anything like a run for his money will be slim.

Next I checked the timer at Dragon Temple and saw that Claw of Jormag was due soon so I moved one of my rangers over to meet him. Most of the server seemed to have had the same idea and Jormag, as we know he isn't but everyone calls him anyway, flew in to face probably the greatest force ever raised against him, at least on Yak's Bend.

As well as giving all the Bosses (I hate that term with a passion but this is officially Boss Week so let's go with it) extra hit points and a fix for all the various bugs that have pretty much neutered some of them since launch (Hi, Golem!) a timer has been added to all of the events. A pretty generous timer in most cases, it has to be said, although I'd back Gamarien any day to ponder and muse his way through the full fifteen minutes he's been given to finish his hunt the for Great Jungle Wurm before he ever even gets to see the thing.

Claw of Jormag gets half an hour, which is not far off what it often takes. Or took. To my immense surprise, this fight seemed to have been made much easier. Firstly most of the leftover mobs now despawn when the ice wall goes down. Secondly the walls themselves seem to melt like, well like ice in a fire. Lastly, and most importantly, the golems no longer collapse into scrap metal at the slightest brush against an ice pillar. Oh, and his wings no longer fall off, which is nice, for him at least. Whether it was these changes or the sheer number of players present, far from needing thirty minutes we were done in less than half of that.

My last Boss of the evening was the Inquest Golem MkII. As Jeromai points out, this "World Boss" used to be soloable. My necro soloed him once, or would have had some johnny-come-lately not turned up when she had him at 5%, reducing her Great Achievement to a mere duo kill. Won't be doing that again. All the various AEs he always did but which everyone used to ignore now hit like freight trains. We still killed him, though, even though half the zerg jumped ship when someone popped into the zone and yelled that Teq was back.

My feelings on the whole affair are largely this: making these events harder does not make them any more entertaining. Ninety-nine percent of the people doing them are only doing them to get the loot and if the loot is deemed good enough they will jump through as many hoops as you care to put up, but that does not mean they like jumping through hoops, it just means they like loot.

While there are also achievements and it's flavor-of-the-fortnight it won't be hard to hold a critical mass to get results but I'll be interested to see how many people are bothering to do these Bosses by October, especially if Champions still dole out the same or better rewards for a fraction of the effort.

I'm very curious to try out all of my other old favorites to see how they've fared. Teq wasn't terrible although he's clearly not going to be handing out his miniatures any time soon unless and until the nerf everyone seems to be expecting arrives. Jormag was, arguably, improved. Golem I preferred when he just span round and round and let us dis-assemble him at our leisure but maybe that's just me.

In general, though, no matter how much players complain that bosses are too easy, I remain to be convinced that a majority of the players likely actually to go and do that content on anything like a regular basis really want things to be hard enough for the outcome to be in any way in doubt. Zergs like to swarm over things and tear them apart at no risk. That's what zergs do. And, for better or for worse, GW2 has built much of its positive reputation on providing that sort of gameplay to the large crowd that wants it.

Which talk of zergs brings me neatly to the changes to WvW. Seen 'em. Gimmicky. Don't like 'em. I think that's probably as much discussion as they require.