I Love LA

The second instalment of Guild Wars 2's revised, revamped, restored, Unlimited Edition of Living World, Season One, Chapter who-the-hell-knows? dropped in today's regular Tuesday update. ArenaNet gave it a title: Sky Pirates. Maybe I should just have called it that.

The first and last time we saw this content was the best part of a decade ago, so forgive me if I can't remember if it was called "Sky Pirates" the first time around. It wasn't, though. Possibly a part of it might have been. It's a portmanteau of the original version, several bi-weekly episodes welded together with all the loose, awkward bits lopped off.

Or I guess it is. I've only played the first part. That also has a name. A weird name. I mean, if you were sitting around a table or in a bean bag or hanging over the divider of your cubicle or however they do it at ANet Towers, a bunch of you blueskying ideas on what to call to call your opening act, would you have come up with this?

"Ceremony and Acrimony." Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Okay, yes, well, maybe it does, meliflously-speaking. It has mouth feel, I'll give you that. But it reeks of academia. Is that the first impression you want to make? 

And subtitling it "Memorials on the Pyre"? That just makes the whole thing sound even more like an essay title you'd be unreasoningly proud of until your tutor trotted out that line about killing your babies.

Whatev. I played through it. Took me, I don't know, fifteen minutes? I wasn't counting. 

I remembered it very well, once it got going. It's the one where you get invited to the inaugural Dragon Bash in Lion's Arch and get to stand there like Magnus's spare prosthetic while the one-eyed pirate introduces all his pirate pals and makes some piratical jokes that are about as funny as you'd expect. 

Then all the minor races or whatever now-unacceptable phrase we used to use back in the Personal Story waddle or stride or slither forward (No, come to think of it, no-one invited the Krait.) to throw their memorials onto the pyres.

I always found that part a little strange. I don't think you get any idea what the "memorials" are. I couldn't see them but then I was having a lot of lag. Gendaran Fields was a slideshow, thanks to everyone standing about pointlessly just outside the gate to LA. and my PC was still struggling to recover for a while even when I got into the instance.

As soon as the pyres catch fire, a whole load of pinky-purple lightning shoots out and zaps everyone. It was quite a shock the first time around but I was expecting it this time. As I said, I could remember nearly everything, much to my surprise. 

At the time it seemed like everyone either got zapped into the air or ran away or fell over but I see from the above shot that really all that happened was everyone stood there gawping as if it was all part of the show. Probably the most realistic thing in the entire episode, then.

After that there's a whole load of yelling, all of it by Ellen Kiel, at this time still some kind of officer in the Lion Guard, I think. I won't spoil the plot and tell you what happens to her later but it was one of my favorite parts of Season One... other than the result. Vote Evon!

Eventually a dolyak turns up, towing what looks like a scout tent fitted with anti-grav. You, the Commander, get drafted for escort duty as the hairy yak plods across the big bridge that goes to... dammit, I should know this... some part of the Old Lions Arch I used to visit all the time... no, it's no good, it's gone.

The main reason I was hyped to play this right away was the rumor I heard that we'd get to see the old Lion's Arch again. Not the original original, the one that was damaged by the Karka Invasion. That's gone for good, I think. This would be the one after that, with the lighthouse still in ruins and some of the wooden temporary bridges still in place.

I never thought we'd get  a free run at the whole city but I did think we might get to see the Lion Fountain again. I wasn't sure about that, either. It got destroyed at least twice and rebuilt at least once but I couldn't tell you without looking it up what state it was in when Dragon Bash came along.

Wouldn't have made any difference if I could because the Captain's Council had the thing replaced by a hologram projector for the festival anyway. I remembered that as soon as I saw the ugly Asuran contraption. (You can see it in the picture at the top of the post, if you really want to.)

You can see from the above map exactly how much and which part of Lion's Arch you get to reminisce over. From the Grand Plaza to Fort Mariner. Fort Mariner! That's the bunny! Geez, my memory...

It's not much but it gives you the sweet taste. It's a tease to be able to see the rest of the city, just out of reach. Clearly they could give us back the whole thing if they wanted. Maybe in another chapter. I seem to remember Dragon Bash itself took place right across the city.

Of course, they'll have to bring back the entire map if they plan on doing Scarlet's attack on Lion's Arch and I don't see how they could conceivably run Season One without it. By then, though, half the city's a smoking ruin so it'll hardly be the same.

I would happily have carried on with the next chapter but Beryl the Dog chose then to go completely crazy and I had to spend half an hour throwing things for her in the garden until she calmed down. It's a puppy thing. I'm working tomorrow so it'll probably be Thursday before I get to carry on.

Here's hoping we get to see more of the Old Lion's Arch, while it's still almost in one piece.

Go Your Own Way

Much as I love snow zones, after finishing this year's Dragon Bash meta-achievement on one account and making it about halfway through on another, I was feeling a distinct urge to be somewhere warm for once. Nothing says "warmth" like a fire festival, so I traded the bitter cold of Guild Wars 2's icebound Hoelbrak for the burning desert heat of EverQuest II's Sinking Sands and headed for the beach to join in with this summer's Scorched Sky celebrations.

I knew there was a new quest and I never miss one of those. Well, I try not to, not holiday ones, anyway. I don't do them for the story so much as the rewards, which can often be well worth having. Most festive quests in EQII follow roughly the same format. They always begin with a chat with an NPC, who explains that something vaguely related to the celebrations has gone ever so slightly awry. 

Sometimes some creatures have escaped and either need to be rounded up and brought back or hunted down and killed. That happened a couple of years back. If it's not that, it's a mystery requiring some brief detective work that leads inevitably to some deserted cave system or underground ruin.

Once inside you can all but guarantee to find a scattering of dead bodies and a smattering of hostile wildlife. As the search takes you deeper you'll probably run across a barrier or two that needs to be removed and eventually you'll run your quarry to ground, at which point a fight will break out. Usually the final battle will involve some small degree of tactics and a good deal of thumping.

 

For quests of this kind you really don't need a walkthrough. Well, maybe you do. I wouldn't presume to judge. I don't. And yet I like to have one to hand all the same.

I don't know when it happened but at some point in my long EQII career I started thinking of quests not as adventures my characters are having so much as recipes I'm following. I think it probably began when I came back after a lengthy layoff and worked my way through two or three consecutive expansions in a row. It was taking long enough without having to work everything out from first principles. It seemed more than fair to follow in the footsteps of those who'd gone before.

Now I pretty much always do it except in the new expansion each year, when I do at least make a nominal attempt to play the way nature intended. Or at least the way Tunare intended. (A little Norrathian humor there...). Even then, if I find myself in any way stuck I turn immediately to the inestimable EQII Wiki, quite possibly the best and most accurate resource of it's kind I've been fortunate enough to draw on for any game.

As soon as I logged in this afternoon I went straight to the wiki to see where to go for this year's new quest and... nothing. I'd googled there using the search term "Scorched Sky EQ2" and it had landed me on the correct page but nothing seemed to have been updated since last year. It was a worrying sign.

For EQII's holiday events there's another resource that's even better: EQTraders. Niami Denmother (who thankfully seems to have recovered from her serious operation last year and is back to her usual active self) runs the tightest of ships when it comes to anything pertaining to crafts and housing and since every Norrathian holiday always comes packed with both those things she can be relied on to cover the whole event.

 

She doesn't always do walkthroughs, though. She has more than enough to do without that. I found the name of the quest (Feats of Burning Devotion) and the questgiver (Devotee Arborash) from the EQTraders Scorched Sky page and went to see if I could muddle through on my own.

Which, of course, I could. Everything went down exactly as expected. Arborash told me a tale of some nutcase who'd summoned an Efreeti from Doomfire, the Burning Lands, aka the Elemental Plane of Fire. Probably. I think. Who can keep these planes straight? 

Arborash was deeply impressed but when I asked him where I could admire this Efreeti and maybe speak to the genius who'd summoned it I was told the man, one Adherent Drasithe, had wandered off along the sands. That didn't seem like a good thing so I toddled off to look for him and maybe see if he needed a drink of water or something.

I didn't find Drasithe but I did spot a pretty obvious clue: a massive chunk of glowing lava stuck in the cliffside. As you do when you happen across a highly dangerous quasi-natural phenomenon, I went straight over and gave it a good poke, whereupon I found myself... yes, you guessed it, in a cave.

The cave had formerly been the hideout of some Samiel pirates, a smuggling crew commonly found lurking in similar crannies and crevices all over the Sinking Sands. I figured that out for myself by the way they were all lying around dead inside. 

The current occupiers turned out to be some snakes, a bunch of fire elementals and those annoying flying imp things you get all over any place where lava comes boiling out of the ground. In EverQuest they were called mephits. I forget what we call them now.

 

It was obvious what I needed to do next. Same as always: kill everything, take anything not nailed down and if I happen to spot any clues while I'm doing it, so much the better. I got to the end of the first bunch of caves (Is bunch the correct  technical term?) and ran into a portal. 

I did literally run into it, to see if it would port me anywhere, but it wouldn't. I had a bit of a think and then I noticed the two big spikes of lava-rock either side of it were clickable. So I clicked them. I can take a hint.

The portal closed down and my quest journal suggested now would be a good time to find a way past the fiery barrier I'd seen earlier. I had a sneaking suspicion I might just have done that by closing the portal and it turned out I was right.

Just past the portal I ran into my quarry, Adherent Drasithe. Again, literally. I ran up to him, intending either to congratulate him on his success or possibly slice him into small pieces if he'd been possessed by the creature he'd called into being but I didn't get close enough for either. He waved his arms and sent me flying backwards and then he yelled something and ran off, deeper into the tunnels.

I followed him, of course. There were some more elementals to dispose of along the way before I found him again, close to a portal just like the last one. He yelled at me again and turned into an Efreeti. Or maybe summoned one and vanished. I'm no magician, I don't know the form.

Makes no odds either way. You know it's just going to end in a punch-up. Which it did, although there was a bit more to it than that. It was one of those fights where the "boss" stops taking damage every so often and starts summoning minions and you have to kill those until something else happens and you can start pounding on the boss again. Seen it a thousand times.

 

I got the hang of that pretty quickly. The message I got every time a minion died, telling me the portal pillars were weakening, gave the game away, really. I whitled my way through elementals and imps until both the pillars were gone and the portal shut down, then I finished off the efreeti. At this point my journal suggested I might want to find the Adherent himself, who had to be somewhere close by.

He was. He was flat on the floor behind a rock, as dead as the Samiel pirates. I took the handy exit that had popped up from somewhere and legged it back along the beach to give Devotee Arborash the bad news. 

He seemed remarkably unphased. In fact he all but told me it was the best thing that could have happened and that Adherent Drasithe had done a marvelous thing for which he'd be richly rewarded in the afterlife. That's zealots for you.

I was more interested in being richly rewarded in this life, or at least in this virtual life. I took the eight ember coins (Four plus another four for being a subscriber. See? Subscriptions are worth it!). There was also a choice of a huge bed of embers or a replica of the Tyrant of Fire. I looked at them both in the Dressing Room. One was very impressive. One really was not. I took the Tyrant.

That got me wondering how many ember coins I had. I vaguely remembered doing the 2019 quest a few times but I also had an idea I'd bought a few odds and ends back then. I'd read there was a new mount this year, one that can fly, so I went over to the vendor to take a look.

Blimey, Charlie! Now that's a nice mount. A coal-black horse with fiery hooves and glowing eyes. I'd ride that. Although not until I do something to earn more ember coins, I won't. It costs a wopping hundred and fifty of them. The other two mounts, neither of which can fly, are a mere fifty coins apiece.

And this is the thing about holiday events. When they're well-done they can be highly motivating. Mrs Bhagpuss and I have both already put in hours at Dragon Bash because a) a lot of the events are fun and even if they aren't fun at least they're easy and b) the rewards are kinda-sorta nice. That staff I mentioned. Some fancy gloves. If I can imagine using these things then I'm quite likely to make more than a token effort to get them, even if in the end I probably won't end up using them after all.

I do want that horse. I'd quite like it for several people but I think that would be pushing it. I'll definitely get it for one character at least. You get an ember coin for killing the elementals that spawn near the festival sites and again you can double that if you're a member. I already have about fifty coins from previous years so I only need to kill fifty or so. That shouldn't take long.

Oh, and it turns out there is a full walkthrough up on the wiki after all. For some reason it isn't on the Scorched Sky page but it's there if you search by the name of the quest itself. I'm glad about that. It's always a bad sign when wikis stop getting timely updates.

Of course, if anyone wants to know how to do it, they can also just read my post. That should take about twice as long as doing the actual quest. I'll leave you to decide which would be more worthwhile.

You Can Get The Staff

Tuesday is patch day in Tyria so yesterday I was looking forward  to the next instalment of Return to Living Story. We'd wrapped up Season Two, the warm-up act for the first expansion, Heart of Thorns, and I was all set to jump straight into Season Three, about which I can remember almost nothing without some kind of artifical memory aid.

When I logged in, though, there were no free tokens in the mail. We're taking a short break between seasons, it seems. The next two episodes dropin a week's time on the 29th.

Instead, to entertain us this week we have Dragon Bash, the pinata-smashing, hologram-battling, moa-racing festival that takes place, for no reason I can think of, in Hoelbrak, the snowbound hometown of the Norns.

It makes for a nice contrast with Scorched Sky, the holiday that began the same day over in Norrath. As the dramatic note from new Community Manager Accendo puts it, "The Scorched Sky Celebration is back and within the flames, all mettle is tempered—that which is weak, distracting, and fleeting is burned away leaving only the strong, pure, and resilient! Join us in lifting up the Tyrant of Fire and the Burning Prince, and you too will know the cleansing intensity of Fire."

I haven't yet engaged with the new quest, Feats of Burning Devotion, or browsed the thirty-four new items on the Ember merchants (including a new flying mount, so I hear). I'll get around to that tomorrow or the next day.

I have, however, already started working on my necessary obligations in the Shiverpeak snows. At least I thought they were necessary when I began. It turned out I was wrong.

ArenaNet have made some concerted effort these last couple of years to fill out what was once a desultory holiday calendar and also to make the holidays themselves more interesting and fun. I usually do the dailies and some of the events in all of them but Dragon Bash has several events I always enjoy. Smashing pinatas is a bit of mindless fun and I'm always up for some rollerbeetle racing. The hologram arena is okay for a few rounds once a year but  the staged hologram invasions of the various Shiverpeaks maps are good for the whole three weeks.

The problem with most Tyrian holidays isn't usually with the entertainment so much as the presents. It's all very well doing the events to earn the currency but I can hardly ever find anything I want to spend it on. 

From that perspective, it was a very nice surprise last night when Mrs. Bhagpuss, who can be much more of a determined holidaymaker than me, linked a very attractive new staff in guild chat. Going by the seasonally inappropriate name of Spring Warmth, it's a rustic pole that bursts into flower at the business end and it's one of three new weapons for sale at a new vendor added this year.

Out of curiosity, I ported across to Hoelbrak to take a look at the other two. One is a flowery rifle that looks both unwieldy and bizarre. I don't have anyone who habitually uses a gun but even if I did I can't imagine using this one. 

The third is a warhorn which, like almost every other smallish weapon in the game, would be hard to notice in use. This one also happens to be very ordinary-looking. It's quite realistic if that's the look you're going for but I can't see it setting any hearts racing.

The staff, though, that I liked. So did Mrs Bhagpuss. The cost at the vendor was twenty Jorbreakers, the currency of Dragon Bash. There are various ways you can acquire Jorbreakers, some of them quite speedy, but Mrs. Bhagpuss calculated that by doing dailies and regular holiday events it would probably take her thje full three weeks of Dragon Bash before she'd earn enough to buy staffs on two of her accounts. She reckoned she might even manage the third if she really worked at it.

I didn't plan on going that hard but I thought I'd definitely make the effort to get at least one. It was certainly pretty enough to make it feel worth it. And it would be nice to have a positive, practical reason to do the dailies and some of the events most days. Nothing like a sense of purpose.

I meant to get started on it today, after I finished in World vs World. I was doing my dailies there, when the dreaded three-minute warning sounded. It happens quite often after a patch. Some bug had been found and fixed, so everyone had to log out to get the update. If you happen to be in WvW when something like this happens, you don't get the luxury PvE players have of waiting for a convenient moment. Players on competetive maps need to have the same build so everyone gets kicked.

I thought I'd check the update notes to see what had changed. It was, as it almost always is on these occasions, a server crash. Since I had the main update notes from yesterday in front of me, I read those, too.

This line jumped out at me: "Three new weapons are now available as rare drops from dragon coffers. They can also be purchased from Sparking Stone, a new Dragon Bash weapons vendor in Hoelbrak." Say what? That seemed odd. The same weapons the new guy was selling were also this year's rare drops from the Holiday Lootboxes? Free, in-game lootboxes, that is, before anyone starts sharpening their pitchforks.

I told Mrs. Bhagpuss and she asked whether they were also tradeable, since if they were they'd be on the trading post in no time and maybe she wouldn't need to work on those Jorbreakers after all. I checked and there were none for sale but while I was at the vendor (reminding myself what the things were called so I could search for them) I noticed there was a dialog option I'd missed.

Chatting with the vendor, Sparking Stone explained how the weapons he was selling could also be found in the dragon coffers, if you were very fortunate. I refuse to feel embarassed for missing that the first time round. Who takes random dialog options from merchants?

I passed this information on to Mrs. Bhagpuss and carried on with my pinatas. Then, just a few minutes later, a link to the new staff appeared in guild chat. Mrs. Bhagpuss had been opening her coffers as they dropped and guess what had fallen out?

I congratulated her and thought about things for a moment. I was fairly sure I had a stack or two of those boxes stashed from last year. I went to the bank and checked and it turned out I had more than eight hundred tucked away for a rainy day.

The reason I store these things for years is precisely for this kind of situation. ANet generally don't create new containers when they add items to an annual event. They just alter the contents of the old ones. If there's nothing much I want one year I hold onto my stock in the hope next year will bring something better.

So I started opening coffers. I'd opened about thirty when the new warhorn dropped. That was a good sign. I kept going and with coffer #96 out came the staff. It hadn't even taken a hundred pulls to get what I wanted.

I put the other seven hundred or so back in the bank and considered my luck. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had bounced three of the new weapons from scarcely more than a hundred tries. That would hardly count as rare by the standards of most mmorpgs I've played but by the standards of GW2, where drop rates have historically been appalling, it seems incredibly generous. 

Or we were just incredibly lucky. It's clearly too small a sample to tell. If I was sufficiently motivated I might open another five hundred coffers and keep a count. That would probably give me a better idea. I think I'd rather save my boxes for the next good thing, thanks.

The real question I'm asking myself is how lucky is "lucky" anyway? Before the two staffs dropped so easily this afternoon we both had several weeks of content ahead of us. Working to earn something in a holiday event is a classic way to spend time in an mmorpg. 

Assuming Mrs. Bhagpuss doesn't pull another staff out of a box, she can now carry on with her plan to get the Jorbreakers she needs to buy the staff for her other two accounts. I'd bet she does get the drop before she gets that far, though. You get a lot of dragon coffers, doing these events every day.

I, on the other hand, am now finished with my Dragon Bash plans for this year. I got the only item I wanted on the first day. 

I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. I'm genuinely happy to have the staff and I'm also very happy to see ArenaNet getting into the holiday spirit. They've been scrooging for far too long. On the other hand, it does seem like they already covered the "don't stress - you'll get the thing you want" part just by putting the weapons on the vendor in the first place.

There's just no pleasing some folks, is there?

That's A Big Bag : GW2

Yesterday I was looking back at some old, unfinished plans. Today I went out and finished one. Didn't happen to be one of the ones on my list but, hey, you can't have everything.

My intention was to knock off what I thought had to be the easiest - the ranger pets. I got as far as looking up twhere to find them on the wiki. I had the page open, ready. Then I logged in.

As some general, a Charr no doubt, once said, no plan survives contact with the login screen. The ranger I'd picked was camped out in Wayfarer Foothills, in Krenek's Lodge to be precise. As he zoned back into the world he found there was some excitement going on.

Someone had dumped a load of banquet food on the ground along with a Hero banner, a sure sign of something about to happen. People tend only to do that when they expect a gathering to form. And there were indeed plenty of people all around.

As he set upon the free lunch, someone asked in general chat where they needed to be and got the reply "It happens all over the zone". That gave me a good idea what was about to happen.

This time last year we were all a bit sideswiped by the unexpected return of Dragon Bash, a Tyrian holiday missing in action since 2013. Along with a host of events and entertainments in the Norn capital of Hoelbrak, Dragon Bash brings with it an open-world rumble known as the Dragon Bash Hologram Stampede.

This little zergfest cycles around the four snow-covered zones surrounding Hoelbrak on a fifteen minute rotation. I just happened to have logged in as the carnival arrived in mine.

I love open-world zerg events in any MMORPG but they're especially enjoyable in Guild Wars 2, which was designed from the ground up to accomodate them. Any zerg is a good zerg in my book but the very aptly named Stampede isn't one of my favorites for several reasons.

Mounts are pretty much obligatory if you want to travel with the tag and even then you might struggle to get a fireball off before it's time to jump back on your not-a-horse and head for the next target. The mobs that spawn are highly likely to die in microseconds as soon as the zerg arrives.

As I discovered last year, if you want to get credit, grab some loot and finish the achievements, it's better to move away from the zerg and trigger a few of the spawns yourself. All you have to do is go to one of the many markers on the map and click on the hologram you'll find there. That's not ideal zerg -play. Rather the opposite.

But there wasn't time for any of that kind of smart thinking. I'd barely remembered what the event was before it began. The zerg was already half a snowfield away. I hopped on my roller beetle to catch them up.

The whole event only lasts a few minutes. The Asurans organizing it can't hang around. They have to be in the next zone setting up in a quarter of an hour. It lasted long enough to completely disrupt my ranger's pet plans, though.

He stopped to look at the loot that he'd got and inevitably noticed his bags were almost full and that got me thinking. Specifically, it got me thinking that I'd missed something off yesterday's To Do list, namely craft some bigger bags.

For years the largest bag you could have in GW2 was a twenty-slotter. That changed sometime in 2017, when recipes for 24, 28 and 32 slot bags were introduced. More were added, including a free one you could get by way of an achievement, with the March 2018 Living World episode A Bug in the System but as I said then, "A 32 slot bag comes in somewhere close to 250 gold, which in GW2 is a very great deal of money. I haven't been able to bring myself to make one yet."

Changes in the economy have brought that eye-watering ticket price down to around 200 gold but that's still a bit rich for my blood. A twenty-eight slot bag, on the other hand, can now be had for not much more than fifty gold, which these days seems quite reasonable.

So I made myself a couple. It was very simple - once I stopped reading the wiki and just got on with it. GW2 has one of the most comprehensive, detailed and exhaustive wikis I've seen for any game but sometimes that very exhaustivity can be... exhausting.  

I spent half an hour looking at all the various oversized bags you can make. I drilled down into the detail to discover the provenance all the unfamiliar materials. I read up on the events and zones and achievements that you could do to get the more expensive items for free or at least shave a little off the cost. I even bought a couple of items off the Trading Post to open a collection that seemed like it might be a shortcut...

And then I realized that if i just ignored all the Living Story stuff and stuck to traditional crafting, there's a very basic series of bags you can make that just use regular mats and stuff you can buy for peanuts off the TP.

There's just one expensive component, the Supreme Rune of Holding. Those will run you around ten gold apiece.

You need half a dozen for a twenty-eight slotter but the key thing to hold in mind is that, provided you have a 500 skill Tailor, Leatherworker or Armorsmith and about fifty-five gold in your bank account, you can do the whole thing in thirty seconds in any well-appointed crafting area.

I went to my favorite, Black Citadel, and knocked out a couple of 28-slot Gossamer Saddlebags. They don't do anything clever, like auto-sort particular items, but they have ten slots more apiece than a couple of the bags my Elementalist was using.

Then I rummaged around in my bank vault and dug out that free 32-slot Olmakhan Bandolier I mentioned. The one that came as part of a Living Story achievement I completed a couple of years back. At the time I couldn't decide who should have it so, as I do with most GW2 loot, I just shoved it in the bank and forgot about it.

My Elementalist, the character I play the most, if almost exclusively in World vs World, now has a grand total of two hundred and twenty-two inventory slots, of which a princessly sixty-one are empty as I write. Luxury!

More importantly, I now have the knowledge and experience to bang out a big bag whenever I feel like it. It would be nice to say my inventory woes are over but of course, as we all know, more slots just means more stuff. They'll be full in no time, I'm sure.

Now, about those pets...

What I'm Playing - And What I'm Not

I missed a day posting the day before yesterday, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen. I had my second in-hospital chemo session, which only took up the morning, but then the car broke down on the way home. It stopped right on a busy junction and I had to get out and push it into a nearby car park. Not exactly what the doctor would have ordered.

With great good luck Mrs Bhagpuss managed to get it going - just about - and with even greater luck we were only about a quarter of a mile from the garage we usually use. Mrs Bhagpuss managed to limp it in and the mechanic diagnosed a shot clutch. It was set to take a couple of days to replace in the end they got it done a day early.

I felt somewhat out of it that day. My hands were affected and typing was a bit unpredictable, although it didn't stop me commenting on a bunch of blogs, so I decided to skip a day. It's not like we're in Blaugust after all.

Yesterday, when I was a couple of paragraphs into this post, we got the call to pick up the car. When I got back a couple of hours later I read the news about Daybreak and Amazon, which looked a lot more interesting than what I had planned (this post, so I'm really selling it.).

I thought I'd do a little "what I'm playing" number. I always consider these to be fillers although for many bloggers they seem to be much more like regular features. It might be useful for me, anyway, because some days I'm really not quite sure what I'm doing and everything seems to be even more random than usual.

The MMORPGs I'd consider myself to be actively playing this month:

Guild Wars 2
EverQuest II
Riders of Icarus
Secondhand Lands
Final Fantasy XIV

Games I thought I'd be playing but don't appear to be:

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Secret Worlds Legends
Black Desert Online

Games I keep telling myself I should be playing but never do:

Dragon Nest (the mobile version)
Villagers and Heroes (mobile and PC cross-platform)
Occupy White Walls
DCUO

Games that are nagging me to play them but which I am resisting:

World of Warcraft
Rift
Elder Scrolls Online
EverQuest

Anything not on one of those lists is probably out of luck, although FFXIV would have been nowhere near any of them a week ago and now look at it.

 Riders of Icarus

As far as time spent goes, Riders of Icarus is probably getting the most hours logged. It's the first game I fire up most days. I'm very keen to hit all 31 this month for the login rewards. They are without doubt the best I've seen anywhere.

This morning I got a Legendary mount, my first. The other login Legendary Familiar I got was a combat pet only, because you can't really ride around on the back of a maid. Actually, I wouldn't put anything past MMO devs but in this case they've restrained themselves.

The mount in question turns out to be an inflatable dolphin of the kind you see people drifting out to sea on at holiday resorts before being rescued by the coastguard, hopefully at considerable personal expense. At first I thought it was just a ground mount but then it occured to me it might float over water like a skimmer in GW2.

I happened to be in Divinity Shore, the fishing beach, so I tried that out and the dolphin, whose name is Black Dooly (might be its species, actually), promply poofed, dumping me in the water. I took it for a spin around the Hakanas Highlands and after a while I noticed it was floating in the air whenever I rode it over a drop.

Turns out not only is Black Dooly a flying mount, it has a huge ceiling of 1200 meters, making it by far my best performer, Vulkanus the dragon being a distant runner-up at 450 meters. I'm just beginning to hit the point where the game takes off - literally - so it couldn't have come at a better time.

The more I play Riders of Icarus, the more I like it. I'm wary of making it sound better than it is because it's very much what you probably expect it to be. It's currently the game I'm enjoying playing the most, though, so there will be more posts about it, at least until I inevitably stop playing suddenly with no explanation or comment and don't mention it again for months, if ever.

 Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has seen a resurgence of interest chez Bhagpuss almost entirely off the back of Dragon Bash. I like most of the activities the event has to offer, the achievements are largely achievable and there are some rewards I quite want.

I've finished the metas on one account and I'll get them both done on a second account before the event ends. I've ditched the third account for the duration to prevent burnout but I did log in the 4th, free to play, account to get a few AP there. I've particularly enjoyed the mount race (ironic, considering my well-documented loathing of mounts in GW2).

Dragon Bash ends next week but its immediate replacement is the very quick return of the World Boss Rush event. I really didn't do this event justice last time it was around but it's exactly the kind of thing I enjoy and this time there are significantly improved rewards, including tiered community targets, which should keep the whole fizzing.

I'm very happy to see that someone at ANet has finally recognized the importance of giving people plenty to do between Living World instalments. Shame it took them nearly seven years to work out what every other MMORPG seemed to understand from the get-go but better late than never.

EverQuest II

EverQuest II gets played most days. I have a ton of stuff to do there, not least finishing the Signature Questline from Chaos Descending, something I still seem to be subconsciously avoiding. I'm on the final step, too, but that step is, as they say, a doozy.

As has happened before, in commenting on one of Telwyn's posts about a bottleneck in EQ2 I did some research that told me stuff I didn't know. As a result I took another long look at my Berserker's gear and now I have some kind of plan on further improvements. That needs work.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might even go back to Test and pick up a couple of questlines I never finished - or I might start them on Live. That would be a project because one of them is sixty steps long and took me weeks the first time around.

Secondhand Lands

Secondhands Lands is my EQ substitute right now. I log in and grind some mobs to fill a quest quota. Now that I'm in areas where the creatures are aggressive I have to find a safe spot and pull singles carefully, which is something few games made after about 2006 require you to do. It's very satisfying.

I got a large number of hits to my original post on the game after Massively:OP gave me a lovely plug in the piece they did off the back of the tip I sent them. No comments though and I don't know if it's resulted in anyone actually downloading and playing the game. It was interesting to see the effect on numbers here from a main article on M:OP as compared to a mention on Syp's Global Chat column, which barely registers.

FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV came out of nowhere. Like Syp (him again) I had pretty much decided I would never play this again. I even commented to that effect on the post. I haven't even logged in for any of the recent free welcome back weeks. Then I read about the Trust system (Endgame Viable. whose post I entirely agree with, is just the latest to weigh in on the topic) and next thing I knew I was patched up, in and playing.

And enjoying it. As often turns out to be the case, I find the extended free trial version of an MMORPG more to my taste than the full game. cf World of Warcraft. I've been pottering around and leveling up. I'd like to get to the trial cap of 35 and then do a second job.

The Rest

Of the games I'm not playing, the one I really should get back to is SW:TOR. I had absolutely no intention of stopping but there's a specific reason why I'm not playing this month. TOR has a lot of voiceover. It's quite well-voiced and I like to listen to it.

But not while I'm listening to the Cricket World Cup on the radio. There's been a match virtually every day for the last six weeks and it quickly became too annoying to have to keep tabbing in and out to pause the commentary so I could hear the quest dialog. There's cricket all summer with the Ashes coming up so it might be the autumn before I get back to TOR.

SWL and BDO just fell off the radar after their events drew me in. I had plans for both but they faded. I've been watching the entire eight seasons of Monk on DVD in bed on my portable DVD player so I haven't even had the Kindle Fire on for weeks. That's put paid to both Dragon Nest and Villagers and Heroes. I did get as far as recovering my login details for the desktop version but I don't see any characters there so I'm going to have to start again and I can't be bothered right now.

Everything else is thoroughly on the back-burner. I'm undecided about WoW Classic but I imagine I'll resub for a month just to be there. Not expecting to hang around long.

I do have one new (to me) title downloaded and ready to start, Eternal Lands. It's an old game I thought I'd already tried but looking at the screenshots and some video, I don't recognize it at all so I imagine I'm confusing it with something else. I'm trying to resist starting it yet for obvious reasons but when I do there will be first impressions here.

That's where things stand. Next week it will probably all be different. Or tomorrow. Or this evening.

Who needs a schedule? Not me, apparently.

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.

Bash It! : Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 and I have been on the outs of late. It's nothing new. Flipping through some of my old posts on the game yesterday, going back a few years, I often seemed to be complaining  - how stale the game felt, how little new content there was, how disinterested I'd become.

None of those drawbacks ever made much impact on my desire to log in and play but my current ennui may well be the most intense I've experienced in the near-seven years the game's been running. It's been building a while, too. I began to lose faith around the time of the second expansion, Path of Fire. I didn't like it much then and the passage of time has done little to improve it. Nothing, in fact.

Still, I go on logging in. GW2 has the event horizon of a black hole. As I wrote almost five years ago to the day, "What is it about this tar baby? Every time you think you've pulled free, there you are, stuck again." I should listen to myself once in a while.

The most recent Living World episode barely held my attention for a week. It took me two short sessions across two days to finish the story and I think I might have spent as long again diddling around in Dragonfall, the new zone. Since then I've barely touched it - or the game.

But I'm back now. My necromancer's logged in as I type this. I can hear the fireworks and shouting as she stands next to Tigg, the Moa Trainer, close to the Legends Waypoint in Hoelbrak.

Tigg used to have the Moa racing franchise in Lion's Arch back before Scarlet's armies laid waste to the city. All his moas were killed in the invasion. When Lion's Arch re-opened, looking for all the world like the campus headquarters of a top 100 tech corp, the new management declined to find space for lowbrow pastimes such as on-course betting.

According to the Wiki, Tigg re-located to the far outskirts of L.A., taking over the now-ruined mill, where he's spent the last few years training Moa chicks. Lion's Arch's loss turns out to be Hoelbrak's gain. Tigg's back in business for Dragon Bash.

The asuran entrepreneur's comeback may be unexpected but it's not in the same league as the return of this long-forgotten festival itself. Who ever thought we'd see it again? Not me, that's for sure.

The original Dragon Bash was a one-off. It appeared as an episode of the first Season of The Living World, the same one that introduced Marjory Delaqua (currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file).

The first Dragon Bash made up most of the open world part of that episode. It included some narrative content relating to the Aetherblade sky pirates plus a slew of holiday-style activities. I reviewed it favorably at the time, concluding "Overall. Good. Better than The Secret of Southsun, which wasn't too bad either".

I also saw potential for the non-narrative activities to fit into GW2's sparse calendar of holiday events. As I observed, "...unlike all the other Living Story events so far, Dragon Bash could return next year".

It didn't. ArenaNet, at that time and for years afterwards, seemed entirely content to create repeatable content and then not repeat it. Really solid, entertaining, well-designed events like The Bazaar of the Four Winds and The Queen's Jubilee showed up once or twice, then vanished.

Last year something changed. The Bazaar and The Gauntlet returned for the first time in four years, bolted together and re-marketed as The Festival of The Four Winds. This year, to almost everyone's astonishment, Dragon Bash is back, bigger and better than before.

A lot bigger, in fact. Returning from the original are the Moa races, fireworks and pinatas. Some of the decorations look to be the same, too. New for 2019 we get to battle holograms in the classic GW2 event style in the Hoelbrak arena, try to survive against harder ones in a five-player dungeon-style instance and chase hologramatic dragons around the Shiverpeaks maps in a wild zerg. There's also a mounted race around Hoelbrak because there's always a race, isn't there?

The event comes with a plethora of achievements. There are two sets, Dragon Bash and Dragon Bash Feats. The first has thirteen entries, seven of which are required for the meta-achievement, which seems very generous. The latter has fourteen, half of which are needed for another meta.

So far I like the new Dragon Bash a lot. The choice of Hoelbrak as the location for a holiday is both inspired and also so obvious you wonder why it's taken seven years. The Norns, above all the other Tyrian races, positively live for this sort of thing. They spend their entire lives drinking, partying and trying to one-up each other in "friendly" competition. It seems impossible to imagine they'd sit on their enormous thumbs and let first the pirates and then the Krytans have all the fun.

The decorations look amazing, as always. There's a fantastic feeling of excitement and celebration all across the snowbound capital. Hoelbrak's layout doesn't make things exactly easy to find but that's all part of the fun. The sky is filled with fireworks and swooping holograms and the streets are filled with players having what looks suspiciously like a very good time.

So far I've tried the mount race and the arena event, I've smashed pinatas and bet on Moas, let off fireworks and stuffed my face with sweets. I even set some effigies on fire. All of those I enjoyed to varying degrees, with my favorite definitely being the arena, which seems to run 24/7 with a mere minute's rest between cycles. It offers all the utility of Halloween's Mad King's Labyrinth with none of the annoying running around and I can see myself doing it an awful lot.

I would probably also enjoy the open world zerg event, the Hologram Stampede, if I could get to anything before it died. I tried it last night in Lorner's Pass and even though I was on my Griffin and there from the start I literally never saw a single hologram. Maybe later, when things calm down and there aren't so many people.

Looking at the achievements, many seem doable. I'm currently a sliver away from 25000 AP on my oldest account so I need the points. 25k is a big milepost with a major reward, worth making a bit of an effort to reach.

Not that I'd bother if what was being asked of me wasn't also fun but in this case it is. I could happily never play another Living World episode again but I'd be all over a new holiday as good as this one every couple of months.

Dragon Bash runs for three weeks from June 25 to July 16. After that, if last year's a guide, we'll move almost immediately into The Festival of the Four Winds and then we'll be hard up against the seventh anniversary celebrations.

Perhaps ANet are finally getting the hang of holidays. It's not before time.

I Remember Dragon Bash: GW2

Maybe it was because I'd just been writing about how much there is to do in GW2 but I've begun to notice just how much has already gone missing during the short life of the game. It was the pictorial record that alerted me.

Over the three years it's been up and running, beta weekends included, I've taken over six and a half thousand screenshots. They pop up randomly as my desktop background, a new one every ten minutes. As we move steadily into the future these begin more and more to resemble glimpses of a lost age.

Living Story Seasons One and Two account for much of the change. I diligently documented their convoluted, fractured progress as I attempted to follow the quasi-linear narrative. One would not, perhaps, expect the chapters of a completed story to remain in play indefinitely but seeing those fragmentary images of the past reminds me strongly just how much happened that can never happen again.

A rift in reality

The changes made to the way Season Two operates, packaging it up into re-playable, purchasable instances, attempts to square that circle with some constricted success but despite the ongoing clamor for something similar to be applied retrospectively to Season One, it's very hard to see how something like Scarlet's Invasions could be replicated for latecomers. Even relatively simple events like the Shiverpeak refugee crisis would only be feasible with the introduction of the kind of phasing technology used in WoW and ESO, something I can't see as either likely or desirable.

Still, one doesn't expect an ongoing storyline, necessarily, to remain persistently available throughout the life of an MMO. Every MMO I've played for long enough to see it happen has had one-off story-driven events that did or didn't change the world. What's more surprising to realize, as these snapshots of the past pop up, is just how many set-piece events have been added to GW2 and then discarded in less than three years. Events that would, in other MMOs, most certainly have represented permanent recurring content.

A rift in surreality

Over in EQ2 right now Errolisi Day has just ended and Brewday is coming in. Those holidays come round every single year, bringing with them all the content they've accrued over the life of the game. Most years something new is added but rarely is anything taken away. Any year that I get the itch to revisit holiday events in Norrath or Azeroth or Middle Earth or just about any other of the imaginary worlds I've called home for a while I can be fairly confident the party will still be going on.

I'm hoping to visit FFXIV during the current "don't make a stranger of yourself" welcome back week that runs until the ninth of March. There I mean to board the much-ballyhooed Golden Saucer to see whether Triple Triad is really anything like Vanguard's much-missed Diplomacy card game. No-one knows what the future holds but I feel reasonably assured in suggesting that if I don't make it to Eorzea this time round the Chocobo races will still be running whenever I do find the time to drop by.

Things just don't work that way in Tyria. For all the lather and strop over "limited time events", for all the hue and cry and tarring and feathering after the Karka Invasion and the Taming of Southsun, the game has largely carried on with a modified version of the St Crispin's Day Solution.

Can't say we weren't warned

Remember Dragon Bash? In Telara something very similar happens every year. In Tyria it's a once-and-done deal. The Bazaar of the Four Winds managed one repeat appearance before it crashed and burned. Literally. Super Adventure Box similarly managed a single encore before the plinky-plink music stuttered into silence. When you come to think of it, what set festivals do we have left in GW2? Halloween, Wintersday and... erm...that's it.

Really, check the Wiki. Two, count 'em, two whole holidays! WoW has thirteen, EQ2 ten, LotRO has a big bash for each season of the year and half a dozen small celebrations scattered around between. You can quite literally mark them on your calendar except you won't need to because you'll have a calendar in the game itself that keeps track stuff like that.

Good luck planning ahead that way in GW2. True, you don't have to be there at a set time on a set day or forever wonder what could have been, the way everyone complained about so bitterly back in Autumn 2012. No, you just have to be there at some point during a set period instead and you'd better be paying attention because, likely as not, there won't be much warning before it starts.

We'll always have Halloween

Once that extended moment, which you can generally bet on stretching for two weeks, Tuesday to Tuesday, passes, chances seem to be increasingly slender whether you'll get a second shot. The subtle way this change has been slipped under the guard of the frenzied supporters of equal access gameplay is exemplary.  Give the people what you want them to have while telling them you have listened and are giving them what they said they wanted. Slick.

Counter to that, though, I do notice, as I gaze nostalgically at shots of Scarlet's probes in The Mists or blocky, primary-colored animals cavorting through Metrica Province, there is a move afoot to package and conceal temporary content neatly away in instances, where it doesn't frighten the horses that we don't have and can be sold on at a profit. The recent Golem Invasion that turned out to be a player-exploited bug not the harbinger of some unexpected World Event, reminded me sharply of how long it's been since some strange, unexplained addition to the open-world landscape sparked frenzied speculation.

I do hope things aren't going to become too tidy. I love looking back at all these lost moments. I love knowing they will never return. Let's have more of it. With an expansion in the works it's a fine time for some excitement-building intrigue and mystery. I never travel anywhere without my camera and soon I won't even have to be in every shot.