Badgers And Bears

As longtime readers will most likely have realized, I'm in the infatuation period with Neverness to Everness right now. Not so much the honeymoon period, although that too. 

The honeymoon period is where you want to spend all your time playing the game and everything about it seems amazing and wonderful. The infatuation period is worse because you also want to tell everyone about it.

And no-one wants to listen. Honestly, who wants to hear someone banging on and on about their new crush? Who wants them bringing it up in every conversation, at every opportunity, shoe-horning it in when it's not even remotely relevant? 

So, in an attempt to inject some much-needed variety into what would otherwise be a stream of posts about a game most people aren't remotely interested in, judging by the page views (Seriously, I was expecting a spike but what I got was a slump.) I'll see if I can't come up with something else, just for a day. God knows, we'll be back to Hethereau soon enough. Oh yes.

And guess what? Today just happens to be one of those very rare days I already had earmarked for a specific topic. I hardly ever do that. 

It's not that I marked Friday 1 May in my calendar or anything. It's that I was always planning to post something about the day I earned my next badge in NightCafe and today just happens to be that day.

Yes, I was a Horse and now I'm a Bear! 

Don't look at me that way. I didn't make these titles up. If I had, I sure as hell wouldn't have called anything a bear. I like most animals but I make an exception for bears. Bears are not nice at all. They just have inexplicably good PR.

MassivelyOP today has an Overthinking column on the pernicious nature of log-in rewards, dailies and similar schemes. I posted a comment that's mighty ironic when you consider what I'm about to say next, which is that not only do I do the NightCafe daily every day, without fail, but that I treat it like it's one of the most important things I do all day. 

If I even suspect I might be about to miss one I come out in a cold sweat. I did miss one - actually several - way back in last year and it still gives me the shivers thinking about it. 

Nightcafe has a lot of badges you can earn. Win. Get. Whatever you call it. I mean a lot.

When you get a badge it gets crossed off the list. As you can see, I don't have many. Which is fine. I don't want any of them except for the login streak ones. Those I do want.

Why? Beats me!

This is the thing with streaks, isn't it? You get stuck in one and you don't want to break it. For reasons.

I got started on the streak for an actual reason. One that made sense at the time. Every day you log in and do the log-in daily, you get credits. It used to be ten but now it's "at least five" because they halved the guarantee but they also added random bonuses. 

You can get as many as fifty credits if you're extremely lucky. I've only had that happen once. I often get more than five, though.

Credits are obviously what you need to use the service, so if you don't want to pay a subscription or buy credits directly, you'll want all the free ones you get.

Except you won't. Not really. Or I don't, anyway. 

I use NightCafe fairly regularly. Mostly it's when I need an illustration or two for a post that doesn't naturally generate its own in the form of screenshots, videos I can embed from YouTube or photos I can take myself, any and all of which I will use in preference to an AI illustration, now the novelty of AI has long worn off, along with the gilt, the glamor and the glitz.

I don't have too many posts like that and usually it only takes me a handful of prompts to get something suitable (Useable, anyway.) so I don't need a lot of credits. The first generation each day is free, anyway, and often one shot is all it takes.

I'd guess that in an average month I might get through twenty credits, tops. Some months I don't use any. I currently have 6,517

Earlier this year, there was a move to have free credits expire but the idea was received so badly the plan was canceled. Instead, some changes were made to reduce how many free credits you can get and how you can use them but I can't honestly see it's made much of a difference. I still get far more than I'm ever likely to need and I can still make as many AI images as I ever did and as fast as I ever could.

And yet I keep on doing the dailies, even though I don't need the credits. It's all because of the streak. And the titles. Badges. Whatever you want to call them. 

I was a Bee, then I was an Owl, then a Horse and now I'm a Bear. Why those particular animals? No idea. 

Next comes Eagle. I want to be an Eagle. I like Eagles more than I like Bears. Not that I especially like Eagles either but they're better than bears. Everything's better than bears. Well, nearly everything...

Getting to be an Eagle means logging in another 165 days without a single missed day. I'll be an Eagle in October or I'll be mightily pissed off because if I'm not, that'll mean I missed a day and I'll have to start all over again. It's a brutal system but then that's how streaks are. Streaks are pure evil.

For a while I was using the daily log-in to run an experiment. I posted about how I used the same prompt every day to see what variations I could get. After I got bored doing that, I started making up prompts on the fly but that soon got to feel like too much work so I slumped into just clicking on one of the suggested prompts each day.

The suggested prompts are weird. I've used today's and it won't reshow the window so I can't give a specific example but it's always much the same.

 There are maybe a dozen prompts, almost always revolving around the same themes and subjects, some combination of spacecraft, spacemen, dystopias, cities, dirigibles, noir, neon, art deco, badgers, foxes, aviators, explorers and detectives.  

For a while I thought it must be pulling ideas from the prompts I've submitted. I still think it probably is doing that but if it is, it's making a very odd selection and it's certainly nothing even close to random or even varied. It's broadly the same set of prompts every day with some mild variations, with the very occasional, extremely left-field entry, like last week's "vintage toaster aggressively ejecting a perfectly browned slice of toast, all rendered with the exaggerated colors and graphic intensity of 1970s pop art magazine illustrations"

There have to be more prompts in my back catalog that mention dust bowls, corn-fields, line art and retro-futurism just from the aforementioned experiment alone but none of that seems to come up at all. Nor do superheroes, hedgehogs or dogs, all of which I must have prompted for at least as often as badgers or foxes. Not to mention line art, which I prompt for almost every time.

The only input I have to the whole sad, sorry process is flipping through the options and picking whichever takes my fancy. I tend to take the fox option every time it presents itself and most of the badgers. 

In NightCafe's world, Badgers are all grizzled old P.Is or crusty academics. Foxes lean towards aviation and space travel and also sometimes present as animals rather than anthromorphs.

There is absolutely no point to me doing any of this, of course. It's even less a valid use of my time than the Overseer missions I do every day in EverQuest II. At least those occasionally give me some reward I can actually use, even most of it just takes up space. 

Arguably, running even a single AI image every day might even do harm to something more than just my sanity and self-respect, although I can't say I'm able to make myself feel all that guilty about the five or ten seconds of processing time it's taking.

The really sad part of all this is that I enjoy it. OK, maybe not "enjoy" but I do sort of look forward to it each day and I do sort of feel pleased with myself when I'm done.

It's part of my routine. I feel very slightly good about things when I remember to do it, as if I've done something I ought to be doing and someone is going to be pleased with me because of it. I haven't and they're not but that's not the point.

If I stopped doing it, though, I'd almost certainly not miss it. Well, not after a week or two. These are lightly ingrained habits, nothing etched deep. They fade fast Or I hope they do. Not that I'm about to test it.

Are they also harmless? Maybe. 

I do have a lot of pictures of badgers now, anyway, so that's something. I mean, you can't have too many pictures of badgers, can you? And now I've shared some of them in this post, you can have pictures of badgers too. Granted, they aren't very good pictures of badgers but then that's AI for you.

I bet you wish I'd posted something about Neverness To Everness now!

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Nah. Not going there. I didn't write the prompts, I didn't choose the models, I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything, and anyway it was all the fault of those pesky NightCafe kids...

Catching Up

A couple of updates on previous posts today, just to tidy things up a little. I continue to grub around the peripheries of various games, ticking a few boxes here, indulging a whim there. It keeps me amused but it isn't creating a lot of fresh ideas for posts about gaming. 

This might well be the least gamey I've felt for a couple of decades. Most of my time seems to go either on playing with the dog or doing things around the house and garden. The weather is fairly good and it's nicer to be outdoors doing physical stuff than inside, going digital. It won't last. We'll get some rain soon enough and suddenly sitting in a chair staring at a screen will seem like a much more attractive option.

I've been plugging away dutifully at my Overseer Missions in EverQuest II and I've finally managed to acquire enough Celestial and Fabled quests to fill my ten-a-day quota. It's not quite that straightforward, since some of the Celestials take a little over a day to complete and some equally extraordinary length of time on cooldown but most days I only have to fill in a couple of slots with Legendary missions to make up the shortfall.

The slightly disappointing part, after all the effort I've put in, is that now I've been able to inspect the full loot table, including the Celestial Bonus Chests, there don't seem to be any Fabled weapons, armor or jewellery. There's only Legendary, which tops out at 295 Resolve. 

That's still very useful and upgrades much of what I had from questing but I'm sure there were Fabled items in the previous seasons and those were another five or ten points of resolve above the Legendary. 

Of course, it's all somewhat notional when I'm not actually doing any adventuring. I don't think I've swung a sword or cast a spell in EQII for the best part of a couple of months, even though I log in at least once every day, often two or three times. It does sometimes make me wonder why developers bother creating any old-school adventure content at all. I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer the games without it.

Okay, no I wouldn't, but it is interesting just how long a diet of log-in dailies and setting missions can hold not just my loyalty but also my attention these days. I think I burn out faster on actual adventure activities than I do on the background maintenance. It's no wonder things like World of Warcraft's Garrisons had such appeal for a certain demographic. I fear I might be part of it.

Partly, as must be obvious, the appeal for me comes from working out the mechanics and figuring out just how these things operate. I've mostly got the hang of the latest Overseer season now but I would still like to know just what effect, if any, levels have on the system. 

Overseer xp is painfully slow but I've inched my way to the mid-point of the five-level range. I can't say I've seen any difference. I'm guessing it's nothing more than a qualifying pre-requisite for the next season but even that's a guess. I've always been maxed on the season before so I don't have any direct knowledge of whether you have to hit the cap on the last season before you can do the next.

The other mmorpg I'm still notionally playing is Guild Wars 2, although there, for the first time since they were added not that long after launch, I have finally fallen off the Daily roundabout. There was a while when the puppy made it difficult to get the dailies done every day and somehow that seems to have broken the habit. I could easily find time to do them every day again now but often I just can't be bothered. 

Surprisingly, that doesn't mean I'm not playing at all. I logged in this afternoon to do some more of Living World Season One. I was hoping to find out if we ever get to see any more of the old Lion's Arch but I was also curious to revisit the introduction of Marjory Delaqua. (I'd completely forgotten, naturally, that we all got a doohickey at the conclusion of the original outing that lets you replay the whole thing any time you like.)

After I'd played through the Dead End chapter I was even more curious to compare my feelings today with what I thought about it the first time round, when we were first introduced to the concept of a 1940s film noir detective agency in a 21st century fantasy mmorpg. I had a vague recollection that I'd been a lot more impressed back in 2013 than I was with the rerun nine years later.

In fact, it turns out I barely mentioned. it. I reviewed the Dragon Bash event in full but consigned the story to a single paragraph, where I summed it up as "Good, on the whole". I was considerably more generous towards the Raymond Chandler pastiche back then than I would be if I was reviewing it now, saying it "worked surprisingly well".

This time around I found the writing unconvincing and the voice acting labored. Marjory has always sounded downbeat but on her debut she comes across as just bored. I think it's supposed to convey world-weary cynicism but it just made me feel she wasn't interested either in her work or life in general.

As for seeing more of LA, sadly that didn't happen. It's back to the main plaza, where they haven't even covered the body of the Charr representative, much less moved it to a more suitable resting place. I carried on with the storyline until I got to the part where you have to complete events in Bloodtide Coast to fill a progress bar, at which point I lost patience and gave up. 

For now, anyway. I don't hold much hope that I'll get to see any more of the old, pirate version of LA in the rest of this revamped episode but I'll probably carry on to the end all the same. It is a bit of a nostalgia trip, after all.

And finally, My Time At Sandrock. Bizarrely, there was a news item about the game at NME earlier today. I really wasn't expecting that. It suggests the series has something of a following, since the thrust of the piece is that Sandrock is already more popular than Portia, even in Early Access. 

As I type, MTAS stands at #83 on the Steam chart, one place above Cyberpunk 2077. Just over twelve thousand people are playing but the peak so far is not far off double that.

I've been playing too, but so far I've only notched up about three hours, mostly because it can be a bit of a struggle at times. Nothing to do with the gameplay, which is identical to Portia and a lot of fun. The main problem is loading and transitions. It can take several minutes to get into the game and a couple to move from one location to another within it; opening any window - inventory, map, options - takes thirty seconds or so.

At first I thought it might be yet another problem with my machine and it still might be but there's a note in the latest patch notes saying "Optimization is a high priority" so I 'm hoping it's them, not me.

As soon as I can play comfortably I'll be racking up those hours, I'm sure. At least, I will when it starts raining.

Play To Yearn Or How I Found Myself Wondering If Token Systems Might Not Be Quite So Bad After All

As far as I can tell from my lowly position as a casual (if commited) soloist, the latest EverQuest II expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, has been reasonably well-received. I've certainly been enjoying myself, even if I am currently stalled in the Signature solo questline, banging my head against an instance boss I can't beat.

That's a mere problem of player skill. I don't have any. Victory will come with time and patience. 

Of more general concern in VoV is crafting. It's one of the several areas of the game that had been the cause of a good deal of pushback over the last few expansions. Happily, tradeskills seem to have turned a corner with the appointment of Niami Denmother as the developer responsible. The value of mastercrafted gear has been restored and the convoluted and largely unpopular shadowcrafting process has been shelved. I liked the shadow stuff, as it happens, but mine wasn't a widely-shared view.

Still, everything in the new expansion hasn't been unicorns and rainbows for crafters. The current controversy, such as it is, revolves around the acquisition path for Advanced skill books. They're the source for Mastercrafted recipes, which in turn act as the gateway to even higher levels of spells and combat arts, making them more of an essential than a luxury.

Over the years Advanced recipes have come into the game via various means. If I'm remembering correctly, the original source was primarily through mob drops. As I recall, each level of crafting boook (And Adept spells and CAs.) could only drop from a mob of the same, exact level. I have a clear memory of spending hours in Nektulos Forest hunting mobs for the books I was missing and having to keep clearing spawns of creatures just one level shy in the hope of forcing the correct numbers to appear.

Later, quite possibly when uber crafting dev Domino joined the team, a lengthy series of crafting questlines were introduced, the rewards for which were either Advanced crafting books or unlocks for vendors who would sell them to you. I seem to remember a time when you could either quest for or buy most of the books, although there were always a couple of deciles when you either had to go hunting or buy your books from those who would.

My recollection of exactly how this worked is somewhat muddled because I played on the Test server for nearly five years. There, due to the exceptionally small population, certain compromises had to be made, one of which was the addition of a vendor in the Tower of the Moon in Maj`Dul, who would sell you every crafting book ever made.  

Whatever the exact process at any given time, getting your Advanced books wasn't all that difficult. All of them were tradeable and they dropped fairly commonly, so at worst you could buy them from other players at a reasonable price. That's no longer an option.

Without spending an awful lot more time on research than I'm willing to commit, I can only vaguely allude to the extent to which the whole thing has spiralled into a confusing and convoluted combination of wish and hope. Chances are even a thorough explanation would serve only to confuse matters more.

Like most aging mmorpgs, EQII is a palimpsest of half-abandoned ideas. Where there was once a very straightforward progression of crafting recipes, consisting of not much more than the basic books your crafting trainer sold for a pittance and the Advanced books you got via the aforementioned means, these days there are probably dozens of types of texts containing recipes a crafter might or might not consider essential, often relying on different qualifying criteria than your character's crafting level or skill.

To go over the entire EQII crafting process, even limiting the analysis to nothing more than the recipes available and the ways they can be obtained, would take a series of lengthy, detailed posts. A series I have no intention of writing, I should make quite clear.

For the purposes of this post, I'm merely going to talk about the way crafters are currently expected to get their desired Advanced recipes. On the positive side, it's a very simple procedure, something you might expect to go down well with an audience heartily fed-up with the abstruse and awkward choices made by previous crafting devs. I believe people do generally approve of that aspect, at least.

What they don't like is the way the system leans so heavily on pure RNG. Thinking about that aspect is how I came to coin the expression "Play to Yearn", something I believe applies to any number of similar mechanics in any number of mmorpgs.

It's what happens when you find yourself spending much of your playtime doing things in the vain, vague hope that something you want or need might finally drop. It could be camping a Named in EverQuest or repeatedly soloing an old Raid for a mount drop in World of Warcraft. Whatever your mmorpg of choice, chances are you've done something of the kind. For me, right now, it's doing dailies and weeklies in Visions of Vetrovia, hoping but never trusting one of the Advanced Sage or Alchemist books will pop out of the reward chest at the end.

Some people tolerate this kind of gameplay better than others. I've always ratehr enjoyed a random element to my gaming. It adds a frisson of excitement every time I get to open a chest or a box. 

Others feel differently, especially those who self-identify as "Crafters", it seems. It's the view of the most vocal opponents of the system that all crafters want to do is make their damn items, already! It seems they have little or no interest in the kind of "progression" the EQII dev team is convinced ought to be a core part of the crafting experience. They don't want to eke out the lifetime of the expansion working on getting their crafting books as a form of character arc. They just want the damn things today so they can spend twelve months making stuff.

No, I don't understand it either. I can't imagine how anyone can play an mmorpg pretty much daily for extended periods of time with the specific intent of doing nothing but craft items. What for? Even the busiest guild crafter in the biggest guild is pretty quickly going to make everyone all the stuff they need, aren't they?

Let that rest. It seems to be what some people see as ideal gameplay so we'll have to accept it. Clearly those people aren't going to be happy with any system that doesn't allow fast access to the tools of their trade and from their perspective former systems, no longer in play, supposedly did just that. Andf I suppose they did, to an extent. There may be some rose-tinting going on but it's not such an exaggerated a view of how things used to work.

Here's how they work now. There's an NPC in an instance in the final open zone of the expansion who gives dailies and weeklies for crafters. You get a portal stone to his location as a reward during the crafting Signature questline so you can pop in to see him whenever you want with no problems.

He offers you one quest every day. Just one. It requires you to run around the werewolf and vampire town in Forlorn Gist, picking up thirty each of two items and fifteen of a third from special quest nodes you can only see if you have the quest and you're using the werewolf illusion that comes with it. 

Looking like a werewolf means everything in the area becomes non-hostile, so its completely safe. There's no time limit. Every pull nets you three of whatever it is, so you really have to collect twenty-five items, not seventy-five. 

It's very easy or it would be if there weren't so many people doing it all the fricken' time. Seriously, there are always (And I do mean always.) a bunch of players running around snatching stuff from the spawns. It doesn't matter if I'm there in the morning, the afternoon or the evening. It's the middle of the night, US time, and I still have to race people for cobwebs or werewolf fur or whatever today's recipe calls for. The reason there are so many is, of course, because we all want our Advanced books and this is the only way we're going to get them.

The weekly quest is exactly the same, except it asks for about three times as many items and if you do it on the day it drops, which is Thursday, there are always at least three times as many people trying to do it, so it takes a lot more more than three times as long. The weekly offers a much higher chance of a good drop so people jump on it the moment it comes up.

The items that both quests send you to find are used only for the quests themselves. They have no other function. When you have them, you use them to craft a few items for Renfry, the questgiver. You can't make anything else with the leftovers and you can't save them to use in subsequent quests. The act of gathering them updates the quest. Just having the items in your inventory does nothing.

When you finish the daily you get a reward that pulls one random item from a loot table, the exact
contents of which has not been revealed, so far as I know, but which can definitely include some of the VoV adornment books, tinkering blueprints and recipes for mount gear. I've had a few of each, including a couple of very useful Adornment recipes I will certainly be using.

Mostly what they give you, however, are house items and most of the house items are chess pieces. I already have enough to line the path all through my Mara estate. They used to give you what are disparagingly referred to by crafters as "soda cans", the cylinders that were introduced several years back to deal with the severe lack of items suitable for transmuting into materials used in crafting adornments. 

At the time they were welcomed but now, thanks to other changes in the game, few people need them so they're treated as an insult when they drop. Those were swapped out for the house items after player's kicked up a fuss on the forums but the replacement items aren't going down much better.

It may or may not be possible to get Advance crafting books from the daily. I'm assuming there's a very small chance but so far I haven't been lucky. You definitely can get them from the weekly. I've had two so far. Not ones I wanted, naturally, but I did sell one for 8.5 million plat and the other I can at least use (Or sell. It goes for about 4m.)

You can also get the moulds needed to make very good crafted items as part of another complicated process I don't propose to go into right now. Unfortunately, the loot table for the Weekly also includes some of the same things as the daily, meaning you can end up with nothing useful at all.

Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down well. Leaving aside the "I want all my books on day of release" extremists, a more reasonable view is that the system would be okay if there was a higher chance of an Advanced book in the daily loot table and a guarantee of one for the weekly. Or if you could just buy the books using the special currency both sets of quests also give you. (A currency which, I should point out, I have so far been unable to spend on anything at all. I can't find any vendor willing to take it, even after spending some considerable time searching, both in and out of game.)

Things people don't like about the system include the extreme reliance on randomisation, the irrelevance of most of the rewards and the useleness of the quest materials outside of the quest itself. All of these are valid complaints but for once they're all receiving equally valid replies. 

In marked contrast to previous expansions since Domino departed, the game now has a crafting dev both willing and able to explain why things are being done the way they are and why they can't just be changed overnight because players don't like them. Niami Denmother patiently (For the most part!) points out that we have the furniture items because people asked for the soda cans to be removed and that the useless special mats are a compromise required to guarantee something else players have long demanded, namely a safe place for non-adventuring crafters to do the high-level daily and weekly quests. 

She also goes into some detail about the limitations of her brief, how certain developers need to co-operate and compromise with others to get anything done, how senior developers have structural plans for the game that take preference to specific developmental concerns and how, following the launch of an expansion, changes to systems it introduced cannot be made before sufficient time has elapsed and sufficient data gathered to assess their impact and effectiveness.

In other words, there's a hierarchy that has to be respected and action requires an evidence base. It's eminently reasonable but it's not what people want to hear. 

As a player, I'd have to say it's not what I want to hear, either. I've been doing my dailies and weeklies religiously on three characters, barely missing a daily and never missing a weekly since I was able to get them. I don't have a single Advanced book for my Sage or Alchemist. I do have one advanced book for my Carpenter, though. Yay! More furniture!

My experience would seem to be typical. The recipes books are so rare that insignificant ones sell for 5-10m plat while key spell or CA books change hands for ten times that - if you can find anyone willing to sell. Usually you can't.

There was some of this last year but then there were at least some other options, even if those weren't always very popular either. I did very nicely on Advanced books, filling out most of my own characters recipe sheets and selling the rest on at a good profit. I got them as rewards from the Overseer system. This year the Overseer is still giving out those same books. Last year's. I suspect we'll get a new Overseer Season in the early spring, at which point the new ones will start to drop, but even if that happens, it seems like a long time to wait.

With Niami fighting the crafters' corner, I do have hope that some kind of compromise might be reached before then. It is, after all, only a few weeks since the expansion launched and for some of that time the devs have been taking a well-earned holiday. When everyone's back in the office and data is available on just how many players have actually received their Advanced books via rng, maybe we'll see some positive changes to the process.

Until then it's back to the dailies and keeping my fingers crossed.

Guild Wars 2 Doesn't Matter And That's Fine With Me

I had a couple of ideas for posts for today but then I read Jeromai's excellent semi-rant on the cluttered, jumbled, messed-up state Guild Wars 2 finds itself in these days. It's a lengthy read but I recommend it to anyone interested in how the game works, or mostly doesn't, these days.

There's a ton of stuff in there that I've been thinking about for a long time but frankly could not summon up the willpower to turn into a post. As a very long term and very committed GW2 player - I believe it is now the mmorpg I have played both longest and most - the irony is that, although there is an almost inconcievable amount of "content" in the game, I still feel it's one of the thinnest, lightest, most repetitve and on far too many occasions flat-out tedious mmorpgs I've ever stuck with for the long-term.

As Jeromai so terrifyingly explains, the problem is never not having anything to do. Oh, ye gods no! If you limited yourself to nothing more than the basics, it would be quite literally impossible for a human being to work through all of the one-a-day, repeatable options in a single twenty-four hour period and also find time for sleeping and eating. Actually, probably even without that. There are probably bots trying it right now but honestly I'm not sure even a bot could do it. You'd probably need a team of them.

My problem isn't lack of content, then. No-one's problem in GW2 is lack of content. My problem is lack of interesting content. Fresh content. Content that I'm excited to do. There are thousands of things I could theoretically be doing but there aren't all that many I ever wanted to do more than once, not even when they were new. 

I'm not going to re-write history and pretend I never enjoyed any of the myriad of maps, dailies, collects and story snippets that have trundled off the end of the Living World/Living Story conveyor belt over the last nine years. A skim through the hundreds of frequently quite upbeat, positive posts on the game here at Inventory Full would soon punch a hole in that kind of retcon. 

The thing is, for many years that content was designed to be consumed and forgotten. The first season of Living World played out in real time. You were there or you missed it. Even now, much as they'd like to, ArenaNet can't bring those moments back, neatly packaged and sold for two hundred gems a pop.

Waiting for the Veteran Warg to spawn in WvW for the Veteran Creature Daily. It's a 10 minute spawn and we're going to stand here 'til it comes. That's entertainment.

 

Subsequent seasons were designed to be resellable and the addition of awkward, fiddly Achievements was supposed to make them replayable, too. Still, that was something for a niche audience. Completists, late-comers, obsessives. The general design continued to favor periodic content drops intended to bring everyone together in a feeding frenzy that would soon be overtaken by the next one on the content assembly line.

It seemd like a good idea at first. Dry Top and particularly Silverwastes kept us occupied for months. As time went on the prospect of a new map (or at least part of one) every couple of months took hold. Became expected. A Living Story drop without a new map was seen as an admission of failure, a sign of the game falling into decline.

What to do with all those old maps, though? Keep using them, of course. GW2 has the best record bar none in the genre of keeping all older content continually in play. It's a laudable goal and a considerable achievement. We certainly complain enough about the opposite in other games so it seems more than churlish to criticize ANet for doing what we so often say all mmorpgs should do. 

I'd be the first to applaud them for bringing back good repeatable content, like the Marionette. I complained about the waste of taking that away, plenty of times. In GW2's nine year history there hasn't been a surfeit of set piece events as strong and well-liked as the Marionette. Certainly not so many the game can afford to discard them after a few weeks and never let them be seen again.

I can think of a handful more good ones that could be brought back but here comes the inevitable corollary: be careful what you wish for. Open that door and who knows what might shoulder its way past? I certainly don't want to see Joko in the game ever again, or Balthazar.

But of course those two never really went away, unlike Scarlet. With years of experience the developers have become more adept at designing maps and content for continuous use, albeit at the expense of logic and possibly sanity. We have an officially-stated position now that time works differently in Tyria. Everything exists simultaneously and all these maps are somehow timelocked in a hand-waving fashion I don't remotely begin to understand because magic, I suppose. Or more likley because just go with it.

Fine. Fair enough. It's a problem no theme-park mmorpg I know of has ever managed to solve, even World of Warcraft, where no-one really seems to mind ripping out whole chunks of the game and throwing them away with every expansion.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of content GW2 has added over the years was never intended to hang around forever. It was meant to excite people for a few days, occupy them for a few more, then be replaced by something new. That was the original Living World model and for my money it worked. Unfortunately for ANet's money - real money - it didn't. It was too expensive to keep producing content that only lasted a few weeks and anyway most players hated it. Mmorpg players are very uncomfortable with content that goes away. 

I cared about these people, once. Well, some of them.

I'm not. I'm uncomfortable with content originally designed to be permanent  getting removed but very comfortable indeed with content that arrives with an expiry date attached and especially with content that comes with an appointment to view. I really like one-off events in mmorpgs. I'd go as far as to say I think one-off events are what mmorpgs are for.

Apparently that's a minority view. It's certainly commercially unsusutainable. Everything has to be permanent and reusable for everyone, always, or someone's going to kick off. Which is a problem when you also have a sales structure that relies on doling out chunks of monetizeable content week after week.

It might be sustainable if there wasn't such an obvious formula to it all, I guess. We'll probably never know. I doubt there's the imagination or the budget in any mmorpg studio to make it happen but it's a theory. In the case of GW2, the best we've been trained to expect with every new map is a meta that can be farmed and some pretty new scenery to look at while we're doing it.

Oh, and a new currency and some new dailies to do to get it. As Jeromai so vividly describes there are always more dailies...

To me, the prospect of returning to those old maps and grinding those old events for those old currencies is about as attractive as watching re-runs of an old sitcom you never found all that funny to begin with. If you're lucky it might raise the odd, wry smile, once or twice but more likely the best you can say for it is it kills half an hour when there's literally nothing else you can think of to do.

The whole game is a bit like that although, for my own personal tastes, I'd have to say that revisiting many of the original maps and most of Heart of Thorns is more like happening on an episode of a sitcom I used to like a lot and finding out to my pleasure it's still as funny as it always was, only now the humor is layered over with a patina of familiarity and recognition.

Maybe other people get that from all those increasingly faceless maps that came with later seasons of the Living World. If so, I'm happy for them.

Like Jeromai, I was working my way through the old episodes and chapters ANet have been re-promoting as a quite clever and exceptionally cheap run-up to the next expansion, End of Dragons. I have to say that as a marketing excercise it's a good  one. It got me to do things I would have sworn I'd never do, like replay old story content and revisit old Living World maps.

I could beat this thing with my eyes closed.

 

Also like Jeromai, though, what I've noticed as I've been doing it is just how shoddy and ramshackle much of that older content is and, by implication, always was. It's a little disturbing how much of a pass all content in all mmorpgs gets just for being new. I'm certain I enjoyed a lot of this stuff a lot more at the time simply because I hadn't seen it before.

And that's fine with content that goes away. As I said up top, I'm good with seeing it once and never again. A lot of popular entertainment is throwaway for a reason. Much of it is smoke, mirrors and flashing lights. And that's fine.

What you get when you go back to visit it again a year or two later could be magical. It could be nostalgic, emotional, bittersweet. It could be fun. Or it could be like the circus the day after the last show. Sweaty men smoking roll-ups, heaving dull, heavy flats onto a lorry. A threadbare lion yawning toothlessly at the back of a filthy cage. Clowns with their make-up off sitting on the steps of their ricketty caravans, shoulders slumped, looking worn and tired and old. You can see how it all works, now, and you wonder how you could ever have found it so entrancing.

And that story. Oh, boy. If there's one thing in Guild Wars 2 you do not want to revisit it's the storyline. Jeromai really skewers it and rightly so:

"The story started to dry up as the NPCs talked at each other for 5 minutes or longer each instance, before progressing on to the next scripted step, that produced even more talking, until maybe there would be a quick fight (utterly destroyed by a power-creeped spin-to-win reaper shroud) and then even more talking. Oh, and a gimmick fight or two which takes FOREVER"

The thing is, when this was new, I wanted more of all that talk. The talk was the best part. It was why I played through the stories in the first place. 

It wasn't that I thought it was well-written, even at the time. As Jeromai points out characterization is wildly inconsistent, the plot is driven by the needs of the cash shop and the whole thing has the unmistakeable stamp: "Approved by the Storyline Committee". It's not just pulp fantasy soap opera - it's mediocre pulp fantasy soap opera - at best!

Did someone ask for a golem?

 

And yet at the time it was new I was sufficiently invested in the plot and the characters to care, at least while it was happening. And so, I believe, was Jeromai, from what I remember from his commentary back then. It's just that none of this stuff was built to last any more than the latest episodes of East Enders or General Hospital or whatever modern-day soap you want to slot in for a less-dated example. 

You're meant to watch this stuff once then never think about it again. You just need to retain a vestigial memory of the main plot points so the next episode at least seems to follow on. As anyone who's ever re-watched a sopa opera knows, the more you remember about the plot, the less sense it's going to make.

So, after all that, why do I still play GW2 every single day without fail? Why, yesterday, did I play for an hour and a half longer than I intended, even while I was wanting to play Bless Unleashed instead?

Becuase as Jeromai says there's an "inherent freedom" to the game that isn't found in many of its competitors. You really can do whatever the hell you want in GW2 and it really doesn't matter. No-one else cares. There's no one thing you "ought" to be doing. Saying "nothing matters in the game" sounds like a damning criticism but say it in a different tone and it's a ringing endorsement.

I spent most of my GW2 time yesterday defending our EBG Keep from SoS's ROSE guild and their hangers-on, fifty-plus of them with a bunch of golems coming back again and again, to be wiped by our thirty or so PUGs and a great tag. There's a bunch of acronyms and jargon you don't need to understand. All you need to know was it was in-the-moment fun that mattered a lot in the moment and for not for one second after.

Ditto my dailies. I do my dailies every day and I love it. I have no reason to do them. If I missed a day or a week or a month it wouldn't matter. It just pleases me when I get them done. And when I say "my dailies" I mean exactly that. As Jeromai says "every single GW2 player knows how to pick and choose what dailies they want to do." 

In Bless Unleashed there are certain things I feel I need to do every time I log in. They matter or for now it feels as though they do. In GW2, hey, who cares? 

Nope. You got me. I don't remember this one.

 

It's freeing. It's the upside of playing a game where even the developers clearly have no real idea where things are going and never have. Yes, it makes a lot of the narrative and most of the activities feel objectively meaningless but that can be a good thing. 

The plot in Bless Unleashed is far more coherent and followable than anything I've experienced in GW2. That's great. I'm really enjoying it. It's pulling me through the game like an engine. I played GW2 for something like seven or eight years before I bothered to finish the original Personal Story that was there at launch.

If the GW2 story had been as clear and compelling as BU's I'd have wanted to know how it ended. It wasn't and I didn't care. I still don't care. But I'm still playing GW2 nine years later. I have over twenty characters there and that's in large part because I've never felt I had to repeat any content I didn't want to do again.

I want to play another class in Bless Unleashed but I'm already wary because I know I'll have to go through the story again. It's a good story but I've seen it. Do I want to see it again? Want to place a bet on how many years I'll be playing Bless Unleashed? Or how many characters I'll have there?

That's not a dig at either game. They are, weirdly, very similar. In fact, Playing Bless Unleashed feels closer to playing GW2 than anything else I can think of. Maybe I will still be playing both of them, years from now. 

If so, that will be because nothing much in either of them matters or at least doesn't matter too much. It's important things in video games don't matter too much. Things mattering in video games is a problem not an advantage. That's why people burn out or get angry or addicted. Mmorpg's "mattering" is not a goal for which we should be shooting.

Over time I hope things in Bless Unleashed come to matter to me less than they do now. That's as it should be. I also hope the developers there can keep adding things that seem to matter, for a while, when they're new. That's also as it should be.

What happens to all that stuff when it doesn't matter so much any more, that's the question GW2's been wrestling with all these years, along with every other mmorpg developer. The solution ArenaNet have come up with, problematic though it can appear, seems to me to be about as good as we could hope for. 

At least, if anyone's found a better way, they're keeping it to themselves.

You Keep Me Hanging On: EQ2

It seems that EverQuest II is now my main MMORPG. I always knew I'd end up playing a lot of EQII with the release of the new expansion but the extent to which the game has shouldered everything else aside came as something of a surprise. I certainly didn't plan it!

Digging down, there are reasons, not least of which is the dire state of Guild Wars 2.

I've played GW2 for longer, consecutively and without a break, than any other MMORPG. I think. I don't keep notes or run software that tallies my playtime, unlike some people. This blog has been running longer than that game, though, which means I don't have to reconstruct what I thought about GW2 over the years from dim, partial memories, I can just read my own recorded thoughts on it.

I think it's fair to say that I've found GW2 both compulsive and infuriating in equal measure for most of the close to eight years (including open beta) that I've been playing. Until last year, though, I plainly never found it boring. Now I do.

The unpalatable truth is that for an MMORPG of its longevity, content in GW2 is very thin. There's more content in EQII's housing offer alone. Arguably. And I'd take that argument.

ArenaNet, always infamous for the glacial pace of their development team, seem to have slowed almost to the point of stasis. More damagingly, almost all the replayable content they have been able to add over seven years is highly repetitive and extremely samey.

It's worse than just the slow dripfeed, though. What they haven't done, which many (most) other successful MMORPGs manage, is to continually increase the type and variety of systems within the game. Adding new features can be disruptive but it's also motivating. And exciting. Yet another map with yet another currency to buy yet another ascended item just isn't, no matter how hard the art department work to cover it up.

The Alpine Borderlands, where every day is Wintersday.

Even the holiday events, usually an easy win for developers, have been left to wither. In the last year or so there's been something of an attempt to spruce them up and flesh them out but it's pitiful compared to what we see in other games. I couldn't bring myself to bother with Wintersday this year. I just hope the upcoming Lunar Year celebrations are better but I'm not holding my breath.

Most de-motivating of all, the absence not only of a third expansion but of any hint one will ever happen has pretty much capped off my long-term interest in GW2. If the developers can't be bothered, why should I?

By comparison, EQII is insanely rich in content. With a fraction of the resources they manage, somehow, to pump out not just an annual expansion but a whole raft of pre-expansion events, mid-year content drops and additions to the extensive holiday calendar. Not only is there always something to do, thanks to the game's enormous depth of legacy content, there's almost always something new to do, too.

No matter what their resources, any developer can only produce so much content. Players are always going to consume it faster than it can be created. That's why most would-be forever games rely on continual improvement and progression mechanics, something GW2 made the unhappy decision to eschew.

Someone has been slacking.

EQII has this down to a fine art now, to the point that they may have found the tipping point where too much progression becomes counter-productive. My own list of daily checks and tasks in the game is daunting.

Every morning or evening, depending whether or not it's a work day, this is what I do:

• Check progress on Mercenary Training on ten characters
• Check progress on Mount Training on ten characters
• Check progress on Spell/Combat Art Upgrades on ten characters
• Check Pot Plant on two characters
• Empty Pack Pony and Reset on two characters
• Check Overseer Missions on an as-yet undetermined number of characters
• Complete Loyalty Dailies on the account

There are a lot more things I could - and should - be doing, like the daily Transmute, Tinkering and Adorning quests, which I seldom get around to and the daily Familiar quest, which I never remember -  but those are the key ones. I'm running through them as I write this post. It's actually a fairly swift process to do the checks themselves. It's all the logging in and out that takes the time.

I could also avoid 90% of it by keeping a spreadsheet of all my characters and their various timers. I'm sure there are plenty of players who do it that way. Not really my thing, spreadsheets. Or being organized.

The embarassing thing is, I enjoy it. Especially after work. It's a nice, relaxing way to settle into the evening. Because I don't mind if I miss a few characters or a few timers here and there, I feel I'm in charge. And when the timers are up I get something I want - an upgraded spell, a new gear slot for my merc or mount, some rare mats. It's like getting a present and I love getting presents.

I particularly like the new Overseer system. I get ten missions a day and the longest I have so far is two hours. You sometimes get new quests (missions) or new agents as rewards. These seem to be per character not per account. It's all quite confusing and getting to grips with how it works is fun. Plus sometimes the rewards are worth having.

Dresses like a horse, looks like a disc. I love Appearance.

The new expansion also comes with ten more levels for both adventurers and crafters, which means new gear and recipes for everyone who levels up. Not only do I have six characters (at least) to take through the (very fast) leveling process, I then have to get them all kitted out and upgraded.

That's going to take me all year. Seriously, it will. Even with EQ2 as my main game. There's a good chance I'll get fed up of it before then and drift off to something or somewhere else but if I do, that will be my choice.

What matters is that the character progression systems are all there, in place, ready to act as a scaffold for my gameplay. The game offers me pre-determined goals, which I'm free to approach in a number of ways, at a pace of my choosing. They are both compulsive and time-consuming without being onerous or claustrophobic, which has the effect of making me play more EQII because I enjoy it.

I know it's not working for everyone. I can see that on the forums. I can think of ways it could be done better and probably please more people and it puzzles me sometimes why those ways aren't the ones being taken.

For all its flaws, in the end it's an approach that's very successful in holding my attention. It's far from unique and it's probably been done better but it suits me almost perfectly. WoW Classic, using much the same mechanics, had greater bite and traction in the first forty or so levels but there it all grinds to a halt in the fifties, unless you embrace the group-centric ethos of the game like SynCaine and Wilhelm.

EQII supposedly still has a solid group game, too. I wouldn't know. It's an alone-together affair for me these days. Ironically, that was the role GW2 performed to perfection for a long while. Not any more. And whether it ever will again I very much doubt.

But something will. EverQuest II is a great MMORPG and I'll be playing it as long as it or I last, but surely not as my main game. This is an unexpected, unplanned reversion to old behavior. It has to be. It can't last.

Can it?

How Funky Is Your Chicken?

Not that anyone cares - I'm not even sure I do - but I'm still playing Riders of Icarus. For a given value of "playing", that is, one where a full session means logging in and going afk for thirty minutes then logging out again.

RoI, in addition to being a more than half-decent MMORPG for anyone who can actually be bothered to get quests, run dungeons and, y'know, kill things, is by a country mile the most generous idle giveaway game I have ever seen. After a few weeks, I already have more really good things in RoI than I've collected in Guild Wars 2 over seven years. Just sayin', ANet.

A couple of days ago I got a psychedelic chicken. It's not actually called that, of course. I only wish it was. Its official name is Tropical Ramphastos. Good luck remembering that.

It clearly is a chicken because it runs on two legs and can't fly. I'm not entirely sure what the point of ground mounts is in a game predicated on flight but there's a lot I don't know about Riders of Icarus - most of it, most likely. My chicken has an 11% run speed buff, which makes it my fastest ground mount by far, so maybe it will come in useful somewhere.

First of all, though, I have to level it up. This takes ages if all you do is sit on the grass under a tree. I finally got my Skywhale to twenty-five, the same level as my Trickster, then I moved to another nice freebie I'd picked up, a fighting crab called Skallion.

Skallion seemed to be taking even longer than most familiars to get going. In the end I put him back in the stable at Level 15 in favor of the chicken. It's going to be a week or so before I pick up the next giveaway Legendary mount so I ought to be able to top both of them off before then.

There's another special login event running because of course there is. In fact, I believe there are something like five or six login events stacking throughout August, including several that require logging in at specific times of day. I literally can't keep up so I've been pretending those aren't happening.

The one I am working on (if doing absolutely nothing counts as working) is the one I probably wouldn't have noticed if Massively:OP hadn't popped up a notice about it. It's a Summer Fishing Event although I may never see a fish. The event comes with its own seven-day login cycle, for which I need to do nothing at all. I'd already done the first day without even knowing it was on.

As if to prove how incredibly generous the game is, the rewards for each of the first six days include a pack of 50 Elluns, the cash shop currency. That's 300 Elluns in total just for being there. I already have over 300 Elluns and this will double my stash.

It takes an increasing number of Elluns to open each new Familiar slot or to increase Inventory but so far the free currency stream is running much faster than my needs. It's as if GW2 handed out a few hundred gems every month to free-to-play accounts, something that's about as likely as an announcement for a new expansion.

Most of the other rewards for the fishing event are temporary cosmetics. In keeping with many imported F2P MMORPGs, RoI loves rented items. I don't usually care for such things but when you get them for nothing...

On the seventh day there's a Legendary mount that's yours to keep for good. I haven't managed to find a picture of it so we're going to need to use our imagination here. It's called Watermelon Banana Boat. I just can't wait!

As if that wasn't enough, which it clearly ought to be, while I was fiddling about in my bags after logging in to take some screenshots for this post I found yet another Legendary Mount in my backpack. It's the four-ticket top of the shop Familiar I bought with my July login tickets. I'd completely forgotten about it.

I wondered what it would look like. It's called Gilded Infernal Demeroth, which tells me nothing.

Turns out it's a frickin' gold dragon! It has the best stats of any of my mounts so far and it looks utterly amazing. I have more incredible-looking mounts with overwhelmingly powerful stats and razzle-dazzle particle effects in Riders of Icarus than I have ever had, and most likely ever will have, in any MMORPG - and I've done nothing to earn any of them.

It's fantastic! I could play this game indefinitely just as an idle collection simulator. Oh, wait, what am I talking about? That's how I am playing it.

Maybe one day I'll get back to questing and levelling up but right now I don't entirely see why I'd bother. I'm having all the fun with none of the effort and it's all for free.

Soon the game will be changing publishers to VFUN, whoever they are. I've already done all my pre-registration stuff so I'm hoping it will be a smooth transition and that the game goes on to have a long and healthy future under the new management.

I'd really hate to lose my stuff, now I have so much of it and all so good.

Back To The Old House : GW2, EQ2

No sooner do I think I've shaken myself lose from Guild Wars 2's seven-year deathgrip, then here I find myself, clutched tight in its merciless talons once again. I knew Dragon Bash would sucker me back in but I was determined to take control, limit my exposure, minimize the damage.

So much for that. I'd tried to convince myself I'd stick to my main account, concentrate on hitting that 25K AP target, complete the event achievements and be out of there but oh, no. GW2 was having none of it.

First it was the Dragon Bash dailies. So tempting. Then the regular dailies crept back in. It's two gold a day for those and two gold is a lot for doing not so very much.

Six gold is a lot more, of course. Those other two accounts nagged at me. Once I'd logged them in it seemed foolish not to do the holiday metas there, too. And when you're doing that, you might as well do the holiday dailies...

So now I'm doing eighteen dailies a day. It's just as well I'm not working.

I could be doing a lot more. GW2 is crazy for dailies. There are sixteen tabs in the Daily section of the Achievement panel: the main dailies, the current holiday, Fractals, the sunken treasure hunter one and a set each for every new map ever introduced by way of the Living World.

If you did all of them it would be somthing like eighty. There's almost certainly someone doing them right now. With my three accounts it would be two hundred and forty, although since I don't have Path of Fire on two accounts and no expansions on one and I'm not qualified to do Fractals above the basic on any of them it would come out a lot less.

The rewards for both the metas are absolutely hideous and will never be used by any character I play.
So naturally I have to have them.

Anyone who tried to do all the dailies on multiple accounts would need secure accomodation for their own protection. An intervention wouldn't be out of the question in my own case. Then again, the modern MMORPG operates almost entirely by a process of extreme repetition. I'm just compounding it by running three accounts.

The real reason I'm playing a lot more GW2 again is that Mrs Bhagpuss is also back. I thought she'd pretty much given up. She's been off the boil with the game since mounts were added. The harder ANet push them the less likely she is to log in and it had reached the point where she'd not played for over a month.

Would you trust one of these creatures? Seriously?

I thought the addition of the Warclaw to World vs World would be the final straw, WvW being the only part of the game mounts hadn't yet ruined. The big cats have indeed wrecked much of what was left of that game mode but if we're honest that wasn't much. The score has been meaningless for a very long time. and almost no-one I remember from a year ago still plays. Those who replaced them seem to play a different game altogether, one they make up as they go along.

But Dragon Bash is stronger than all, it seems. These last few days Mrs Bhagpuss has been seen in Hoelbrak on all her accounts, chipping away at the metas and generally goofing around.

Since there are a couple of mount-related achievements I drafted myself to do those for her, which is why I spent this morning racing round and round Hoelbrak on a beetle. One of the achievements asks you to complete fifteen laps, so that'll be forty-five in total. I've done about twenty so far.

The holographic dragon display is best seen from the rooftops.

Of course I'll have to do the same for my own accounts so that'll be a grand total of ninety laps, minimum. I like the roller beetle - it's the only mount I do like - but there are limits.

I'll let you in on a secret here. The bar for the Dragon Bash racing achievements is set very low indeed. You don't need a roller beetle. You can do all of them on the basic Raptor. Crucially, as far as the two achievements that count for the two metas are concerned, you don't need to use a mount at all. You can do those on foot. I did it this morning to prove it.

Mrs Bhagpuss could do them herself but it would take about an hour to do fifteen laps on foot so she'd rather I do them for her. And who can blame her? It's kind of embarassing, trudging through the ice and snow with beetles zipping by on all sides.

That's about a tenth of the mobs our tank scooped up. It only takes one to one-shot me.

As a result of all this festive activity, those other MMORPGs I've been so keen on lately seem to have dropped out of sight. I did manage to finish the penultimate stage of  EQ2's Chaos Descending Signature quest a couple of days ago, leaving just the finale to go. I read the walkthrough and it looks like a lot of boss fights so I'm saving it for when I have a whole afternoon free. So, any time, really.

While I was there I also tried one of the new Public Quests, the ones that have "best in slot" items as possible rewards. My Berserker joined a raid and said it was his first run. The group leader told him it was a simple tank&spank and to target through the MT. "If you get an uncurable curse, run under a waterfall. If there's a black cloud on it, run to another".

Best view of the fight I could get. You should see the close-ups - they look like Jackson Pollock on bad acid.

Clear enough. Unfortunately, no-one mentioned the MT was also the puller, so I followed him as he ran around gathering up every Epic X4 in the zone. Doing that, I got aggro somehow and died. Embarrassing, but no one mentioned it. I picked myself up and ran back and after that it all went swimmingly, appropriately enough, seeing we were in the Plane of Water.

I didn't get any BiS gear but I did get my first Ethereal currency of the summer. Whether I'll get enough to buy anything is another matter. I usually let the Summer Ethereal events pass well above my head but I do like PQs so this year might be different.

Dr. Arcana - quite possibly a homage to something. I wouldn't know.

As for the other MMORPGs I was so keen to play last week and last month - Star Wars: The Old Republic, Riders of Icarus, Secret World Legends et al,  they seem to be on the back burner for now. They'll be back, I'm sure, along with more.

For the time being, though, it's looking like Tyria in the lead, Norrath plodding along behind and the rest of the pack nowhere in sight. I'm not entirely happy about it but there we are. The mouse pointer wants what the mouse pointer wants, as they say.

I just go where it tells me.