#9 - Maggottypie - Born 5 May 2000 - 17 days 11 hours

First of all, doesn't he look great? No-one would have to tell you he's a magic-user. He really looks the part. He also looks pretty darn scary with that austere expression and those eyebrows. How many people's eyebrows turn grey before their hair does? Unless maybe he dyes it...

And look at what he's holding. Some kind of voodoo doll in his left hand and a serrated dagger in the right. A jagged blade says you're serious about gutting your enemies. Those things are banned for a reason.

All of which goes to show just how misleading looks can be. Maggottypie was always one of my sweeter characters despite his forbidding appearance and frankly disturbing name.

Ah, yes, the name... At the time I chose it I was under the impression it was a relatively familiar folk term for a magpie. I'd seen it in Shakespeare and quite possibly in Pratchett but I also thought I'd heard my grandmother use it.

No-one else seemed to have come across it. Certainly no-one playing EverQuest in 2000. I got a few comments about it, mostly along the line of wouldn't it look better on a Necro? Googling it now, I see the actual Shakespearian expression is maggot-pie, which is even worse. Lucky I didn't go with that. I think I wanted to but couldn't because EQ doesn't allow punctuation in character names.

Maggotty, as everyone called him ("Everyone" being Mrs Bhagpuss and one or two others.) is a Magician. Not a Mage, as I confess I have fallen into the habit of calling the class these days. Back then, people would happily correct you if you used the shortened version of the name. I think it might have had something to do with another game using the term, although I was never really sure just why some people disliked it so much.

At that time, EverQuest had two classes that could summon "pets": Necromancers and Magicians. In theory, this made them more suitable for soloing since, in effect, there were two of you. One of the two wasn't very proactive and didn't have any initiative, sure, but then that could happen with any group.

Necromancers, however, were in direct competition with Bards for the Swiss Army Knife of Norrath title, whereas Magicians were very much a one-trick pony. Well, they were then. Now, not so much, as we'll find out later, when we get to #17.

I'd been soloing a Necromancer with some success, on and off, but I'd read a lot about how much more powerful a well-played Magician could be and by "powerful", what people generally meant was faster at killing stuff. Necros mostly employed damage over time spells to rot and poison things to death and DoTs, by absolute definition, take a while to do their wicked work.

Magicians, in contrast, deal their damage up front. They blow stuff up. Not as spectacularly as Wizards, the kings and queens of devestation, but quite spectacularly enough. Plus Magicians have the pet to take the hits while they're doing it, which is a crucial advantage.

Back-tracking for a moment, "pet" was what we called any creature you could either stand behind while a mob battered on it instead of you or any creature you could sic on a target like a (Very badly-trained.) attack dog. In these early days, both pet pathing and pet aggro were huge issues, particularly in dungeons. Misbehaving pets would frequently bring the entire contents of a wing or a floor back to an unprepared, soon to be extremely angry and mostly dead group. The Magician always got the blame even though there was often nothing much they could do to stop it.

It certainly put some groups off taking Magicians, who would often be asked to dismiss their pets if the group needed to move from its pull spot. Since summoning pets cost money in the form of reagents, having to re-summon several times in a session was not a trivial expense and no-one ever re-imbursed you for it the way they fell over themselves to give peridots to clerics for buffs. 

Non-summoning pet classes like Enchanters and Druids were even worse liabilities, since they had to make do with charming mobs. Charm spells had a tendency to break at inconvenient times, meaning their so-called pets could - and regularly did - turn around and try to kill their masters. Woe betide the group who suddenly found themselves having to deal with an enraged former pet mid-fight, especially one that had been buffed to the eyeballs by its erstwhile owner.

We may get to that in more detail when we meet my first Enchanter. For now, let's stick with the real pet classes, the ones who summoned their pets, loyal servants who would stay with them until death or dismissal and who would at least attempt to follow the orders they were given. 

At low levels, Necros got relatively weak skeleton pets that didn't do a lot of damage or take a lot of hits. They improved radically later on but it was a long slog to get to the good ones. Magicians, however, got great pets from the start, one for each of the traditional elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water 

Their roles in a group were generally clear but the debate over which was best for soloing was furious. The easiest, safest option was Earth. The Earth elemental grabbed aggro and held on to it like velcro, not least because it kept casting Root on whatever it was fighting. It also had a ton of hit points and could take a real beating. 

Earth made a serviceable tank even in groups and solo it was like fighting from behind a wall. It could easily hold the mob's attention even while you nuked the stuffing out of it. The Earth Ele didn't hit very hard, so while using one made for a safe option, it could also feel slow.

Water was the all-rounder. It did more damage than Earth and healed itself so it was also quite robust but it wasn't quite as good at keeping the mob's attention and if it lost it, there was no Root to get it back. It was also immune to poison, which could be handy.

Fire did the most damage by far but had the lowest hit points and could often die before the mob did, leaving the Magician exposed. There was a technique for chain-summoning Fire Eles but it was both high risk and high maintenance. I never really got the hang of the rhythm required.

The Air elemental had the best chance of not being hit and also procced a stun fairly reliably, making it a decent option for tanking. It also did quite a lot more damage than Earth, about on a par with Water but not up to the standard of Fire. At higher levels, a lot of Magicians swore by Air for soloing and I eventually came to understand why.

All the elements had their advocates but Earth was by far the most common choice with players new to the class, even though quite a few guides recommended Water.  Air, as I said, was often the choice of more experienced Magicians and Fire was for the real high-rollers as well as being the first choice in groups, when the Magician had been hired to do DPS.

I mostly used Earth at first. After a while, following some guide or other, I tried Water, which I remember not going so well, although it was good for mobs like rattlesnakes which, without their poison attack, turned out to be pretty easy prey. Or maybe I was just better at hunting by then. I mean, you'd have to hope so.

After a while, though, I went back to Earth and stuck with it. I tried Air but Maggotty never really trusted it to keep mobs off him. I don't believe I really got to grips with the Air pet until I played my second Magician a few years later. Back in 2000 I wasn't in that much of a hurry anyway. I was a lot more concerned about not dying than scraping every last point of XP out of each session. Earth kept me safe so I was happy with that.

Other than summoning pets to fight for them, the thing Magicians were best at was playing Quartermaster and that seemed like it might be a good way to get groups. Everyone was always running out of something and Magicians could pull all kinds of stuff out of thin air, from food and drink to weapons and bags. In practice, though, most people I grouped with didn't want much of what I had to offer. The good stuff didn't come until quite a bit later.

Post Kunark, at high level Magicians also got a spell that made them very popular with groups hunting in far-flung places, which in Norrath is just about everywhere. Call of the Hero allows the Magician to summon a group member to them: just the thing when your tank leaves and their replacement is on the far side of the zone.

Needless to say, Maggotty never got to summon anybody. He didn't even get to the level where he could scribe the spell and anyway he rarely grouped. I did actually enjoy grouping as a Magician - it was just that no-one seemed all that keen to take one. Maybe that name put them off. 

Mostly I soloed him, always hoping to see the fast kills and easy xp Magicians were supposedly known for. It never appeared.

Instead, I either ended up spending to much time summoning new pets to replace the ones that had died or going so carefully, trying to make sure that didn't happen, that I hardly killed anything at all. In the early days, your pets would kill themselves if you crossed a zone line, too, so that was another limitation. 

I found playing a Magician a lot fiddlier than playing a Necro. There seemed to be far more reagents to cast the spells and a lot more set-up time in general. I didn't really mind re-summoning a skeleton. It was just a couple of bone chips and a rusty weapon. For a Magician it was a gem and maybe armor and weapons and there was a small random element to how powerful a summoned pet might be, which meant when I got one of the good ones I really didn't want to waste it.

I also found the summoned items annoying in that they were all No Rent, meaning they vanished forever when I logged out so next time I had to start all over again. Worst of all, the extreme reliance on the pet tended to counterbalance any advantage it gave.

And yet, despite all of that, my highest character today is a Magician and I wouldn't, from choice, play anything else now. But we'll get to her later. 

I remember Maggottypie fondly as a cheerful fellow, who rarely lost patience with what was quite often a difficult role. He was fun to play in small doses and on the rare occasions when he managed to get a group I could see why some people rated the class so highly. Maybe now I know how to play a Magician better than I did back then I ought to get him out for a run sometime. He deserves it.

#4 - Tarquinn - Born 3 January 2000 - 7 days, 22 hours

Tarquinn was the first character I made with anything less than serious intent. I'd been playing for not much more than a month when I created him and I'd only just begun to loosen up a little.

EverQuest at the turn of the millennium wasn't exactly what you'd call a laff-fest and on top of that I'd already begun to develop a tendency towards the po-faced, an unfortunate attitude which would only get worse over the next couple of years. By the time I got to my fourth character, though, I was ready for some light relief. So I made a Troll and gave him a posh name. I thought it would be funny and it might have been, too, if he'd ever gotten as far as joining a group.

I'll pause so anyone who played EQ back then can have a good laugh at the idea of anyone playing a Troll and imagining it would be fun. Trolls were the least-played race for a long time, probably still are, and with good reason. 

Before the Iksar arrived with the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, Trolls were the most hated race in Norrath. They were kill on sight in every city other than their home town of Grobb. Their neighbors, the Ogres, grudgingly tolerated them in Oggok but only if they kept out of sensitive areas like the Shadowknight Guild. The Dark Elves allowed Trolls into the Neriak Foreign Quarter but they certainly weren't welcome there. Trolls weren't welcome anywhere.

Somehow, not only did I think playing one of these social outcasts would be fun, I also didn't think it would be enough of a challenge, so fairly soon after I started playing him, I decided Tarquinn was going to move to Qeynos. It seems like a crazy idea but there was some logic to it. 

In his first few levels, Tarquinn died so many times to froglok tads, frogloks, swamp alligators and every other damn thing in the filthy swamp that Mrs Bhagpuss could not stop laughing. She was watching because at that point we were still sharing a PC, taking turns to play our characters. I think it was sheer humiliation that drove him to cross the continent at around Level six or seven.

Obviously he wasn't going to live in Qeynos. That would literally have been suicide. No, I had this super-smart idea to get him bound outside the city walls so he could level up in Qeynos Hills and Blackburrow. 

I think my reasoning was twofold: Innothule Swamp and The Feerrott, the two starting zones he had access to by birth, were dark, fetid, depressing and all too frequently fatal, whereas I'd found Qeynos Hills much more open, light and cheery during my time there with Raiffe. So long as Tarquinn could avoid falling down that hollow log in Blackburrow, I thought he'd do just fine.

The only problem (Not the only problem as it turned out...) was getting there. Travel in EQ back in 2000 was infamously slow and dangerous for just about anyone. Travel for a character whose levels were still measured in single figures was like running a deadly gauntlet. No, not "like". That's exactly what it was.

Nearly twenty-five years later I can still remember the zones he had to cross. In order, they were Innothule Swamp/The Feerrott/Rathe Mountains/Lake Rathetear/South Karana/West Karana/Qeynos Hills/South Qeynos. I can even remember the paths he took through each of them but the part I remember most clearly of all, the bit that quite literally had me on the edge of my seat, willing him not to die, was the trip across Lake Rathetear.

When they were developing EverQuest, someone at Verant Interactive must have had thought it would be cool to have boats you could steer. There were the big ships to take you from Feydwer to Antonica but all you did was sit on them while they followed their prescribed route. Wouldn't it be cool if you could get on a boat and make it go where you wanted it to go?

So you could. Except the boat in question was a tiny rowing boat that went in a straight line at what felt like walking pace. You couldn't pick those boats up and carry them, either. They were moored in a few places, one of them Lake Rathetear. If you wanted to cross the lake you either used one or you swam.

I knew where the boats were from the EQAtlas maps, all of which by then I had printed out (On the printer at work.) and kept, neatly bound, in a ring-binder file next to my PC. Unfortunately, when I got to the Lake Rathetear waterline, late at night, there was no boat to be seen. 

The small rowing boats in EverQuest, just like the big ships that crossed the Ocean of Tears, were physical objects in the world. You got in them and they moved. If you missed the ship, you had to wait for the next. If someone was using the rowing boat you needed, tough luck. The server would eventually put it back where it belonged after they left it wherever they got out but who knew how long that would take?

Certainly not me. I remember dithering for a bit and then making a decision. Tarquinn would have to swim. Across the whole lake, which meant swimming the length of the entire zone. 

In normal circumstances, playing a level-appropriate character, I'd probably have gone along the zone boundary instead, clinging to the vertiginous sides with that amazing bio-magnetism all Norrathians seem to have been born with. Unfortunately for Tarquinn, Lake Rathetear has a bunch of camps dotted around the perimiter, all filled with mobs ready and willing to tear a young Troll's head clean off. At his level, if any of them spotted him it would have been a quick trip back to his bind point in Grobb and start all over again.

I decided open water was the safer option although I had no clue what might be lurking below the surface. The entire time he was swimming I was terrified some freshwater shark would start tearing chunks out of him and he'd die in deep water and I'd never get his corpse back. And of course, since he was moving home, he was carrying everything he owned in his backpack - although realistically, how much could that have been?

Remember what happened to Bogle with the piranhas? And that was in a shallow river!  Lake Rathetear is deep. Anything that sinks there is not coming up again.

I'm happy to say that, unlike the Dwarf, the Troll made it to the far side in one piece. There are sharks in Lake Rathetear but they must all have been at a party with the aqua goblins that night. But his troubles weren't over yet.

It was dark when Tarquinn made the swim, which meant, when he came out of the water on the far side, the slightly less terrifying Gnolls that block the exit had been replaced by the much scarier night shift - higher level undead. It is just about possible to edge past them but in the dark it wouldn't be easy to find a safe path.

I don't recall exactly how he got past them. I just know he did. Chances are they were camped so he would have been able to take advantage of the slowish respawns. Everything was camped in those days and Gnolls/Undead was a fairly popular spot. Not as popular as the Aviaks across the zone line in South Karana, though, which was where Tarquinn found himself next.

Fortunately, although there's plenty in South Karana that will kill you as soon as look at you, it's mostly wide-open space with good visibility. After that, the rest of the trip is a long but almost completely safe run along the riverside all the way to Qeynos with very little chance of bumping into anything nasty. Unless you happen to be a Troll, of course, in which case the supposedly friendly guards are just another KoS mob to avoid.

There are no hair-raising near misses to report. Tarquinn made it to the walls of Qeynos in one piece. I think the whole trip took about thirty or forty minutes although it felt like several years. Once there, all he had to do was find someone to bind him before he had an unfortunate accident and woke up back in Grobb with the whole damn journey to do again. 

Let me just catch anyone not in the know up on "binding" in early EverQuest. Everyone had a "bind spot" which was where they'd respawn when they died. Obviously, you'd want that to be quite close to where you were planning on hunting and you'd want it to be safe. The problem with that was... well, there were a couple of problems...

First off, only seven classes got the Bind Affinity spell: the four cloth casters - Wizards, Enchanters, Necromancers and Magicians, and the three priests, Clerics, Druids and Shamans. Tarquinn was a Shaman so he could bind himself... when he reached Level 14. As you can see from the screenshot at the top of the post, he still hasn't.

Second, while those classes could bind themselves just about anywhere they liked, they could only bind other people in specific areas. Mostly cities. Qeynos was a city and it had a small strip of grass between the city wall and the zone line to Qeynos Hills. Players of races or classes not tolerated inside the walls often hung around a little way down from the gates, out of aggro range of the gate guards, shouting for someone to come bind them there.

In 2000, binding people who couldn't do it for themselves was good business. Not as good as casting SoW or using portal spells to taxi people around but still worth doing. Most casters would do it for tips and no-one expected much from a low level so it was a pretty safe bet you'd find someone willing to do it for next to nothing... if only you waited long enough.

I don't think it took too long for Tarquinn to get a bind. If it had, I'm sure I'd remember because being unbound that far from your respawn point was scary. I know for sure he got one before he died again and in fact I don't think he did die very often after that, which was part of the reason I wanted him there in the first place.

Even so, it didn't turn out quite like I'd planned. Quite literally every NPC on that side of the Rathe Mountains was ready to kill Trolls on sight. Not only could Tarquinn not use a bank or a crafting station, he couldn't even sell his trash loot to a merchant. As for training at a Shaman guild, you could forget it.

He tried Blackburrow but that didn't work out. Eventually he made it as far as Level 11, somehow, but it wasn't much fun. When I finally decided to retire him, he was in North Karana trying to learn how to kite on the big beetles there. It didn't feel much different from being back in Innothule, except the scenery was better.

I decided to move on from Tarquinn to another Priest class - one I'd noticed doing just about everything rather better than he could. That was the Druid. But before I made the move - and even before I was done with Tarquinn for good - I thought I'd have a go at being a Wizard. I mean, everyone wants to be a Wizard in a fantasy game at some point, don't they?

Maybe so but guess what? That didn't work out too well, either. More on that next time.

Don't Make Me Get My Main : WoW, GW2, EQ, EQ2

The imminent arrival of WoW's Legion expansion has spurred a flurry of concern about what class to play as a "Main". Rowan, Belghast and Syp have all been pondering the problem, which is compounded by the extensive, some might say draconian, changes to the Talent system.

Some, like Chestnut, have already made their choice, while others prefer to defer, avoiding the difficult decision of which class to make their focus for the expansion by attempting to level everything to the cap before the demon army gets here. Stargrace and Tyler are working on that.

Then there are those who've seen it all before and don't feel the need to jump in any particular direction just yet. Wilhelm and Keen are sitting back and thinking, taking the long view.

Me? I find the whole thing a tad confusing. In all the years I've played MMORPGs I've never really accepted, far less adopted, the notion of a "Main Character". I remember being introduced to the concept quite early on in my EQ career and finding it problematic from the start.

When I first stepped out into Norrath it was as a half-elven ranger who promptly fell to his deat h from the platforms of Kelethin and was never seen again - or at least his corpse was never found. He was followed, not precisely in this exact order, by a human warrior, a dwarven cleric, another half-elf ranger (starting this time in the re-assuringly ground-based caves of Surefall Glade), a troll shaman, a human druid and eventually a gnome necromancer.

As I was trying out different classes and races and starting areas, coming to grips with the game and the fresh concepts that came with it, each of those was, for a time, my "main" character. The necromancer eventually made it into the twenties, pulling ahead of the pack, but I didn't stop playing any of the others.

The Great Test Wipe debacle shifted the emphasis from my necro to the druid, who made Kunark her home when the expansion launched. As the weeks and months rolled on I continued to create more characters, trying out all the classes and races and several combinations of each.

That was a period of amazing growth for EverQuest. New servers opened often and I developed the habit of making new characters on all of them. When the Scars of Velious expansion appeared, around a year after I first began playing, it turned out you needed a character in the low thirties to have much chance of joining in with the action in the lowest level of the new zones.

At that time I played every hour I could manage. I was working part-time and had plenty of opportunity so I'd always get in at least forty hours a week, often more. Despite this major life commitment my highest character, the druid, was around level 28 or 29.

The reason I was so far behind the leveling curve was simple. I had literally dozens of characters spread across more than half a dozen servers and on any given day I would probably play at least four or five of them. My established practice was to play a character until it hit a milestone of some kind - and a milestone back then might be one yellow bubble of experience, twenty per cent of a level. Then I'd swap.

Playing mostly solo this wasn't any kind of a problem. On the contrary, it meant the game stayed astonishingly fresh. Not for me the sad ennui of the bored fifty. Or sixty as it became with the coming of Kunark.

It did become something of a problem after Velious, which was when my grouping and guilding days really began. In order to function in a group, particularly in a responsible role like main healer or tank, the two positions I ended up taking most often, there is something of a requirement for the player to be, at least, competent with the class he or she is playing. If you play dozens of characters that competence can be harder to acquire.

People recruiting for groups tend to ask awkward questions. Questions like "is that your Main?".  The subtext being "...and if it is, why are you so bad at it?" Guild leaders and officers can be even more pointed. For administrative purposes they almost always want to know which characters are "Mains" and which "Alts". That was a question I could never answer.

The result of all this was the building of a network of open-minded, laid-back, non-judgmental friends and acquaintances, a list of people who genuinely wanted you to bring the player not the class. It also meant joining what used to be known as a "family guild", giving up any thoughts of participating in the then-cut-throat world of raid progression.

The compromise I made back then was to have a small number of "focus" characters. I played my Cleric and my Shadowknight - and later my Beastlord - enough to keep them at the level cap through a couple of expansions as well as to develop the instinct and muscle memory I needed to be effective in tight situations. At the same time I continued to play a whole slew of other characters, day in, day out, most of whom rarely met the rest of the people on my friends and guild list.

In the decade and a half since then not an awful lot has changed. The main difference is that, as MMO developers have chosen to make their games hugely more friendly both to playing solo and to raising a horde of characters, the choice of "who to Main" has become less and less of an ordeal.

In the old days a serious player would generally have a Main and an Alt. Just the one. The Alt would often be chosen to complement the Main, would always be in his shadow, often only coming into his own in the dog days towards the end of an expansion cycle, when the Main had Done Everything and the player was Bored.

These days, as can readily be seen in the current Invasion Frenzy, it's probably more normal for the average player to keep a stable of characters at or near the level cap. In GW2, where even at launch it barely took two weeks to hit cap, and where now you can make an Alt and level it to 80 in five minutes while standing at the bank, everyone plays everything.

And yet people still talk about Mains and Alts. The concept is deeply ingrained in the genre. It may never go away. And with good reason, because the fact remains that, no matter how swift and easy the journey becomes, there's really no short cut to becoming competent at your class. In the end you have to put in the hard hours, whether you do that leveling up or after you boost.

I don't have a "Main" in any MMO I play unless it's one that only allows a single character. That's for the same reason I don't have "Toons". All my characters, in every imaginary world I visit, are individuals. They're people in the same way the characters in a book or a movie are people. They aren't extensions of my ego or tools for me to use - or, perhaps I should say, they are much more than that.

All the same, I have to recognize that, in any MMO, there are only so many classes or builds I can play competently. In GW2, currently,  that's Tempest and Druid. In EQ2 it's Berserker and in EQ it's Magician.

For WoW, while I'm there this time around, it's most likely going to be beastmaster  Hunter and demonology Warlock. At the moment I have virtually no understanding of, let alone competence in, either but it will come if I keep playing.

It won't make either of them my "Main" though. I don't do Mains.

Not Waving But Drowning : EQNext

The comment thread following Massively's breaking news that Daybreak Games have cancelled Everquest Next runs into four figures. The blogosphere similarly resounds with the clangorous echoes of a mighty giant fallen. Wilhelm, chronicler of all things Norrath, is keeping a tally. I suppose we're all obligated to say something so here goes...

I agree one hundred per cent with Wilhelm when he observes that EQNext "was in its ideal state for a few hours after that first SOE Live presentation about it". It was a great presentation. One of the best I have ever seen for a game. It had verve and enthusiasm and punch. What it didn't have, as became increasingly obvious in the weeks and months that followed, was a game.

Actually, if all the team working on the project hadn't had at that point was a game, they would have been in a much happier place. After all, making games is supposed to be what they do. They could have come up with one in a year or two.

But it was much worse than just not having a game. They also didn't have a game engine or a voxel engine or an AI engine. They didn't have any of the basic infrastructure they needed to hang their game on when they made it.

It didn't stop there. In addition to having no game and no game engines they didn't even have a game plan. Instead they had "open development". That high-concept take on game-making amounted to not much more than a sporadic series of talking shops that asked questions that no-one cared about and didn't even listen to the answers to those.

There was a series of videos offering the unedifying spectacle of various staffers goofing with each other and sending up the project even as they were supposed to be promoting it. There was a whole beta application process, made hideously complicated and controversial by the involvement of PSS1, all for a product that had no earthly chance of entering any kind of beta in any reasonable time-frame.

Let's see, how about we put Qeynos...here!

And, of course, there was Landmark or, as it was initially known, Everquest Next: Landmark.

Landmark came as a total surprise. I never heard anyone claim to have anticipated or expected that SOE would simultaneously announce that they were going to make a new EQ MMORPG and a voxel-based, Minecraft inspired quasi-MMO at one and the same time, let alone that the latter would be available to play in less than six months.

They did, though, and it was. Or it was for those early adopters and curiosity-seekers willing to shell out the price of a triple-A release for what turned out to be a poorly-optimized tech demo.

The weirdest thing about Landmark and its controversial alpha-launch is that, if you go back and read the coverage from those first few months, it seems a lot of people were having a really good time. I was. I bought the most expensive pack for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present and the cheaper one for myself so I could play too.

I have never regretted it for a second. I believe we got good value for our money. If you read my blog posts from back then you can see I was having a lot of fun. A couple of months of fun for the cost of a regular game is about what you'd expect. Of course, some of the supposed perks that were included in the price, like Early Access when the game launched and the ability to carry some of your work into release will never be fulfilled, but I knew then that I was paying a fee to get into the alpha. Everything else was just window-dressing.

I really enjoyed those first two or three months in Landmark. In many ways I liked it best back then, when it was rough and ready and there wasn't much to it. Over the years it has been smoothed and rounded and plumped up so that it's actually quite presentable, although that means it now runs like a three-legged dog on my aging PC.

I'm not so pessimistic as some about Landmark's upcoming launch. It's always been a fun...toy. It's not really a game. At $9.99 it could be a bargain. I'm looking forward to playing it again, whenever I finally upgrade to some tech that can handle it.

Wherever there are Combine Spires there'll always be Norrath

Landmark wasn't only (many would say "even") a "game" in its own right. It was also supposed to be the test-bed for the systems that would drive EQNext. And it was, controversially, the crowd-sourced sweatshop for some of that putative game's actual content.

Landmark players were set contests to design and build what were intended to be the cities of Norrath's future. I forget which ones they got around to doing - Neriak was one. The prize was supposed to be seeing your work immortalized in EQNext; to be part of Norrath, forever.

Now there won't be a new Norrath. Of course, it was actually going to be a very old Norrath, a Norrath from the deep past. Another swirl in the mist of confusion that  obfuscated everything about the project and made it harder and harder to explain or sell as time wore on.

There won't be a new Norrath in Landmark. Officially, that is. The precarious thread between the two has finally been broken. When the game launches you should, as always promised, be able to build whatever you want. I'm betting now that someone, probably a lot of someones, will build Norrath. Just because.

So, we'll have Landmark, if anyone wants it. We won't have EQNext. I'm glad about that. Let's be honest, it looked awful. Other than that jaw-dropping first presentation, when did anything about the project inspire excitement or anticipation from anyone with a strong affection for the franchise?

EQNext was going to be a bright, brash technicolor ARPG in which cartoon characters bounced Tigger-like across frangible landscapes with all the subtlety of a runaway wrecking ball. It would have been a center-targeted, left/right mouse button hammering, console-favoring experience that bore little or no relation to any previous version of Norrath's story.

I would have played it despite almost all the features Dave Georgeson and Jeff Butler crowed over, not because of them. Just because it would, in some peripheral sense, have continuity.

They call this place The Graveyard of Dreams.

I'm very sorry so much time and energy and effort and money was wasted on such a hubristic project. I dearly wish they'd stuck with whatever the first iteration of EQ3 was, all those years ago, before they scrapped it, what was it, four more times? If they'd just have aimed squarely at their core market we might have been playing EQ3 for five years now and I could be writing a piece today speculating on when we might see EQ4.

This is the problem with MMOs. It's great to have a franchise. It's great to have a loyal core audience that wants more of the same. But, unlike a franchise in movies or novels or comics you can't just keep churning them out and selling them to the same people because when it comes to MMOS those same people are still playing your last franchise game.

All that happens if you try to sell them another one is that your same  audience splits into smaller parts. Which is why, instead of making new MMOs you make expansions and stack them on top until the whole thing teeters and totters and anyone not already on the top floor gets a stiff neck looking up at what she'll have to climb to get to where everyone else is supposedly having the time of their lives.

That, I guess, is why Smed and Smokejumper and Jeff "No Gamer Name" Butler were so keen to break out to find a brand new audience. They must have known as well as anyone that all their core audience really wanted was EverQuest with better graphics. That's all the core audience ever wants (although the evidence from EQ's various graphical overhauls suggests that even when they get it they don't like it. Then again, that sums up the average EQ or EQ2 player's response to everything).

Well, the dream of growing the EQ franchise into a new zeitgeist and a global brand is over. It was never more than a pipe dream, at that. The people behind EQ already changed the paradigm once, when they laid down the framework for Blizzard to follow as they made World of Warcraft. You don't often get to change the paradigm or dictate the zeitgeist twice in a career and never by doing the same thing over again.

DCUO: doing much better than clinging on by its fingertips.

What the fallout from this admission of defeat will be remains to be seen. I thought Russell Shanks' statement was quite informative, especially if you read between the lines, as I always try to do. He as much as says that they bit off more than they could chew and that's a lesson SOE never, ever learned. If all that comes out of the fall of EQNext is a realization at DBG that projects need to be proven to be practical, realistic and manageable before work begins on them, that will be a fine legacy.

I believe the EQ franchise has been better-served under DBG than it was for many years under latter-day Sony management. The games run well, get regular updates and new content. The small teams working on them are doing a stellar job. GW2 players can only wish they were getting the same level of service from ANet's vastly larger workforce.

It may be over-optimistic to hope that EQNext going down the pan will free up some extra resources for the older Everquest titles, let alone that we might actually see a new, less insanely ambitious EQ game announced at some point. More likely the individuals not required to work on EQN any longer will be re-assigned to DBG's now-flagship titles, which would be the twin H1Z1s and DCUO.

Whatever happens, though, I am sure it will be better either than the endless silence and suspicion of an unreleased EverQuest Next or the inevitable media car-crash that would have ensued should that unhappy game ever have seen the light of day.

Goodbye EQNext. We never knew you and you won't be missed.

Thinking About It...

I'm going to try and keep this short because it's really quite simple: MMORPGs used to require a lot more thought than they do today.

It's a realization that crept up on me only this year. As the conversation over The Trinity rumbled on it eventually dawned on me that the arguments I was making in defense of that gameplay didn't have all that much to do with the roles involved. Neither was it simple nostalgia, rose-tinted or otherwise.

No, what's gone missing from my gaming is all that thinking I used to do. The problem-solving. I liked it. I miss it.

Of course, "problem-solving" could be misleading. It suggests puzzle games and the honorable tradition of Adventure in all its flavors: text, graphic, point-and-click.

In MMORPGs, if someone mentions "problem-solving" you might perhaps think of something like EverQuest's original Epic quests. When they were first introduced some of those took a global community of almost half a million people weeks to brute force using the wisdom of crowds.

That's not what I mean. I never liked that side of MMOs much. I was always happy to let someone else solve those puzzles then put them in a guide for me to follow. These days I wouldn't be without my wikis.

No, what I'm referring to is the quotidian problem-solving that comes from knowing your environment, intimately. The kind you do every day, when someone pulls up beside you in the street, rolls down the window and asks "Excuse me, are you from round here?"

Local knowledge. That's what I'm missing. That sense that you've lived somewhere long enough to learn the byways and the cut-throughs, where the bad neighborhoods are, which house has the barking dog, who'll likely sell you a beer after hours.

I miss that feeling of satisfaction and security that comes when you can tell a harmless bee from a drunken wasp or a helpful fairy-drake from a deadly wyvern. What's been lost from almost every MMO I can think of is any need at all to spend a good, long time learning the nature of things.

A long time ago, when my characters were out gaining "xp" and leveling up, the one really becoming experienced was me. I was learning which creatures I could kill, which could kill me and how just about every one was different from every other in some important way that I needed to keep straight in my head if I wanted to survive and maybe even to prosper.

I was learning which way to run if things went bad. Which guards would help and which would stand by and watch me die. I was learning where it was safer on the paths and where to cut across country. Where nightfall meant the bad things were coming out to play and where it just meant use a torch.

A million things to learn and remember and keep straight. Which creatures ignored everyone except trolls, who they hated with an irrational passion. Where you could go in a glamour or an illusion that you couldn't go as yourself - and which glamour and which illusion. Who sold what for less than the other fellow and in which village on what island.

Just being in the world required you to think not much less than all the time. I liked that a lot.

And then there was the fighting.

Keen has a tale to tell about how things have changed when it comes to combat. He titles it "I haven't seen that in a decade" and come to think of it, neither have I.

I noticed the tank (the ranger with better gear) was rooted, so I ran over to him for him to be able to peel the mobs off me. He did, we lived, and all was well. I then received quite a shock: The tank was praising me for how well the fight went saying he hasn’t seen a healer run to the tank for over 10 years

This is just what I mean. This is what I miss. Having to look around, pay attention, evaluate the situation, review options, compare current circumstances with previous experience. I miss the need to know, in detail, what tools I have in the box and which ones I need to pull out when. Crucially, I miss having the time to do all that and enjoy it.

Instead of local knowledge, a detailed understanding of our capabilities and the time and opportunity to asses our options, what do we have now? Circles on the ground. Huge text messages splashed across the center of the screen. NPCs yelling orders. A set of triggers signifying "Go Here Now", "Do This Thing", "Don't Stand There", "Do As You're Told".

I always disliked scripting in MMOs. I’ve been complaining about it since Planes of Power. Over time, not only have scripts become completely embedded in all levels of MMO gameplay, not just in raids, where they began, but developers have ceased to trust players even to be able to learn their lines.

Players and developers alike have come to expect overt, clear signals in the form of ground markers, circles, cones, colors and written or spoken instructions. We've gone from improvisational theater to an on-book recital with cue-cards and a prompt. 

At the same time that every effort has been made to remove most of the need to think for ourselves, playing well in a group context has come to require ever more demanding levels of motor skills. Group play in MMOs like GW2 and WildStar these days consists primarily of having very fast reaction times while being highly reactive to abstract on-screen visual signals.

For the very best players, I imagine, MMO combat still requires an agile, thoughtful mind. If you're able to time your reactions to the millisecond, to co-ordinate status effects that last for the blink of an eye, then, yes, the satisfaction of assessing a situation and responding appropriately can be yours. That's beyond me.

It is, you could say, a young player's game. Perhaps I am looking back with nostalgia to those golden days of my youth after all. On the other hand, since I bought EQ for myself as a 40th birthday present, maybe not.

With the average age of gamers now pushing well into the thirties it seems strange that the mechanics of the games themselves should be trending so much younger. It's hardly surprising, though, that because it is, we need all those handrails, floor markers and LARGE PRINT SIGNS. Without them, how many aging gamers would run out of breath, energy and patience? End up slumped on a bench, watching the game instead of playing it?

Oh, look. I've rambled on and gone off the point after all. Must be my age.

Let me end by quoting Keen again:

 " ...people, for the most part, aren’t used to games where people need to think". 

I hope that changes. And soon.

Alone Together Or

Ravious has a very interesting and thought-provoking post up at Kill Ten Rats concerning the desirability, necessity even, of player interaction in MMORPGs. He references something Turbine producer Jeffrey Steefel once said that rings very true to me:

"Players don’t want to ‘play’ with thousands of people, they want to play with a small group in the presence of thousands. It’s like an old-school arcade. You don’t want to play pinball with 10 people, but playing by yourself in a crowded room is a lot more fun."

I hadn't happened upon this quote before but I've expressed those sentiments countless times. This, often, has been the experience I've looked for, playing MMORPGs. Over the past decade-and-a-half and more it's been an experience that I've, sometimes, been lucky enough to find.

The analogy I've tended to use is of reading at a pavement cafe; one of the finest, most complex experiences to which a human being can aspire. It's one of those magical hinterlands, where awareness fades towards the ineffable as inner and outer worlds move tectonically against and through each other, building up layers of sensual, intellectual, imaginative and creative involvement, hallucinatory in their intensity.

The play of sun and wind on the skin, the ambient sounds of the street, snatches of conversation with their flurried undertows of emotion, rubbing up against and abrading the mind's firm determination to recreate the imagined world of characters, themselves acting out the creative imaginings of an author both absent and present: at the best of times, under these assaults, my sense of self breaks down and for a glorious moment I lose myself in who I am.

Reading alone at home can be deeply moving, intense, absorbing, memorable, life-affirming, all of those things readers so often claim for books, but it remains deeply solipsistic. It can't begin match the humanity of reading in the presence of others. Similarly, playing video games alone sacrifices the outer for the inner, gains focus at the expense of scope.

I still read alone but playing MMOs broke offline games for me. Maybe forever.

Looking back, playing video games alone seems like an aberration, anyway. Gaming has always been a social activity. My first time was in a pub and for a few years that's what gaming meant - drinking, talking, laughing, playing, all together.

Playing Space Invaders, Breakout, Frogger, Galaxians and the rest, it was as much about being with people as pixels. More. Even in the home that was understood. The Atari 2600 I owned in the early 1980s came with two joysticks. The increasingly sophisticated consoles of succeeding generations found their place in the communal, shared, family rooms as much or more than they did hidden away in bedrooms or studies.

The migration of digital entertainment to the internet attenuated, stratified and confused the simplicity of that shared experience, though it continued and continues. So many anecdotal nostalgies of days and nights spent playing Everquest or World of Warcraft stem not only the distant togetherness of raiding with guilds made up of members from all around the world but from the intimacy of sharing a dorm room or a bedroom with another addict.

It's hard to disentangle the emotions and the memories. Did we love the games because of the friends we made in them or make the friends we did because we loved the games? Was life better before Trammel, before PoP, before the NGE, before Dungeon Finder, because the games were better then, the interactions closer, more meaningful, more real? Or was it just because we were younger, less worn-down with responsibility or failure or ennui or cynicism?

Did we talk to strangers as we waited for spawns at the Splitpaw spires or between pulls in The Deadmines because the pace was slower and we had more time or was it because our minds were more open, then, to new experiences? At the turn of the Millennium, for many of us, being online, not just talking to someone in Sao Paulo, Seattle or Singapore but seeing his avatar moving, acting in real-time there in front of us on the screen, in our own house, how could we not respond to that? It wasn't merely magical; it was actual, real magic.

And now it's not. Everyone does it. Without thinking. There's nothing magical about the internet any more. It's in your pocket, in your car, in your office, in the air, everywhere. There's nothing amazing any more in joining with dozens of people of all ages and races and genders and religions separated by thousands of miles and an infinity of experiences, coming together to imagine killing a giant dragon or a destroying a titanic spacecraft. Happens all the time.

The experience of playing alone together in MMORPGs always lacked the physical, sensual layers that can make reading a novel at the table of a pavement cafe so overwhelming but for a while it had instead a vast and mesmerizing sense of wonder that worked as well in the annihilation of the self. That's gone and it's not coming back.

What's left? With what can we replace that which we have lost? Ravious, pushed out of his comfort zone by connections and friendships, finds a faint echo in the unfamiliar experience of rolling a character on an RP-PvP world in WoW. After a sequence of unexceptional, predictable encounters he says:

"None of that would have happened if I had not been on a PvP server. Except for my one foray into the dungeon finder, I would have had virtually zero interaction with other players. There would have been no story for me to tell except “I did the quests in three zones, and it was what you would expect.”

Of course it's true that none of that would have happened. But something would. Whether he'd have had a story to tell us about it would depend entirely on how good a storyteller he is. A good storyteller can keep an audience spellbound with a description of a single character in an empty room. The tale is in the telling, always.

The last half-decade and more of MMO history is characterized by developers' attempts to mechanize human interaction in MMOs, to codify and commodify it. From Warhammer's Public Quests through Rift's eponymous planar incursions to GW2's Dynamic Events, from Dungeon Finder through Instant Adventures to LFR, they seek to find that magic, bottle it and sell it back. It can't be done.

Here's what happened. We got older. We lost patience. We gave up. A whisper from a stranger, new to the game, new to the world, lost and looking for someone, anyone, to help, ceased to seem like a chance to show off our experience and expertise. After fifty or a hundred times, who wants to answer the same old questions? Isn't it obvious? Go read the wiki or just google it ffs! You must know how to do that - you're playing this game on the frickin' internet, aren't you?!

I used to abandon plans just because I saw someone having a tough time. They wouldn't even need to be asking for help. I knew things and I wanted to share. I had a Chipped Bone Rod and I knew how to use it and what's more I knew where to take you so you could buy one too. I knew how to get to the sewers under Qeynos and I knew how to get out the other side. I knew barbarians couldn't see in the dark, while my half-elf had infravision, and even though I'd only just met you I trusted you to give me back my Greater Lightstone at the end of the tunnel to Blackburrow because otherwise what were you going to do? Stay in Everfrost the rest of your life?

That was when we were all living a shared imaginary life in a shared imaginary world. Before we all started playing games. How long did that last, really? That it took years to wind down to an ending is maybe the most amazing thing of all.

And we miss it so much. Perhaps that's why we chase every new game almost before it appears, hoping we'll catch the unicorn by the tail and swing back astride before it vanishes around the corner, yet again. All we get are a few strands of silver that quickly lose their shine or, worse, a thumping kick, a humiliating stumble, a painful fall.

So, I don't hold out hope that imposed PvP rulesets or autonomic grouping systems or any clever, mechanical intervention can bring back the wonder. Our friends lists won't refill with all those people with whom we shared formative or traumatic or hysterical moments, one night, one session, out of the blue. The MMO experience has moved on. It's no longer about wonder and awe and strangeness, just dailies and achievements and gear.

And that's okay. Those aren't bad things. Just not the same. Nothing stays new forever. Let it go. Love it for what it is, not what it was or what you wish it would be. Then maybe, just maybe, if we remember once in a while to answer that question in map chat or send a tell, a little of the magic might flicker on again.

At the pinball table or the pavement cafe, when someone asks you for a light for a cigarette, you don't always have to tell them you don't smoke. Maybe you could even carry matches, just in case.

Blue Skies Ahead For Daybreak Games?

It's really not my intention to stalk Smed. I don't even follow him on Twitter. Okay, that doesn't prove much - I don't follow anyone on Twitter. I don't do Twitter.

Well, not as such. I do have an account. I had to make one years ago to play Echo Bazaar, as it was called back then, now known as Fallen London and well worth a look if you haven't already tried it. As is Failbetter Games newer title, Sunless Sea, which I have only watched someone else play on YouTube. Or was it Twitch? Wait, I remember, it was Total Biscuit (what kind of a name is that, anyway?).

Sunless Sea isn't an MMO so naturally it's been reviewed, very favorably, in the mainstream press. The Guardian gave it four stars. The Daily Mirror gave it five! And that's the first and probably the last time I'm going to link to The Mirror...

Where was I? Oh yes, President Smed.

The Big Landmark Wipe finally arrived yesterday. Scheduled originally for the end of last month it got bumped, first to the fifth, then to the eleventh and finally back down again to the fifth of May, which was yesterday. The servers will be down for two or three days after which the new, all-singing, all-dancing, still-not-ready-for-open-beta-let-alone-prime-time Landmark will sidle onto the servers hoping no-one is looking. I'll probably log in then and see if it feels any different, wander aimlessly around for a while, decide it's too laggy and log out. That's the usual routine.

I may not have been playing Landmark much, or indeed at all, but I'm still interested in it. Somewhat. Enough to visit the forums, on and off, to take the temperature of the waters. Which is how I came across a couple more of Daybreak President John "Smed" Smedley's always entertaining interviews.

How about a chicken next time? Seems more of a fit, somehow. Can't imagine why...

Players of games from the Daybreak Games studio (née Sony Online Entertaiment, née Verant Interactive, or was that the other way around?) love nothing better than to use the official company forums to link to anything their President ever says, mostly so they can point to everything that confirms their perpetual belief that the sky is falling and then cluck about it.

The first is with Gamasutra where Smed is once again accompanied by his hapless PR minder Senior VP of Marketing, Laura Naviaux. It's another "industry" piece and it has plenty of meat on finances and processes.

The second is much more directed to an audience of people who actually play Daybreak's games, or might be persuaded to do so. It was conducted by Veluux of Ten Ton Hammer. He asks Smed, who seems to be soloing this time, some very pointed questions and gets some surprisingly straight answers. I thoroughly recommend everyone interested in the future of the Everquest franchise, including EQNext, takes time to read it.

Doom-mongers will be disappointed with both these two chats, especially the TTH outing, in which Smed is very clearly on some kind of charm offensive aimed at PC gamers in general and his existing Everquest playerbase, past and present, in particular. Far from confirming any falling sky rumors Smed makes every effort to lean hard on the scaffolding that holds everything up to show just how sturdy and reliable it all is.

Morrissey would feel right at home on any Everquest franchise forum

I was trying to hold off doing the quote thing again but I can't resist a few. Here's the President in full damage-control mode. Veluux had just asked him straight out whether Daybreak plans to move away from developing games for the PC platform:

"Let me start at the last part first, because when I get a question like that, if I'm not careful how I answer people might think I don't like PC. PC is our primary focus for all of our games. Period. We love PC, we're never going away from it."

Even more reassuringly, in response to another very direct question about the security of the older EQ titles going forward, Smed makes this forceful and unequivocal statement:

"They will continue to exist well into the foreseeable future. Not only have there been no discussions but we haven't even talked about it because these games are all very healthy."

He's even prepared to give timescales:

"What you can expect from us with EverQuest, and I'll say the same goes for EverQuest II, we expect that these games which are already out are going to be around here at least five years from now." 

It's a secured tenancy on a five-year lease...unfurnished let.

There. That clear enough for you? Now you can relax. Except now I have David Bowie's  Five Years playing in my head and that's not reassuring at all...

I could go on pulling quotes out of both interviews until, well until I'd reprinted pretty much the entirety of both of them, all cut up and in the wrong order, like one of Mr. Bowie's love-letters to William Burroughs. Probably better for anyone who's interested to go read the originals. It's all good, thought-provoking, question-raising stuff that could spawn a dozen blog posts.

The entire tenor of the Gamasutra interview is worth noting, though. Smed and Naviaux repeatedly emphasize how much more freedom the team have now as Daybreak Games, how it feels almost like a start-up, how

"it's like the difference between renting a house and owning it".

Which is all very well, except they don't own it, do they? They just have a different landlord. 

It may be true - I'm sure it is - that 

"Columbus Nova doesn't get involved, even a little bit, in game design"
 
 but they do hold the purse-strings. When you're saying things like

"As Daybreak, we've already had a conversation with our new owners about whether we can go get new people if we need them"  

then it hardly gives an impression of complete freedom, does it? (And it turns out the "new people" he means are in fact some of the old people he "let go" earlier this year. I think we all know how that works...). 

Also, it just seems odd to talk about the creative shackles being broken one minute and then come out with something like this: 

"...when we want to do something, a new business thing, we have to actually justify and make a business case for it." 

(That's enough Smedley quotes. Ed.)


Grrr. I said I wasn't going to do that, didn't I? It's just so hard to resist. I'll stop there. Until next time...

 

I Know I Don't Look Busy, But... : FFXIV, GW2, EQ

Thanks to Square Enix's ingenue startle at the prospect of someone actually paying them some attention at last  I really don't have much time to dissect the slew of hard news and scuttlebutt about various MMOs of interest that scudded across the media battlefield this week. The only day Mrs Bhagpuss and I managed to get onto Goblin at the same time was Wednesday and today and tomorrow are the best opportunity we're likely to get, so it's a choice between Play or Pontificate for the next couple of days and Play will win. Probably.

When I've been able to get in I've been having a rare old time in Eorzea. The world turns out to be a lot bigger than it looked from the maps in beta, with convoluted, layered topography and dense concentrations of interest scattered all over. Explorer heaven, at least at this early stage, and stunningly beautiful. The art direction is what really makes this world shine. Everything just looks right. The settlements have function, the NPCs have life, the views all have true perspective.

Towards Sunset

Day and night both last a long time and graduate. The way the light changes throughout the entire cycle is wonderfully subtle. The shadows lengthen, the colors change, all the good stuff. At night it gets proper dark and night-time lasts long enough to be uncomfortable. Wonderful.

Eorzea both looks and feels like an actual place. Many, many screenshots have been taken. It feels more like going on holiday than playing a video game, which along with the miserable log-in issues is probably while I'm still only level 15 in a single class while everyone else is thirty or more in many.

Outside of FFXIV so much else is happening on the MMO front, demanding attention it's not going to get, at least from me. The layoffs at SOE are worrying but can't really be unexpected. When Smedly said they'd been holding these off for a year my thought was "and the rest". Two, three years ago even, my concern as a longtime fan of SOE's MMOs, if not always of their handling of them, was how long they'd be around to play. It's magnificent that they've kept Vanguard running, that there are still seventeen Everquest servers, that you can still play a ten-year old iteration of that game on your Mac. Is it financially realistic, though?

After Dark

This is the week we find out. There's supposed to be a statement on the future of the MMOs in SOE's stable. Can't imagine it will be good news for anyone.

On to GW2, where neither profitability nor population would seem to be an immediate concern. The Clockwork Chaos update appears to have been a resounding success. The servers are popping and I say "servers" because I've been on Overflow as often as not all week. John Smith the innocuously-named in-house ANet economist poked his head out of his office to issue a warning of imminent market disruption.

Globs of Ectoplasm, everyone's bellwether of choice and already climbing fast from the rain of rares, jumped from 22 silver to 34 silver overnight. Not seen them at that price this year. I'm sitting on the best part of a thousand of them so Go Ectos!

Especially so since I'm unlikely to be taking part in the new tier of crafting that's coming and which is causing the price to leap. It looks insufferably grindy on paper. The detailed explanation in ANet's article is too dense and dull for me to parse but the gist appears to be a nest of time-sinks requiring both extensive gathering and farming but with the added minus of time-gating on top. And all to make a new range of pink stat items that I certainly don't need.

New Morning

At least I don't need them now. But look, what's that coming over the horizon? Is it a bird? Is it a Pact Copter? No, it's the all-new revamped Tequatl, landing in a swamp near you on September 17. Good old Tequatl. He's coming back as the Undead Santa with a sack full of Ascended weapons and minis of himself. I haven't watched the Twitch TV reveal yet but everyone was talking about it so much in Map last night it feels as though I have. Apparently he'll take eighty people to kill him (don't say the "R" word!) and he'll be so tough we'll get rewards just for knocking his health down because we won't be killing him very often. ANet devs themselves haven't been able to do it in testing (yeah, right...).

My Life With The Goblins

No doubt he's the first of many such revamps as we see the inevitable second year MMO power creep in action, this time without the benefit of the traditional expansion. Will Ascended gear become a requirement to compete rather than the affectation it currently is? Wait and see, but I smell gear grind on the wind.

Expansion. Now there's a dirty word. Or maybe not. This sounds like backtracking to me. Interesting that IGN chose to go with the "No expansions planned" headline rather than the more newsworthy "Expansions are definitely something that we’ll potentially look at in the future" quote from Colin Johanson. That seems a lot stronger than just "never say never" to me.

Oh, and the Super Adventure Box is coming back. Yay! Or not. Gives me the excuse I need to skip a couple of weeks. Let's hope Square get their act together sooner because I've got a date with Tequatl later.