Flame + Frost = Farrago: GW2

"Is that it?" was the refrain that echoed across Tyria as the first chapter of the Living Story limped to a close last night. Listening to map chat in Lion's Arch it was apparent that few players had read the press releases, seen the interviews or had the slightest idea what was going on.

Most did know that they were one achievement short of a Box Prize though, and not surprisingly, quite a few thought there might be a pot of gold at the end of the three-month long rainbow. There wasn't.

Next it'll be CCTV in Lion's Arch, you mark my words!

The pot of gold, such as it was, had already arrived with the conclusion of the Rox and Braham storylines more a week ago. A ticket for a pair of exotic gloves too utterly hideous even to contemplate wearing. No-one paid much attention at the time, what with the new dungeon and all. Even the anticlimax was anticlimactic.

What we did get was a bonfire and just how appropriate, in this particular case, was that? You've been driven out of your home by a bunch of burning creatures chanting about fire and setting your settlement ablaze. Do you really want to see more flames? Okay, it's cold in Hoelbrek so the warmth may be welcome but they already have rather a lot of open fires there. All the time. How special does it make you feel that they lit one more little one? And as for Black Citadel, where you're sitting on a solid metal floor that conducts heat and where the enemy at the gate even before all the recent kafuffle was always the Flame Legion? Does any of this make any sense?

In someone's dreams. Not in mine.

Then there's Rox and Braham. Hmm. These two characters that drop out of nowhere. The big, buff Norn and the wide-eyed catgirl.That we all follow. Whose story we are mostly watching, facilitating, a story clearly not our own. After that video I can't but think we're seeing Our Gods walk among us in their Mortal Form. Are we comfortable with that?

Is this whole thing a complete mess or what? I'm not saying its not been fun but has any of it made any sense to anyone? Has anything since the game launched made any sense? Did The Mad King destroying the Lion Statue make sense? Okay, he's mad, he gets a pass. Did the Karka make sense? Did Tixx make sense? The Super Adventure Box? Anything - anything at all - about the Living Story?

Might there be a whole lot of people working very hard on personal projects, obsessions,

We can't all be famous

ideas, getting them into the game with very little in the way of top-down, authoritarian control? Might things be getting greenlighted on a prospectus containing not much more than "wouldn't it be cool if...?"

Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. Not at all. For my no money it's a considerably better thing than, for example, the approach Rift ended up taking, where players must at all costs not be annoyed, nothing disruptive must ever happen and everyone must get a Fair Go. That makes for an admirably solid, reliable experience but one which, after a while, tends towards the dull.

At least with ANet (as with SOE all these years) you never know quite what might happen next. Sure, some of it, arguably most of it, doesn't really come off but rather a sporadic splurge of exotic failures than a steady stream of stuff designed not to annoy anyone.

In a day or so we're off to Southsun Cove for a couple of weeks. If Team Spring Break (Really? You really want to call yourselves that? In public?) can make that a place worth spending more than five minutes in then I'll be impressed. After that, who knows? This over-excited PR blurb certainly isn't letting on but apparently "it does all tie together".

I'll believe that when I see it but I don't mind if it doesn't. It'll almost certainly be just as much fun if it all falls apart.

Molten Weapons Facility Take 2: GW2

Ravious and Jeromai both posted recently about how long it takes players to travel from exploration to exploitation. Nothing like as long the two weeks the new Flame and Frost dungeon is scheduled to hang around it seems.

My experience has been somewhat different. I first ventured inside the Molten Alliance's lair beneath the Shiverpeaks an hour or so after the Vigil breached the gate. No-one knew what to expect and we had no strats to follow, let alone exploits to, well, exploit. We barreled through the whole thing without single death until we reached the bosses. My ranger was never even Downed. The boss fight did see a lot of us lying on the ground, but everyone got revived as necessary and we beat both bosses on the first attempt.

Mrs Bhagpuss did the run on both of her accounts in PUGs during the first couple of days and had no more trouble than I did. That left us needing just one more trip to finish up Flame and Frost on my second account. Not wanting to leave it right to the end I took my Elementalist out to Wayfarers Foothills last night to get it done. Mrs Bhagpuss came along with her Necromancer to see what she could get out of the chest.

Having read the posts linked above, and given the relative cakewalk the dungeon had been for a totally unpracticed and inexperienced PUG on the opening day, I was expecting to get the whole thing out of the way in half an hour or so. Two hours later my Ele stumbled out into the bitter Shiverpeaks wind dressed in nothing but her underwear, surprised and profusely grateful to have gotten out at all.

How did it come to this?

Back to the beginning. There weren't many people waiting outside when we arrived. My plan was to reply to the first LFM request, join up and follow whoever took the lead, let them do the work while we trundled along at the back and did we were told. Only problem with that plan? No-one Looking For More. There weren't any parties there at all.

Rather than stand around complaining about it in the traditional fashion we joined the only other person LFP, a Thief, and started recruiting. The problem with recruiting, of course, is the people you recruit tend to think you're going to lead them. Having done the dungeon precisely once, and not having understood much of what was going on even then, I made the point strongly as we acquired each new member that I wasn't in charge and anyone who thought they knew what they were doing was welcome to put on the Captain's hat. No-one took me up on the offer.

We had five people in no time. So fast in fact that I was still recruiting and had to have it pointed out to me that there were already five of us. We stepped inside the Dungeon and before anyone could even speak to Rox one person announced his doorbell was ringing and another let on that he had to see to his dog. As the Thief observed, better then than when we were on the final boss.

Our thief, on the way to do something thiefy

That turned out to be the only such interruption in what would be a long and difficult adventure. Well, unless you count the Asura Engineer who pulled a vanishing trick after a particularly bad pull about half an hour in, which I don't, since he'd said only one word since we arrived and the Ranger was able to call in a charming Charr Guardian from his guild to replace him in less than a minute.

It all started so well, too. The ambush was dispatched almost derisevely. We loped along behind Rox and her burrowing machine burning down anything that got in our way. Mrs Bhagpuss's Sylvari necro, blithely ignoring Rox's warnings about hot coals, set herself on fire in her eagerness to get her hands on the Azurite, but her leaves were barely singed.

Everyone's on fire. That's probably not a good thing.

We rounded the end of the tunnel to confront the Champion Ember. He's supposed to be the hardest of the three possible spawns but we dampened his fires without too much trouble. On to the Weapons Test Room we marched. Someone ran straight into the Safe Corner and we all followed but after a couple of minutes the Thief decided it was against the famous thiefly code of honor to do anything sneaky so she ran out into the middle to dance with the flames. The rest of the Test passed with everyone running about and dodging back into the corner as amused them most. Gaiety and abandon prevailed.

She's usually so demure, too

Things began to take a turn for the worse in the Cryogenic Chamber. I hadn't even noticed this on my first run, we went through it so fast. This time: full party wipe. I was in Water attunement, wielding the healer's staff Memory of The Sky. Much good it did us. It was at this point that the Engineer bailed, although since he said nothing and we'd been doing very well until this first set-back maybe he just disconnected. We gave him the requisite couple of minutes then called the Charr Guardian off the benches.

He needed all his feline patience because from the moment he joined us things went rapidly downhill. I struggle to explain why, because bringing him on board made the party considerably stronger as a unit, especially since he took on the role of leader most efficiently, something we'd been muddling through without until then. Nonetheless we managed to wipe again half way through rescuing the prisoners and much of the time two or even three players were Down. Rox did a great job reviving us.

We made it to the Platform, battered and bruised but still in good spirit. A brief discussion ensued over which Boss to kill first. Everyone who had an opinion agreed on the Berserker. It was at this point that the Ranger let slip he'd done the dungeon about twenty times already, something he'd very wisely kept to himself until then.

Great grouping with you Rox...

I'll gloss over the agonies of the Big Fight. The first attempt left all of us dead and the Berserker still at 90% health. Second and third attempts didn't go a lot better, although there was some marginal evidence of improvement. For the fourth attempt we switched tactics and went for the Mole, who everyone called The Robot. Things went much better. I think we wiped first time but I'm not sure. It's all a bit of a blur to be honest. Either way, in short enough order The Robot went down and the cut scene played.

That left The Berserker. He was a nightmare. My only other experience of him was that he offered a tough fight, but my earlier group had run him around, worn him down and taken him out on the first attempt. This time it didn't go that way.

Each time we tried we ended up with three people Down and two trying to kite to victory. One time it was me and the Ranger and in what seemed like several hours we got Berserker Bill to 50%. I'm pleased I got that one good run even though it did us no good in the end because other than that I spent most of the time lying down. At least it made it look like I was trying.

...and you too Frostbite!

At this point I have to say once again that I must be very lucky with PUGs. Far from the social cesspools most people seem to dip into, my experience has largely been sunshine and rainbows. The dungeon took three or four times longer than it should, something of which the Ranger who'd done it twenty times must have been all too well-aware. Despite this and even though in the end he and his Guardian guildie ended up tag-teaming the Berserker from half health to dead while the rest of us lay around offering nothing more useful than "You can do it!" encouragement from the floor, everyone kept good their sense of humor throughout. There was never a moment when I thought anyone was going to call it quits. We'd started and we were damn well going to finish.

The key to victory was probably when the Guardian/Ranger duo finally gave up trying to get the rest of us back on our feet. Indeed, I would say that in both groups it was trying to revive others that made the fight seem more difficult than it really was. Without the need to stop and make targets of themselves the two were able to find a rhythm, playing the Berserker between them, wearing him down steadily until he finally fell over and we all stood up.

Wanting to show willing I grabbed a bomb and placed it and in a few seconds we were all crushed together in the lift. Rather embarrassing in my Ele's case, given what she wasn't wearing. The Guardian linked the Tonic recipe he'd gotten from the chest so I guess he was happy he came, which was just as well as he'd had to do most of the heavy lifting. We said our goodbyes and I made a hasty trip to the Repairer.

Everyone find something else to look at!

So that's most likely it for the Molten Weapons Facility as far as I'm concerned. Speed runs remain notional, exploits theoretical and my interest in running any kind of dungeon in GW2 is as it ever was, marginal. The one thing it did make me realize is how very much I miss playing a proper healer in a dedicated healing role, with real healing abilities that I can target as needed. Frankly, the whole thing would have gone better and been more enjoyable with an old-fashioned Healer/Tank combo. Under GW2's Trinity-free combat model, all too often we just end up trying to cobble something similar together out of poor-quality, second-rate parts. I'm ready for the Trinity to make a comeback, as it surely will, if not in this particular game.

Was it fun? In a way, although I'm not sure "fun" is the right word. Completing something you set out to do do even though it turns out to be a lot harder than you expected is satisfying. Getting it done in good company, with good humor and a few jokes is even better. In the end, though, I can think of a lot of more fun ways to have fun. I hope ANet can, too.

Pardon Me But Your Tail's On Fire - A Trip to The Facility With Braham and Rox: GW2

Should have known better than to try and play an MMO on launch day. Just as I was reducing the size of my new Dwarven Cleric's nostrils in the Neverwinter character creator the screen froze and that was that for two hours. Eventually a new launcher installed itself and with my cleric restored I tore through the tutorial only to find the city of Neverwinter rubberbanding like Bouncing Boy at a Flubber convention.

Enough of that. Back GW2, which was having its own issues. The Molten Alliance was understandably reluctant to open its doors to thousands of loot-hungry adventurers and for a while no-one could get into the new dungeon. That got fixed in fairly short order and while I was standing gawping at the entrance in Wayfarer's Foothills someone popped me a group invite so in I went.

Spoilers follow, although not many because most of the time I wasn't all that clear on what was going on, what with taking screenshots, trying to clear bag space for the torrent of trivial loot and trying not to be set on fire.

To open proceedings Rox operated a tunneling machine she must have twocced from the Iron Legion to dig through the mountain into the Supervillain Lair weapons facility. Along the way we passed a bunch of rooms with mining nodes inside, all of which gave up Mithril and the new Azurite gems. These are on a 24-hour per account timer but their placement is such that they could probably be reached duo or even solo, allowing for a few deaths along the way.

That's as far as you'll be going without a full group because the rest of the dungeon is, well it's a dungeon. It was designed by the Holiday Content team not the dungeon team and since we completed it with a PUG, none of whom had done it before or seemed to know anything at all about it, I'd say it's probably not the most challenging of dungeons but it was challenging enough for my tastes.

There's a longish bit where we got to stand in as targets for a demented Dredge weapons tester. That was fun but it went on too long. Once you've dodged a couple of waves of fire you've dodged them all, I say. After that there was another long part where we freed prisoners, all of whom trundled along behind us adding little to the proceedings.

We made our way deeper into The Facility while many, many Molten Alliance drones tried and failed to stop our progress along the winding but linear route. It would be hard, probably impossible, to take a wrong turning of more than a few paces. There are no turnings. There are a few mild jumps to be made. The drop looked terrifying but no-one in our party fell. I imagine you can just waypoint back.

We met a Champion who had a small chest...let me rephrase that... we fought a Champion and when we defeated him we got to loot a small chest nearby. I guess that makes him some kind of a sub-boss. Finally we reached a massive platform above another sheer drop into darkness. The Molten Alliance have no concept of health and safety. They might as well be Asura. Would it have hurt them to put up a guard rail?

 At this point two comedy Bosses appear. One's a cat with an electrified waste-paper bin on each paw and the other is a mole dressed as Iron Man. Both blown up to gargantuan proportions, of course. No explanation how this has been done is forthcoming. I guess they feed them well down there in the mine.

They might look like a pair of pantomime villains but these two were rough. Until this point I hadn't even been downed but they soon sorted that out. There's supposedly some mechanic where you switch from one to the other as they hit various percentages of their hit points but no-one paid any attention to that. We just hared round and round, dodging and rolling and frantically reviving teammates. Rox and Braham went down early and stayed there. Fat lot of help they were.

We got the mole down. Actually it was more like up. He had a jetpack and it must have malfunctioned as he died because he shot off like a punctured balloon. With him out the way you'd think it would have gotten easier but Wastepaper Bin Paws got a second wind and it must have taken at least twice as long to finish him off.

He crumpled up at last and we got the requisite Huge Chest, which had some odd loot inside. I got a 400 skill recipe for Mushroom Loaf and an Insignia to make a piece of the new armor. I have crafters that can use both so I was happy enough but there were mutinous growls from some of the party.

Even then we weren't done. We had to grab some explosive charges and do some more jumping across bottomless pits to place them, then we had to leg it to the lift in 30 seconds before the whole place blew. We all made it, even Braham and Rox and the freed miners.

We emerged on Diessa Plateau, stood around blinking in the daylight wondering what had happened, then said our "thanks for the group" formalities and disbanded. The dungeon is only here for about two weeks and I need to do it at least once more to complete the meta achievement for Flame and Frost on my other account. I might well also need to do it a time or two with Mrs Bhagpuss for hers. That shouldn't be too arduous. It was fun, although I wouldn't want to make a habit of it.

A visit to see Rox interrogating the Molten Alliance prisoners down in the Black Citadel pokey followed. I recommend talking to all of them, especially the Veteran Dredge. There is More To This Than Meets The Eye. My money's been on The Consortium turning out to be the master villains of the piece for a while now and the conversation I had with the mole just adds to my suspicions.

The evening wrapped up with a trip to Hoelbrak to see Braham mouth off at Knut Whitebear again. From the way the conversation went I'm guessing Cragstead will be staying as a permanent settlement. I hope so. It would be weird if it just disappeared as though it had never been, although come to think of it that's how it arrived.

So that's Flame and Frost. I wonder what comes next?

Fat Tuesday : Neverwinter, EQ2, GW2

Sitting here drinking a coffee waiting for the Neverwinter gates to open in just over an hour's time, wondering why everything always has to start on a Tuesday.

For as long as I can remember Tuesday has been the weekly server-reset day for SoE but they're going one better than a mere reset today, landing GU66 aka Scars of the Awakened, which if I remember rightly is the third installment of EQ2's Velious saga. Somewhat to my surprise and much to my great pleasure this includes substantial new overland content accessible from Level 90.

I'd been assuming it would be aimed at the folks who bought the Chains of Eternity expansion, which I didn't. Haven't. Yet. But no, apparently that was just a little holiday from the seemingly endless revision of Velious and now we pick up where we left off a year or so ago. I foresee a return to Norrath in the near future.

ArenaNet doesn't take servers down the way SoE and most other MMO companies do. They have some clever way of patching on the fly. Even so the servers start to creak a little after a week and Tuesday's the day they get reset. Things tend to get glitchy after a while, events bug, rewards don't always register. Today there's yet another major issue with the Guild window. It definitely feels like the batteries need changing. Add to that it's the end of the month so there's the third and final part of Flame and Frost on the way too .

As I was finishing dailies on my second account a few minutes ago the big yellow "new build" notice was flashing on the screen. Normally I'd be raring to get started, especially since the new dungeon is supposedly only with us until the 12th of May, which should create some frenzied pugging. If only Cryptic/PWE weren't Tuesday's Children too.

In a three-way death-match between a major update, a minor update and a new game the winner is so obvious no bookie would take the bet. Of course it isn't a death-match. More like a running order. I'll get to all of them eventually. It would have been a lot better if they hadn't all arrived at once, and especially if they hadn't all arrived on Tuesday. Tuesday's a work day, y'know. Okay, I'm not at work but that's hardly the point.

Presumably the reason these things happen on Tuesdays is precisely that, though. The Devs are at work and so, largely, are the players. That way the log in servers don't catch fire and when the inevitable emergency patches follow there's the rest of the day, and the week, to write and apply them. And by the weekend everything's running smoothly, the players can play and the devs can play golf and go to the opera. I assume that's what they do in their spare time...

Okay, that killed an hour. Time to log in!

Rox Rocks : GW2

I was going to do an overview of GW2's March content drop Flame and Frost: The Razing but I don't really have enough time to do it justice and anyway Ravious and Jeromai got there before me.

In brief, then:

The Living Story finally came alive, almost literally with that full-motion cut-scene with Rytlock. That was a real surprise and a very welcome one. More of those, please. Also I took to new Charr character Rox right away. Just give me those huge green cat eyes for one of my Charrs now. I'll pay you good money.

The nursery instance was exactly the right degree of hard. I completed it without dying but I was downed a few times and it looked touch and go for a while. I hate having to restart storyline missions after a death because it completely destroys any narrative involvement I may have had with the story. If my character died, the story is over. Getting up and carrying on as if nothing happened just doesn't do it for me. So, win.

The Dead Letter Drop mission was first-rate. Having the locations listed in just the right amount of detail in an in-game mail worked wonderfully, especially since all the locations were actual map POIs. The content of the letters when found was mouth-wateringly mysterious. It seems there is a shadowy hand behind the Molten Alliance and it's not Suspect #1 Primordus. Color me intrigued.

WvW - The removal of culling is game-changing. The combination of that and the (really rather pointless but inevitably addictive) ranking system meant a complete change of behavior in WvW, which last night resembled nothing I have seen before. I loved it. Mrs Bhagpuss was not so keen. It will settle down over time to something more in the middle, I'm sure, but for now I'm going to enjoy it for what it is - chaotic, hysterical mayhem.

My favorite changes so far, though, are the adjustments to some of the Big Ticket Events. I love the new Bonus Chest system, which seems to have the twin virtues of heavily reducing the clustering at certain events, making them far more enjoyable, while actually increasing the amount of Rare loot I'm getting. I may only be able to get the Bonus Chest once per account, but but my characters can now get the normal chest as often as they can do the events and the normal chest has one or even two Rares in nearly every time! I hope this version sticks although I wouldn't be surprised to see it tweaked down again.

An unannounced but very welcome change was the rolling-out of the increased challenge levels tested last month to more big events. Claw of Jormag last night was vastly improved. I particularly admired the way that Ice Elementals had been persuaded to cast continual AEs on the "safe rock". So many downed players! There were a number of clever changes along these lines that I noticed and the whole thing was riotous fun again in the way it used to be back in September. Whether that will last, we will see. Players do have an almost limitless capacity to game themselves out of their own fun so I imagine new strats will soon be discovered to re-trivialize the event.

That's it. Can't stop. Got a Norn to help next.

Gathering Storm, Light Drizzle To Follow : GW2

February tends towards the dismal; the cold, wet stub of winter, with neither January's crisp bite nor March's fresh clarity. It's just the time when you feel the need for something filling, substantial.

Why, look! What's this? It's the February update for Guild Wars 2. Think that'll do the job? Set the fires roaring? Drive out the damp?

Well, hardly.

WvW 

First off, there's a bit missing. A big bit. The WvW revamp fell off. Along with the wheels, some might say. J3w3l at Healing the Masses has an entertaining rant on that. At least we get some sketchy details in the "look what you could have won" section of Colin Johanson's unapologetic announcement.

All pile on the Lord!

The gist appears to be that WvW is being re-tooled to suit Achiever subtypes with short attention spans. Not really my demographic but it's becoming apparent to me that there are really only two ways that Realm vs Realm combat (as we seem to have gone back to calling it since the reappearance of Mark Jacobs under his Camelot banner) can be made to work and that's one of them.

For Realm-based pvp to hold an audience's attention long-term, something has to matter and the choice comes down to what you own or who you are. The Camelot Unchained model is claiming the former - everything is made by the sweat of your fingertips, from each arrow you fire to the very bricks of the city your guild built. Losing hurts. A lot. It's a model for masochists and gaming's not short of those.

Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, much though in its extreme youth it flirted with the hedonic and courted the lotus-eaters, is fast morphing into an Achiever hive. There's nothing that could be done for the pleasure of doing it that couldn't be improved by giving you a badge when you're done. It's the Baden-Powell school of gaming.

Achievements are all over PvE in GW2 and come the end of February March they'll be all over WvW, too. It's not what I wanted but heaven knows we do need some kind of medium term purpose for being there day after day after day, so I'm willing to give it a shot.

If this is Tuesday it must be Hills

I'm much more firmly on board with the addition of more short-term objectives. I love jumping Sentries and killing Yaks and taking supply camps has yet to stale. It's the long-drawn-out Keep sieges that I'm losing patience with, or rather the repeated taking and re-taking of the same ones. Having a wider range of ad hoc targets sounds good in principle, at least.

This weekend should have seen WvW's Year Zero, of course, the full points reset that would have seen Sorrow's Furnace rise from the depths of T8 to first place in T1. I was quite looking forward to watching it play out, in the morbid way someone lacking empathy might look forward to a natural disaster. The WvW ranking table may well be as full of design flaws as a Dreamliner, but only a heartless theoretician could imagine the way to fix them would be to turn off the engines in mid-flight.

So, it's probably just as well that ANet made a U-Turn instead and flew the good ship WvW back to the safety of the old rankings. As any politician will tell you, though, U-Turns always make you look weak and that's certainly how I read this one. Hearing that they can't get the maths right to improve things so they're just going to leave them as they are hardly inspires confidence, either.

The Gathering Storm

Ominous, isn't it?

Moving on from WvW to what's actually in the February update, we come to the next installment of Flame and Frost. I second The Egg Baron. Someone hold a mirror to the mouth of the "Living Story", I think it might have died. A slow build-up of tension is all very well but this is like watching a glacier. Has anything changed at all in the last week?

Honey, is this yesterday's paper?

For this to work there need to be incremental changes at least every couple of days - I'd say daily. Instead we get the same inane, incoherent, logically inconsistent, unconvincing refugee mummer's play day in, day out, with the prospect in almost three weeks' time of this:

"more refugees hobble down from the Shiverpeaks. The storm there gains momentum, but the forces of good are beginning to rally".

Anyone know why we're here?

Oh goodie. More refugees and our side is "beginning" to think about doing something about it. I can hardly contain my excitement. I really hope this is ANet taking my earlier advice and under-promising. I'll be happy to eat my words and apologize for doubting them when they come through with the second half of that package and over-deliver.

And so on to 

The Rest:

A new PvP map. 

Since I have yet to set foot on a PvP map at all, I scarcely tremble at the prospect of a new one. Still, more maps are always welcome, I guess.

Two Team Rated Play in PvP

Otherwise known as Fair Fights. This might tempt me into PvP, although fear of getting pwned isn't what's stopping me now - that would be lack of interest.

Guild missions 

Mmm, maybe. If they are what The Egg Baron fears, events started by guilds that anyone can hop on to, then that's good. If they are exclusive to guild members, that takes GW2 further down the road I came to it to avoid. More information required. (What I want for guilds are more options of what to do with Guild Influence. There are only three of us in our guild and one of those hardly ever plays and yet we have 23k influence banked. Once we buy the Deep Cave there's nothing left we want).

Choose Your Own Daily Achievements

Not unwelcome, although since I like all the dailies I wasn't exactly clamoring for a change. No, it's the Monthly I have a problem with, not the Daily. Let's get some choice in there so I don't have to go in dungeons and dungeoneers don't have to do WvW.

And that's yer lot. Thin gruel, isn't it? 

The Sky Is Falling! : GW2

Pai was ranting, quite rightly, about misleading CGI trailers for MMOs.  I feel the same way about over-excited press releases. It's "under-promise, over-deliver", guys! You're all getting it the wrong way round!

The opening of the first installment of GW2's new Living Story had hundreds of players running around Wayfarer's Foothills asking each other in Map chat "Where's the Event?". Being told that they were standing in the middle of it did little to calm an increasing atmosphere of irritation and disappointment.

To quote the Press Release:

"The sky falls and the ground shakes in the lands of the north. Charr and norn refugees crawl from the wreckage of their homes in the Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau, struggling to find shelter in the south. The call goes out for volunteers to assist the victims in this time of need, when earth and sky seem to have become the enemy…"

No it doesn't! No they don't! The earth and the sky are just the same as they always were except for some sporadic, localized blizzards, handily placed out of anyone's way. The refugees are walking along the same paths we've all been using, the ones that pass by the same lodges and settlements that are carrying on the same business they've been carrying on for months.

Exactly which homes have been wrecked? If the refugees are struggling to find shelter, why don't they stop in that big lodge over there where they have more ale than they know what to do with? Or maybe just nip across the border to Diessa and warm up with a beer and half a roast ox at Meatoberfest?

I begin to lose patience with Map chat

Why die of cold and exhaustion in the snow when not fifty yards away happy, laughing, joking Norns are drinking beer by a massive fire? Did anyone think this through? Doesn't look like it.

Bobby Stein, an ANet developer, eventually popped up on the forums to clarify:

"The Flame and Frost story content progresses over time. You will not see everything today, tomorrow, or even the next day. Expect subtle changes at first." 

Fine. I'm more than happy with that. It's a good approach. It might have worked better if you'd said that in the Press Release so we were out there looking for small, incremental, unspectacular changes, not The Apocalypse as advertised.

MMO players are horribly impatient these days and very hard to satisfy, let alone impress. Under-promise, over-deliver and you're in with a shot. Maybe someone'll try it one day.

Sitting On My Laurels: GW2

"Flame and Frost: Prelude" GW2's elegaically-named January update arrived last night. ArenaNet tell us it's the smaller of the two updates they're working on at the moment and if that's true then February's must be a real monster.

The official Press Release gives the flavor, the forums have the Patch Notes and Dulfy has the detail. What I have is a few hours of puttering about and a lot of unanswered questions.

It's quiet. Too quiet...

As soon as we logged back in Mrs Bhagpuss and I set off like a pair of hyperactive Kate Adies, charging past the incoming refugees to gawp at whatever dangers they might be fleeing. Except... what refugees? There were none. All through Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau Norns and Charr continued their obsessive beef&beverage-based activities amid the usual small wars.

Prelude to nothing yet, then, and as I write this early afternoon of the following day, to nothing still. No sign, either, of the Heralds that

"will begin appearing in cities across Tyria shortly after the January 28th update to keep adventurers apprised of the events currently underway that are driving the Living Story forward"

Depends how you define "shortly" I guess. Probably means the same as "Soon". Although:

"Persistent world content related to the story of the refugees has been added to Wayfarer Foothills, Diessa Plateau, the Black Citadel, and Hoelbrak."  

Past tense, not future.

But then, time is out of joint in Tyria. It must be because although we couldn't find any refugees we did finish two dailies in a single day. After months of pleasurable permanence the familiar Daily routine got a hefty shake-up yesterday. From now on we should see a different set of tasks each day, with a handy checklist in the top-right corner of the screen. I'm not entirely clear yet on how these will rotate; whether it's seven sets, a randomized five from a pool, made up on a whim by a bored Dev or what. Time will tell.

Last night's set included 25 underwater kills, which I was happy to see since I had, not fifteen minutes earlier, bought both a Rare Spear and Speargun on the Trading Post for cheap and was itching to try them out. The requirement to complete ten Combos with an Ally was more problematic. Much conversation ensued, both between me and Mrs Bhagpuss and the general population of Diessa Plateau as everyone tried to remember what a Combo was and argued about who counted as an "Ally".
 

Timing. It's all in the timing.

That one took a long time and it was never really clear what gave an update and what didn't, but it got done in the end. All that was left was to craft ten Green Wood Planks and the first of what I expect will be many Laurels was mine.

Laurels? Oh, they're the new currency. We seem to get a new currency every month. Unlike Ugly Socks, though, Laurels look like something worth hanging on to. A Charr going by the unambiguous if unimaginative name of "Laurel Merchant" has appeared next to Craxus the Karma vendor in Fort Marriner and even a brief perusal of his copious stock suggests Laurels are going to be highly worth collecting.

For a start-up business operating out of a wagon he has one hell of a range. I barely know where to begin describing it. Mini-pets, crates of Exotic armor for all classes, superior crafting tools, unidentified dyes, Ascended jewellery, Infusions, it's quicker to list what he doesn't sell. He even sells WvW siege blueprints, although buying those with Laurels would seem to be the equivalent of using £20 notes to start a fire because you fancy a slice of toast.

My name? You don't need to know my name.

There's a good range of prices. There are things you can get for just a day or two's work: boosters for xp, magic find or coin, the crafting tools and suchlike. Less than a week gets you ten dyes or a box with two pieces of Exotic armor. If you want Ascended jewellery you can figure on getting around one piece a month from dailies alone. With five slots to fill, that's not unreasonable, and there's another 10 Laurels for doing the Monthly to shave a month or so off that schedule.

If you want Goedulf or the magnificently-named Chauncey von Snuffles III, an overweight cat wearing a Derby hat and a bow tie who "placed second in the Divinity’s Reach Fanciest Cat competition" it's going to take you a couple of months. Still, why buy a cat when you can be a cat? Top of the shop is the Endless Mystery Cat Tonic, yours for just 100 Laurels.

It's a lot to take in. For now I'm going to keep my Laurels in my pocket. I'd like to see what this Exotic armor looks like, for one thing, not to mention what stats it has. And then there's the "level 78-80" thing. Who wants level 78 Exotic armor, other than a level 78? Then, too, this is just Phase One of the Achievement revamp. There may be other ways to earn Laurels in future.

It's no time to be blowing them on Arrow Carts, that's for sure.