This Is No Time To Stop And Smell The Flowers : GW2

Ascalon is my favorite region of Tyria. Plains of Ashford and Diessa Plateau were the maps where I began my long love-affair with GW2 all the way back in beta and their power to charm hasn't faded though the crowds that used to fill them have. Over the long drift down from launch I've become used to roaming the burnished fields, brittle and golden in the eternal Ascalonian summer's end, alone.

Well, those days are over. The Megaserver's here and with it the crowds are back. Diessa even has some kind of Champ Train running - Nageling Giant, Spider, Seperatist Agitator, Wurm. I'm learning the names if not the rotation. The reports of the Death of the Champ Train turned out to be greatly exaggerated, by the way. Rumor has it most zones have one now.

There was a line for the Breached Wall vista, one of the hardest vistas in the game. I had to stop twice and wait for some Norns to play through because there wasn't room to make a couple of the more difficult jumps. The hard skill point at the end of the underwater tunnel at the West of Blackblade Lake wasn't very hard at all with a constant flow of people making sure the Veteran mage who guards it rarely got to cast his devastating AEs.

Vet's dead, baby. Vet's dead.

It's not quite like it was at launch. MMOs only ever have that extreme, hysterical pitch when everyone levels together in the first few frenzied weeks or in the bubble that forms after the release of specific level-based content like a new race or an expansion with a raised level cap. Instead it's more the steady hum of like-minded players all choosing to be in a particular place for specific reasons of their own.

A lot of people are clearly bent on map completion. Map chat rings with questions about specific PoIs and vistas and how to get to them. There are also a heartening number of genuine new players, asking typical new-player questions like "does anyone need a 5-slot bag?" (answer: no, no-one in the entire world, not even if it is purple") and "what's Meatoberfest"? (answer: it's a Charr thing. You wouldn't understand. Maybe if you're a Norn...)

Warm beer, burnt meat, explosives - I think I was at that party in 1982

Against my normal run of play I, too, was Doing Map Completion. Partly because I want to try and gauge how the new changes play with what I take to be the normative new-player playstyle, which would be to finish a map before moving to the next, and partly because I might as well get in practice because Map Completion is one of the prime requirements for obtaining Traits through gameplay.

I have two things to say about Map Completion:

• The level ranges given on the maps in no way reflect the level required to complete them

•  Not only is Map Completion not exploring, it is the very antithesis of exploring

GW2 was never designed to allow a player to level steadily and sequentially through adjacent, level-appropriate maps. This was a major issue for many players at launch but players have learned or the culture has changed and you rarely hear complaints about it any more. Far from it. People seem much happier to level at the fastest conceivable pace by any means that comes to hand (crafting, Champ trains, Living Story, WvW) then come back and finish off the bits they missed (aka nearly everything) at a comfortable Level 80 with all the mis-scaled downlevel advantage that brings.

Who are you calling chicken?

At launch I was the one in map chat patiently (or not) explaining to some guy that GW2 wasn't "that sort of MMO", that you didn't have to finish a map before moving on, that it didn't matter that you had finished your racial starter map at level 10 but the map said it was supposed to go 15, that it was fine to go to another racial starting city and do their starter map too, that you could get xp doing almost anything - crafting, gathering, helping Blood Legion NPCs in full plate armor to stand up after a dandelion seed floating by on the breeze had knocked them unconscious. ..  That was then. Now I am that guy.

Truth be told, as a Charr I always had a problem with the whole set-up. It's bad enough that your Personal Story takes a dozen episodes teaching you the supreme importance of loyalty to your Warband and the Charr military-industrial complex, then cuts you loose from both as some kind of half-assed secret agent. The Personal Story is utter twaddle but at least it has some kind of narrative to cling on to, to explain why you're doing everything but what you imagine your character might actually want to do.

Yes, that's bad, but It's worse still if you decide to ignore it all and just run around doing whatever you like. So what am I now? A Gladium? A renegade? How come they don't arrest me for desertion the moment I set foot in Black Citadel? It's not like they don't know who I am - everyone I speak to calls me by my name and recaps my back-story.

You just ate meat from a guy who lives in a cave full of giant spiders. What did you think would happen?

So its hard enough staying in character just exploring Ascalon. I can just about rationalize it as some kind of rite of passage to discover my Charr heritage and I guess, at a push, I could stretch it to cover Getting To Know The Enemy in Kryta or Cultural Exchange in the Shiverpeaks but the further you stretch it the thinner it gets.

Which makes it a problem that so far I'm completing each map in about half to two-thirds of the supposed intended level range. And come to think of it, why does that happen, exactly? Because leveling in GW2 is about as difficult as eating a jam donut, that's why! And always has been.

I "finished" the level 15-25 Map Diessa Plateau last night by dinging 20 on Map Completion.

Well that's an hour of my life I'll never get back

I'd started it several hours earlier at exactly Level 15, wearing a complete set of Fine quality crafted armor that I'd made for myself at the forge in Black Citadel. I had 11 Fine quality crafted Weapons I'd made, one of every type a Guardian can use. Every piece had appropriate Runes and Sigils that I'd bought from Our Benevolent Benefactor Evon Gnashblade (if only they'd listened to him...) through the Black Lion Trading Post. I'd made food and sharpening stones. I'd spent well over an hour prepping.

First Heart out the gate took me about 2-3 minutes and the grateful vendor  offered me a major upgrade for my entire armor set. It went on like that from there. I literally didn't get more than two or three minutes' wear out of some items before the upgrade arrived. Moreover, within half an hour I was turning down the upgrades on offer for the content I was completing because I couldn't equip it for three or even five levels.

Clearly whoever designed the Heart flagged "Level 23" expected that the players completing it would be...level 23 or higher. That's why you need to be that level to wear the armor it rewards. I was soloing those at level 17 at a pleasantly satisfying challenge level. If other people happened by and joined in, as they often did, the challenge level dropped to somewhere between trivial and gimme now!

It would be tempting to blame this on the difficulty pass ANet gave the whole sub-80 world to compensate for the later arrival of Traits. That may have something to do with it but I wrote this after Beta Weekend Two, in which I observed "I moved to the level 15 - 25 areas when I dinged 13 and roamed around leveling up on mobs between 2 and four levels higher than me for most of Sunday." It might have gotten even easier but it was always easy.

Gotta get all that human blood off this armor somehow

Okay, some of it does come down to elder characters. A first character would be able to open all the Karma vendors, who in Diessa are stuffed to bursting with really good stuff - armor, weapons, jewellery, kits, many, many recipes - but wouldn't necessary have enough Karma to buy everything the way I did with 4.5m karma in the bank. It hardly matters, though, because having all that kit only makes things go extremely fast instead of just very fast.

Is this a bad thing? No, not as such. If this was my first character I very definitely would not have been pushing ahead at such a pace because I'd have been exploring. Yesterday I was doing Map Completion so I didn't explore at all. It sounds contradictory but it's really not.

Exploring is looking around you, paying attention to your surroundings, seeing something interesting or puzzling and going to investigate. It's spotting somewhere you think you just might be able to get to and taking a hour finding out you can't, but not minding because of the half a dozen fascinating things you found, trying.

Map Completion, conversely, is opening your map, checking where the next PoI or vista or waypoint is, running there using speed buffs, dodge rolls, stability or whatever you have that means you don't have to stop or engage with anything along the way, getting the UI flash that tells you you've ticked the box then barreling on to the next. All the time I was doing mine, other people were doing theirs, zipping past me, looping round and running back. No-one stopped for anything. I was about the only one who even bothered to watch the Camera Obscura at the vistas.

Vet's dead, baby...oh, you already heard that one?

Cut to the chase: did I have fun? Hell, yes. Thinking it through I come to the only conclusion I seem able to reach when GW2 comes under analysis: it is what it is. I loved Diessa Plateau in beta, when I was almost literally the only one there and I played it as though I was soloing in early Everquest. I loved it just after launch when there seemed to be hundreds on the map and nearly all of them Charr or Norn. I've loved it ever since, soloing it, duoing it, farming, exploring or just visiting favorite spots (the Cowtapult, the Sniper Rifles, the Meatoberfest fireworks, so many to choose from).

The Megaserver gives yet another face to Diessa, as does racing through it to complete the map. GW2 was built with an infrastructure where fun, and even the more elusive satisfaction, seem riveted on as firmly as the panels on the walkways of Black Citadel itself. It's gameplay that's very hard to break (although God knows sometimes it seems like ANet are doing their best to try) and I'm still not seeing anything in the recent revamp that looks like it could come close to breaking it for a new player. 

So, what comes next? At 25 there's an odd hiatus in the Charr leveling path. There is no Ascalonian map that covers 25-30 and the 30-40 map, Fields of Ruin has no safe entry point from lower levels, as I found out the hard way so I'd have to go via Divinity's Reach, which my Guardian doesn't want to do. I might do Map Completion in Wayfarers, something I'm not sure I've ever done despite having spent an inordinate amount of time there, or I might go to Lornar's Pass to evaluate the megaserver impact some more.

Whatever I choose fun is guaranteed.

Burning In : GW2

Project Megaserver moves on apace. After the initial announcement (Level 1-15 maps) and the subsequent, fuzzier revision (lower population maps) we now have some actual hard information. This thread lists the maps using the new Asuran technology so far.

Here's the first batch:

• The Grove
• Heart of the Mist
• Black Citadel
• Timberline Falls
• Southsun Cove
• Rata Sum
• Straits of Devastation
• Fields of Ruin
• Brisban Wildlands
• Hoelbrak
• Iron Marches
• Blazeridge Steppes
• Dredgehaunt Cliffs

 Assuming that they did indeed go with the least-populated maps, that's quite an interesting list. All the racial starting cities except Divinity's Reach plus most of the mid-level wilderness maps, suggesting a dearth of interest or activity outside of starting areas, max-level maps and the human heartlands. Just about exactly what you'd expect, given that most of the maps on that list were already sparsely populated three months after launch. And of course no-one in their right mind goes to Southsun if they can avoid it.

The first serving went down well enough that we got seconds very quickly:

• Lion’s Arch
• Lornar’s Pass
• Kessex Hills
• Diessa Plateau
• Metrica Province

It's perhaps surprising that Diessa and Lornar's weren't included on the first pass, but I guess proximity to the alway-busy Wayfarer Foothills, Lion's Arch and now Gendarran Fields have helped keep the numbers up. Having Durmand Priory based there can't have hurt Lornar's either. Seeing Lion's Arch on the list is sad. It really does seem to have lost focus after the Terrible Events. I was skeptical whether Vigil Keep would work as a stand-in hang-out but load times for Gendarran Fields would seem to prove me dead wrong on that one.

See? I told you Diessa wasn't all brown!

Kessex Hills doesn't seem to have benefited much from the makeover it got from the Toxic Alliance. It was always a scrappy map and adding reeking fumes and tough, annoying mobs and events was hardly likely to improve matters.

Metrica, on the other hand, always seemed quite a happening place but then I generally only go there when the Fire Elemental's up, which I guess isn't a representative sample. It's curious that it's the only starter zone to go Mega so far. It's not like you don't see a plethora of Asura skittling about everywhere. I'd have thought Plains of Ashford would be less-used.


Enough theorizing. Time for experiment. Late last night, just coming into NA prime time, I took a jog from Wayfarers Foothills into Diessa Plateau to see if I could see any difference. Diessa has always been one of my favorite maps. I wrote about it during beta, although reading it back now it does suggest my initial reaction was less affectionate than it became later on. I've certainly spent a lot of time there on and off ever since so I must be quite fond of the place.

Who says you have to stand well back to fling a fireball?

Diessa was never bustling. The eternal Meatoberfest celebrations in Butcher's Block, right up against the Wayfarers border, always attracted a few visitors but even when the game was relatively new you could cross the map without bumping into much more than the occasional young Charr discovering his heritage. Your chances of getting enough people to down the Champion Giant in Nageling or open the mini-dungeon at Incendio Templum were poor indeed.

Not any more it seems. Within half an hour I'd done three Hearts (with their much-improved completion UI as noted by Syp), several Meatoberfest events, killed the Nageling Giant and even finished the really annoying Dredge event in Bloodcliff Quarry that always used to fail with too few people. In everything I was accompanied by a whole bunch of friends-I-hadn't-met-yet. Didn't see a single name I recognized from Yak's Bend.

Not that I felt out of place. The whole time I was there a Mesmer was porting all-comers to the very difficult vista and skill point at the Breached Wall and map chat was buzzing with cheerful, excited chatter. It was all very jolly if a little bit uncomfortable, a bit like the last day of term when your year tutor lets you bring in games. I wouldn't go as far as to say it was like launch week all over again but it certainly did make the whole map feel alive in a way it hasn't for a very long time.

Rock Solid Work, Name Deleted.
(Not actual name although there must be someone called that)

Today I popped down to Dredgehaunt Cliffs, a great map with some complex event chains that can be very challenging with low numbers, to see if the same magic was working there. There were people around, I can say that much. Not a huge number but enough that every event I tried found me fighting alongside two or three other players. People were constantly calling events and Champions and linking waypoints. It felt a bit less frenetic than Diessa. I liked it.

So, on the basis of those two snapshots and with the weight one should always allocate to anecdotal evidence, my conclusion is that it would seem the Megaserver is doing what it was intended to do. I'm not about to declare it "awesome" like Heartless but my first impressions are definitely positive, more so than I expected.

It's going to take some getting used to, though, and the benefits may be arguable in certain situations. I logged my engineer in earlier. He happened to be in Metrica right next to the Thaumanova Reactor and by chance it was only ten minutes before the Fire Elemental's new two-hourly slot. Crowds were gathering.

Stop shoving at the back!

There were so many people that the pre-events spawned Elites and Champions and I still couldn't get a shot off fast enough to get credit on anything as we walked the Clean 5000 around. The five-minute whirl in the reactor room was purely surreal. There were twenty or thirty of us scudding about trying to shoot things while as many or more lined the walls like the crowd at an arena. Actually, not "like". They were the crowd at an arena.

By the time the Elemental appeared I would estimate there must have been at least sixty players crammed in the room. The timer for the event runs fifteen minutes but I doubt the  "fight" lasted thirty seconds. Overnight FE has changed from a very, very challenging encounter for a few determined individuals to a trivial, challenge-free loot drop for a zerg.

With Megaserver populations that's going to happen to every event with a fixed timer and loot worth having. It risks putting us back almost exactly where we were a year ago when, even after all the difficulty passes, most World Bosses still melted in seconds when a huge zerg arrived. Except this time, with Megaserver technology, a huge zerg will always arrive.

Spectator Sport

I'm not saying that's a bad thing or a good thing but it's certainly a thing. Short of upping the standard World Boss difficulty to at least Karka Queen level, if not Teq/GJW, it's hard to see how it can be prevented. Always assuming someone wanted to prevent it. Honestly, I've done all these bosses so many ways now - easy, hard, small group, zerg, even solo - I really don't care any more. Most of them are mostly fun most ways. I'll just take them however they come.

After FE died, though, it should be noted that there were quite a lot of complaining comments in map chat. Some people couldn't get there before he died, some couldn't do enough damage to get credit, some just thought it was a lot less fun than it had been with a lot fewer people, some wanted to do it on their own servers and not some unnamed overflow, as they saw it. When I left five minutes later the post-match analysis was still going on.

Oh well. Never going to please everyone. At least it works. That alone is more than I was expecting. Looking forward, nervously, to seeing the new tech rolled out to those few maps I actually spend time in. Whichever those are. There must be some other than Wayfarers and WvW...

This Land Is Our Land: GW2

Way back in April when we picked Yak's Bend as our server for the first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend, we didn't just pull a name out of a hat. Yak's Bend is where the world begins to open out in the original game, the point at which, after days of desperate struggle, hard-fought every yard through Charr hordes that never stop coming, at last you find a moment to catch your breath.

See this bend? This bend is mine.

Two abiding memories from the first run through the original Guild Wars are my complete shock on the fall of Ascalon and my immense sense of relief on reaching Yak's Bend. I played GW1 from launch but buying it was a late and somewhat spontaneous decision. I'd read little about it and had no foreknowledge of the plot. I loved pre-Searing Ascalon from the moment I arrived there and had no idea it would be snatched away from me so soon.

Come Guild Wars 2, I was always going to play a Charr. From the moment I realized, years after wading hip-deep through Charr blood with Prince Rurik, they were cats not demons as I'd thought, I was forced to re-evaluate and from that moment on there was no choice. Still, I didn't imagine I'd get what I'd always wanted; Ascalon back.

The orange is nice but I preferred it how you had it before

There are people, crazy people, who stay in pre-Searing Ascalon until they're fully grown. These are the Iron Men and Women of Guild Wars, ennobled with a title: Legendary Defender of Ascalon. Here's what they went through to earn that name. When players unfamiliar with the elder game question the design ethos behind GW2's Legendary Weapons, behavior like this is a factor they may not have taken into account.

Read it and weep, human.

I tried it once. I got to level 12 before I came to my senses. Life is quite literally too short. I gave up any hope of living in the eternal summer of pre-searing Ascalon. How ironic, then, that the door to that lost past should be re-opened by the same Charr who slammed it shut in my face all those years ago.

Go North-East from Lion's Arch and there, between the Shiverpeak and Blazeridge mountain ranges lies Ascalon. From Black Citadel, the great Charr capital built on the ruins of the human city of Rin, east through the Plains of Ashford to Blazeridge Steppes and north across the Diessa Plateau through the Iron Marches to Fireheart Rise, the Charr hold it all.

Being a cow doesn't give you a pass on training

Um, over here?

Every step is filled with wonder. The high summer idyll of the pre-Searing has ripened into an eternal Autumn, the fall after The Fall. The colors burnish with copper and gold, red poppies flag against the sunburned grasslands, white clouds mass the bluing sky. Ascalon is a land patched by farms, ribboned with ruins, haunted by ghosts figurative and literal. Its lakes are blue and deep, its caves dark and beckoning. There's treasure everywhere.

Out of these golden lands rise the cobalt holdings of the Charr. With all the dwarves gone Charr engineering stands unchallenged (quiet now, that Asura at the back...). Rather than scars or blisters, these massive edifices fit the land like giant puffballs, muted bluetones melding into the umber, soft curves blending into rolling hills, jagged edges natural as thornbriar.

This beautiful country has its dangers. Ghosts and devourers rise from the ground, bandits and revolutionaries bar the paths, ogres and harpies cleave to their own wild ways and may the gods that don't exist have mercy if you cross them. The Dredge, the Grawl, the Skritt pursue their own oblique agendas. Still, these are lands that can be explored with pleasure, if with care.

You can laugh now but in fifty years they'll be listed

Some must fight so all can live, as they say, but maybe not right now. Unlike Orr and the south, across Ascalon there is time to stop and take a look around between battles, to lie down in the long grass once in a while and rest.

Even the dragon, The Shatterer, had the good sense to set the mark of his Lordship on these lands with a scar instead, like Zhaitan, of flinging all to chaos. The Brand runs livid in the purples of a bruise across the back of Ascalon, but the Branded, unlike the Risen, keep to their rut.

Could have sworn I heard an Asura...

At the southern limit of the Charr's influence, Ascalon's, maybe Tyria's, loveliest city waits. Ebonhawke, thick-walled fortress with its wide streets going down to grass feels old as its honey stone. Saved the brash assertion of Rata Sum or the wild imagining of Lion's Arch, Ebonhawke stands more solid, evokes more empathy than either.

Does no-one in Ebonhawke own a scythe?

To the far North autumn gives way to winter as it must. Despite thick fur, Charr are cats and do not like the cold. The Norn may have the snow and welcome. As for the Baelfire, let the Flame Legion skulk among the cinders there, planning their plans. Few would envy them. No, the Charr fought for the heart of Ascalon, and now they have it, revel in it and will hold it long.

Had Guild Wars 2 been only Ascalon and only Charr I would have been more than satisfied. I am more than satisfied.

A Cow Bunga : GW2

Let me tell you some things about the Charr.

"The charr race was forged in the merciless crucible of war. It is all they know. War defines them...Their culture has developed into a military state where they are raised as warriors from birth"

Source: GW2 Official Wiki

Words not enough? Go see for yourself.

How odd, then, that last Sunday morning my Charr Ranger found himself sitting down beside a Lonely Cow to cheer her up before bowing to a Dignified Cow to enhance her sense of self-worth. All this after catching wasps in a jar and feeding them to a cow who Wanted Something.

The opening Charr tutorial zone is manic in the extreme, all martial commands and chaos culminating in a hectic fight with a powerful undead Duke. The level 1 to 10 zone around the spectacularly militarized city, The Black Citadel, is torn by war from end to end. As you'd expect.

Then comes Diessa Plateau, the next zone over. They do a lot of farming there. Charr are giant cats, after all. They eat meat. A lot of meat. It has to come from somewhere. So the Charr raise cattle. I don't have a problem with that. It's how they raise them...

Cows, huh, yeah! What are they good for?

Almost as soon as I stepped out onto the plateau someone warned me there was a farm where boviculture had taken an odd turn. Listen to him. Odd scarcely covers it. This farmer, by reputation the finest on the plateau, feeds his cows on insects and runs them in races. When you meet him you find he also segregates his cows by emotional state. Naturally he wants your help. I imagine it's hard to find agricultural workers up to his exacting standards.

Leaving aside the question of how, given that all Charr are supposedly under military discipline and orders at all times, my ranger is free to come and go wherever he pleases ad lib and ad infinitum (a question which deserves no more consideration in an MMO than "How can I swim in this full suit of steel plate armor?") we come to the less-easily brushed aside question of whimsy.

Sunbathing after dark. In a bikini and boots. Whimsy or a cry for help?

All MMOs have some but how much is too much? GW2 has a lot. I have a very high tolerance for whimsy indeed but even I found myself questioning just exactly what I was doing chasing wasps with a Mason Jar so I could feed them to a cow.

No such qualms disturbed the equilibrium of the truly inspired cow-launching event, which to me exemplified everything ArenaNet are claiming on behalf of their world. Alright, not everything. I couldn't swear it was "dynamic". But I did stumble upon it and become caught up in the jaw-dropping insanity for fifteen or twenty glorious, disbelieving minutes.

I won't spoil the whole thing. Just go watch this. It's short, we'll wait.

There, don't you want to go do the whole event now? That is Charr-appopriate whimsy. In spades. The Meatoberfest I alluded to in an earlier post is another example of something amusing and unserious that still fits what we think we know about the Charr.

Charr butcher likes to work naked. Gonna argue?

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the farm-related tasks. For me as a player they were entertaining enough to spend half an hour on, although I doubt it's content I'd go out of my way to revisit. The twinfold problem seemed to be that the basic tasks (farm labor) were too mundane to be of concern either to me or my Charr avatar and that, realizing this, the developer had perhaps gone into whimsy overdrive trying to gussy them up into something less...Farmville.

I'm up for whimsy. When the Asura show their handlebar-eared faces I'm expecting plenty but I think the Charr sense of humor should be a tad more robust (although come to think of it the Asura are about as funny as a cabbage patch doll stuffed with broken glass when you get to know them).

How much whimsy is too much may come down to a matter of taste. The line between what's whimsical and what's plain daft may change with the light. I wouldn't like to see a halfling prang a live cow two hundred yards into the sky over the Shire but my only concern as a Charr would be the waste of all that meat. On the other hand sitting next to a cow to cheer her up sounds like quite right and proper behavior for a halfling.

Let's remember who we're supposed to be and try to get all our whimsical ducks in a line, shall we?