Window Of Opportunity

I spent very nearly the whole day playing Guild Wars 2 today. I'd guess I've played more GW2 since End of Dragons than the rest of the year put together. 

It's not just the expansion, either, although I have spent a great deal of time in Cantha, mostly doing map completion, which I've found to be far more enjoyable and compelling than usual thanks to the extreme verticality of all the maps and the strong element of puzzling involved this time around. I know from map chat that some people absolutely loathe it for the exact same reasons but they had boring old Path of Fire - now it's my turn!

I also did the hyper-controversial new endgame meta again today, just because I happened to be in the map, the appropriately-named Dragon's End, when it started. It was my second run and it finished the same way the first did, with the dragon stil about 25% health when the timer ran out. 

It was a full map, give or take, and we had maximum NPC support and an experienced, if not very successful commander. He said he'd had about forty tries so far and won thee of them. Far from reducing anyone's confidence in his ability to lead us to victory, the general sentiment seemd to be that, with a seven and a half per cent success rate, he was doing better than most. 

The whole mood of the map stayed cheerful throughout, even when it became obvious we were going to lose. People did start to bail towards the end but with no complaints that I heard, only a few rueful comments along the lines of "We'll get it next time". 

I haven't read up on the tactics and the entire event from start to finish is so mind- boggling chaotic I had very little idea what was happening, let alone what I was supposed to be doing. As with Dragon's Stand, the Heart of Thorns meta it's modelled on, there are three lanes, all of which have to progress down the map, beating various bosses and completing diverse tasks before everyone comes together on a platform for a gigantic death match with the dragon. 

Both times I've done it I've taken the center lane, so I now have a rough idea of the nodal points of that one but I still have no real clue what the mechanics are. At any point where I was supposed to be doing anything other than killing mobs what I was actually doing was watching other people to see what they were doing. Didn't help much. Most of them had no idea, either.

Dragon's Stand was just the same when it started. It took me half a dozen runs to get the hang of it and maybe a dozen more before I got to be competent. After that, I was the one yelling in map chat about what we ought to be doing. I never could keep my trap shut. 

The reason I did Dragon's Stand that many times wasn't because I was desperate for the rewards.  It was because it was a whole lot of fun, particularly on a wet Sunday afternoon, which seemed to be when I usually found myself there.

Someone piped up in map chat today to say Dragon's End was the best meta the game's had since Dragon's Stand and several people chimed in to agree. I certainly think it has that potential, once ANet tune it a little and a critical mass of players understand the rules. I'll certainly be going back for another try, anyway.

The meta took about forty five minutes, with a two-hour lead-in but that was nothing compared to the time I spent reorganizing my banks. That's GW2's real end game. 

I've been at it for days now. I started with the guild banks, all three of them, then I moved on to my main account bank.

I long ago expanded my storage to the maximum number of vaults. I'd very happily give ANet (imaginary) money for more but they won't take it so I had to get creative. I considered buying a new characeter slot to make a dedicated bank mule but then I realised I had the ideal candidate already.

When HoT added a new character class, the Revenant, and gave us a new character slot to play one, I felt honor-bound to give it a go. I made the class and tried to play it but I couldn't get on with it at all. 

Revenants have turned out to be quite popular but mine has been standing on a patch of grass in Lion's Arch next to the NPC who ports you to the daily Activity for years. I only ever do that daily if it's the best of a bad bunch or if Sanctum Sprint is up. I like Sanctum Sprint. 

It occurred to me that if he was just going to stand there, he could mind everyone's stuff while he did it. I converted some of my vast pile of gold to Gems and bought him a couple of extra bag slots, then I gave him some twenty-slot Halloween Pails to put in them, plus a few more to replace the smaller bags he was using. 

That reminded me my Elementalist is also a tailor and she can make bags up to the largest size GW2 allows, thirty-two slots. They cost a fortune to craft, though, so in the end I made a twenty-eight slotter, which itself cost almost as much as the Gems I'd bought. And then I decided the Ele would get more use out of it than the bank mule, so I swapped it for one of her twenty-slots and gave him that instead.

After that it was on to the hard part - sorting through seventeen thirty-slot tabs of largely unrecognizeable icons, trying to decide what to stash on the mule, what to sell, what to use and what to leave in the bank. I even did my best to organize all seventeen tabs into some kind of coherent pattern.

I was doing it in the Citadel in World vs World, which is where I do everything practical in the game other than craft. I was about half way through when some gang of thugs from another server decided to take our Garrison. I was so wrapped up in my bank sorting I didn't even notice until the battle had been raging for about twenty minutes but as soon as I realised what was going on I left off what I was doing and legged it to the keep to help.

The battle went on for nearly as long as the Dragon's Stand meta. There were about double the number of the enemy as there were of us but we kept harrrying them and kiting them and chipping away like an annoying cloud of gnats until finally there were only about even numbers left, at which point they gave up and ran away. 

It was a famous victory! And then, about five minutes after I got back to my bank-work, the whole thing kicked off again at our keep in Eternal Battlegrounds, so I got to do it all over again. We won that too!

Put all that together and I think I've been playing GW2 for about seven hours today, at least. I only really stopped because I wanted to get a post done. I haven't finished sorting the bank, either. I'll have to do more on that tomorrow.

Yeebo has a very good post about how expansions in mmorpgs don't mean what they used to and both he and Tyler F.M. Edwards, who has a post over at MassivelyOP on much the same subject, pick out the recent Star Wars: the Old Republic expansion, Legacy of the Sith, as a prime example. 

Yeebo makes the point that some mmorpg companies seem to have figured out they can get away with taking money for stuff they used to give away for free but also that the promise of a good expansion brings people back to the game. If the expansion lives up to that promise, those players don't just whip through it and leave, they remember why they liked the game in the first place and stick around for a while. 

That's exactly what End of Dragons has done for me. Okay, I hadn't technically left GW2 but I had checked out emotionally. Now I feel re-invigorated and ready to carry on and find out where the game goes next. If EoD had disappointed the way the SW:tOR expansion apparently has, it might easily have been the final straw, not just for me but for many.

Luckily for me that isn't how it turned out. Like Belghast, who seems to have had a kind of damascene conversion to the game, I'm having a lot of fun in GW2 right now and for once I can imagine it continuing for a while. 

Having put that in writing, I imagine next week I'll be here pounding out two thousand words about some other game I've magically started playing but until then expect a few more postcards from Cantha. I have to do something with these hundreds of screenshots I've taken.

Some Thoughts After Revisiting Dragon's Stand In Late 2018: GW2

Last week I read an interesting post at MMOBro entitled "When Is an MMO Really Dead?". Tyler (of Superior Realities) split the concept of MMO death into four stages: Decline, Maintenance Mode, Closure and Extinction, making the point that MMOs are a lot harder to kill than people seem to think.

The whole idea of games being "dead" is an odd one to begin with. I don't recall anyone ever sticking their head round the door of a pub and asking "Is darts dead?" before deciding whether to come in and chuck some arrows.

Even in video-gaming, the concept of mortality seems to rest solely with online games. Various companies have been making a good living for years now out of reselling not just old games but also the retrofitted hardware to play them on. Syp has a series at Bio Break where he plays ancient games from before the discovery of fire and no-one seems to think that's weird.

Apparently MMOs are different. Quite a lot of people seem to want a written guarantee that they won't be wasting their time on a daed gaem before they're even willing to "risk" creating a free account. What risk it is that they think they'd be taking, I'm not sure. The loss of an hour or two that could have been better spent translating "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" into Sanskrit, perhaps?

People even ask the question of MMOs that are self-evidently vital and vibrant. What anyone means when they claim World of Warcraft is dead is beyond rational interpretation. If WoW, with its hundreds of servers, millions of players and ability to spawn a major Hollywood movie a decade after launch, is dead then presumably almost all other Western MMOs are cremated and scattered to the four winds, their very names no longer even a memory.

In the week that I read Tyler's post there was a thread on the first page of the Guild Wars 2 forum titled something like "Is GW2 dead?". I'd link it but it's gone now, or at least I couldn't see it on the first seven pages, which was as far as I could be bothered to look.

I imagine it was removed. ANet don't have much of a sense of humor when it comes to people claiming their bread and butter has fallen face down on the shag pile and who can blame them?

It's hard (although not impossible) to imagine it was a genuine query, anyway. You have to have bought a copy of GW2 even to post on the forum so it's a bit disengenuous to go there and ask if the game is dead - you could just log in and look for yourself.

Which people do. Not that it makes them any less likely to be trolls. After all, if someone makes an account for an MMO, creates a character, then logs in just to guffaw "People still play this thing?" you have to assume an ulterior motive.

Trolling aside, there are good reasons to be cautious when choosing a new-to-you MMO or even returning to an old favorite. It's there in the title: Massively Multiple. Kind of suggests the games require a critical mass of people to make them viable. But do they?

Back in the day there might not have been all that much you could do without either a bare minimum of half a dozen staunch friends or a pool of  pugs to slot and fit into a group session. And that's not even touching raids.

You'll notice I'm using the subjunctive even for that scenario. I'm not personally convinced it was ever true that you had to have lots of people online at once to enjoy an MMORPG. As the century turned, I learned to play EverQuest  on the Test server, where I sometimes never even saw another player in an entire session, far less grouped with one.

Still, for the sake of argument let's say it was true then. It's surely not now. One of the loudest grumbles from complainers' corner these last few years has been over the supposed way MMOs have all turned into single player games. We're all online, playing alongside each other, hopelessly alone, apparently.

The mechanics of many MMOs have even been tweaked to the point that other players actually make progress harder. Someone was complaining about that very thing in the latest Living Story for GW2, where trying to do the main narrative instances in a group is apparently awkward and offputting.

If you don't need other players to play the game then how can it be dead without them? The NPCs and mobs are still there and these days it's likely they'll scale in difficulty to match your level and your numbers. If they don't, chances are there'll be a Solo setting on the dungeon door to fit your circumstances or a computer-controlled mercenary or three just waiting for you to drop them a few gold so you can group with some imaginary friends instead of trying to badger your real ones into playing.

MMORPGs in 2018 can pretty much play themselves. Players are all but optional. The games could all run on indefinitely, perfectly prepared for the occasional visitor, providing an hour or two of innocent entertainment in much the same manner as a What The Butler Saw machine might have done in a seaside arcade between the wars. Okay, not exactly like that...

A lack of players in itself doesn't make for a dead MMORPG. Left alone, MMOs don't die. They carry on regardless, neither knowing nor caring that they've been forgotten. No, if you want shot of an MMO, it has to be killed.

Sometimes it's a simple business decision. Sometimes there's a political or personal factor. If the servers are shutting down , though, you can bet that someone, somewhere, sometime, made it happen.

Of course, knowing it was someone's choice to flip the switch doesn't make it any easier when the last world goes dark, sending your characters on a one-way trip to oblivion. And that's why everyone is so nervous all the time. Nervous enough to ask "is this game dead?"when it so obviously is not. It isn't now but it might be one day and that would hurt.

You know what? There are no guarantees. Nothing lasts forever, not the games, not the characters, not the players. If there's one server up the game's not dead. If you want to play, give it a go. What have you got to lose? After all, as they say in PvP , it's not like you're going to die in real life, right?