That's When My Patience Went Away : GW2

Following my return to work I had the shell of a plan prepared for what I wanted to write about today. I was thinking along the lines of a meditation on the different entertainment needs brought on by enforced leisure and enforced labor, how one requires stimulation and the other just the opposite.

It was all percolating quite nicely. And then I saw this. 

The headline Massively:OP went with was

"Guild Wars 2 delays End of Dragons to 2022, brings Colin Johanson and Josh Davis back."

That's enough to put the fear into anyone. Reading through the official press release, it gets worse. Much worse:

"Alliances When?

This year."

That about puts the cap on it for me. Along with the rest of the handful of people still playing World vs World, I'd allowed myself to get comfortable. I thought this insane idea had died of neglect long ago and we could all just carry on as if the whole ludicrous farrago had never been suggested. Sadly, it seems I was mistaken.

If that wasn't sufficiently disheartening, there's this:

"In the past, development priorities shifted away from WvW, and unfortunately both World Restructuring and our players suffered as a result. Our new leadership team views WvW as a cornerstone mode of Guild Wars 2, and it will be a focus of ours going forward."

It's that sickening moment, when the door opens to your nice, quiet office on the ninth floor, where no-one ever goes and most people don't even know anyone works, and in come three suits from corporate with a checklist and an appraising look. Sometimes benign neglect is the best you can hope for.

In this case, it's not just simple fear of the unknown. There's the plain fact that every single iteration on WvW since 2012 that pretended towards anything more than a basic bug fix has been at best a downgrade and frequently a disaster. Every. Single. One.

Desert borderlands even killed EBG.

 

Naturally, the plan comes with promises and safeguards. Most of the section in the press release relating to Alliances is made up of apologies for previous errors and promises not to repeat them. All of which we heard last time and the time before that and the time before that again.

There's a touching naivete in the promise of a collaborative process based around a beta:

"World Restructuring features will be released in a multiphase beta. What this means is that we’ll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release. ... Once we’ve worked with you to lock down the design and implementation, we’ll polish it up and take it out of beta."

It sounds reassuring until you realize the despised revision that removed all of the alpine battlegrounds and replaced them with their desert counterparts was the result of a similar collaborative beta, albeit a closed one.  That was the update that drove maybe half of all WvW players to stop playing, most of them for good. Several badly-received revamps led to open rebellion that was only quelled by a public poll on what should be done, a poll that resulted in a humiliating defeat for ANet and the removal of all of the new content to which they'd tied their banner. So that went well.

I'm less disturbed about this than I might be. Two or three years ago Alliances seemed like a terrifyingly bad idea but that was when the game mode still retained a vestige of the camaraderie it once had. There's none of that any more. All that remains is some knockabout fun, something very similar to an oversized, hot-join, never-ending game of capture the flag in which no-one really cares where the flag is or who's got it. It's hard to see how Alliances can make it actively worse but I have faith that if there's a way, ArenaNet will find it.

We had fun, once.

 

Going back to MassivelyOP's headline, there are more bad things. First and worst is the postponement of the third expansion, End of Dragons. This is embarrassing. Guild Wars 2 has had two expansions to date, Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire. The first took three years to arrive, the second pegged that back to two. So far, so good. Not great, really very not great, but at least heading in the right direction.

When (I guess I should say "if") it launches, EoD will have been four and a half years in the making. The original game only took six months longer than that to build from scratch. At this point I'm certain the better plan would have been to start on GW3 right after the second expansion. If you're going to take the time you might as well make the damn game.

The given reason is, of course, quality. It's always quality. 

"...we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha...We appreciate your patience as we take the time to give the expansion the attention it deserves"

Seriously, screw your "creative vision". And screw the self-congratulatory tone. Just get a damn expansion out in something close to the timescale every other major manages. 

The problem doesn't just lie with the development team, unfortunately. There's a glib, knowing wink in that "we appreciate your patience".  You can start a conversation about expansions in game any time you like and half the people talking will be saying they don't want one at all or they don't want one yet. It's not patience, it's apathy and antagonism. A lot of GW2 players will be cheering today because they won't have to suffer another expansion until next year.

I am not one of those players. The game is stale. It's been stale for much of its ten year run. The only time it freshens up is when we get a new expansion and so far that's been twice. And I only liked one of those.

Straight up, if there was a good alternative to GW2 I would be done with it now. I was done with it after Path of Fire. I keep logging in because it's there and it's familiar and it's easy and because it's the game Mrs Bhagpuss plays but mostly I'm still playing GW2 because not one of the alternatives I'm waiting on has made it to market yet. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, who only plays GW2 and, unlike me, rarely goes back to older mmorpgs she once enjoyed after she moves on to new ones, has been asking more and more often when the next good game is likely to appear. I can only hope it's soon but sadly I know it won't be before the delayed End of Dragons expansion so I guess we will indeed end up being "patient". But only because we have literally no choice.

So much for the expansion. How about those two guys coming back, eh? 

Heart of Thorns introduces a hitherto unknown problem to the game: too much loot.

 

This one's a bit more nuanced. From a company's point of view, can it ever be a good thing to have to announce you re-hired people you said goodbye to years ago? I guess it depends on why they left in the first place but at best it is, by definition, a backward-looking move. 

Colin Johanson was a very controversial figure in much of his time at GW2. He was the figurehead of a direction of which a vocal majority of players strongly disapproved. Whether it was true or not, he was labelled as the guy who wanted to make GW2 harder for casuals. 

He was the showrunner for Heart of Thorns, the expansion many players found daunting and difficult. The sales of the expansion were reportedly underwhelming and the aftermath confused and chaotic. Johansen posted an emotional and upbeat farewell when he left but my summary of his tenure, written at the time, was less than complimentary:

"Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw."

Given the history, it's hard to see why his return should be greeted like the prodigal son. Or indeed, like Scott Hartsman riding in on his white charger to save EverQuest II, a comparison I am absolutely certain Colin wouldn't want anyone to make.(I imagine he'd prefer us to cast him as Yoshi P riding to the rescue of his own personal FFXIV, but then what dev wouldn't?).

I never had carried much affection for Colin Johanson's style or approach. Nevertheless, I do have to admit that the direction the game took under his tenure, up to and including the release of the first expansion, made it by some margin my favorite era. 

I liked Heart of Thorns. I liked it a lot. It would quite possibly make the list of my top ten favorite expansions for any game. I've played through it start to finish twice and partially several more. I still go there most weeks and goof around just because I enjoy being there.

The adventure begins!

Conversely I dislike, maybe even detest, the second expansion, Path of Fire, which attempted to be all the things HoT was not: accessible, steeped in Guild Wars lore, commercial. I found PoF smug, irritating and, by far the worst of all video game crimes, stultifyingly dull. I forced myself to complete the main storyline on one character. Never, never again.

That does give me some hope for Colin Johanson's return. He did once do stuff I really liked and, let's be brutally honest, he can hardly make things worse. Except, of course, he can. It's amazing how often that happens. Still, we can hope. 

That just leaves the return of Josh Davis, about whom I have to say "Who?". I vaguely remember his name. I have no idea who he is or what he did. The only GW2 writer I remember is that one who got canned for fighting with players on social media and I don't even remember what their name was.

The writing in GW2 has been all over the place for years. It has some standout moments and a vast amount of ho-hum filler. Storylines blow up then blow away like dust on the wind. Who was Mr E.? Anyone know? Anyone care? How's Zojja doing? Is she dead or alive? Is Taimi still ill or did her incurable condition cure itself? Marjorie and Kasmeer, are they still a thing? 

Gliding. 100% more fun than mounts. Official!

 

It's soap opera and melodrama. Most people probably just click through it to get to the fights anyway. I'm sure Josh Davis coming back means something to someone but not to me.

And there we must leave them, Colin and Josh, setting out their desks, going down the hall to have their photographs taken for their security passes. We'll have to judge them by their works, I guess, although precedent suggests we'll be lucky if we have the least clue who's actually responsible for what.

I'll spend my summer dreading the onset of the Alliance beta although at least it's going to give me something to rant write about . I'd far rather have had an unpolished expansion in August than a supposedly tarted up version of the same six months later but no-one's asking my opinion because the people who actually matter have already decided what my reaction's going to be: I'm going to be patient. I've been thanked for it so it must have happened.

Ashes of Creation and Pantheon need to get a bloody shift on. There's an open door here waiting to be pushed. At this stage I'd even take Camelot Unchained as a stepping-stone to something I actually want. I know Mrs. Bhagpuss will try it. I wonder if she'd give New World a look... she does have that new mouse now...

The Rain, The Park And Other Things

It rained all day today. It's still raining now. I spent hours in World vs World, mostly defending our one and only T3 Keep or retaking the rest of our stuff after we lost it, which was about every five minutes. 

This week's event must have been wildly successful if the marker of success is how much time I've spent playing, when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I killed close to a thousand players, ranked up more times than I can remember and made it into the final set of skirmish rewards, Diamond, for the first time in years.

Activity was about as manic as I've seen it. For most of the day no side in our match owned more than one upgraded keep. Almost everything was paper. There were players running around all over the place. Crystal Desert were on a mission to overtake us and go up to Tier Three at the weekly reset later tonight. They had close to a full squad runing all day, even at the times when there are normally none of them to be seen.

Just keep telling yourself that.

Despite all that action and chaos and effort, I didn't see a queue on any map, not even once. I've barely seen one all week and even the couple of times I did it was only one or two people. Measured by that metric, things were actually busier a few weeks ago, when there was no event of any kind.

This is Tier Four we're talking about, of course. Maybe the matches above us had deeper queues and more of them. Then again, much of the time when I check, Yaks Bend is listed as "Full" and you can't get any more populated than that. You'd think, right?

It doesn't work that way. No-one knows how it does work, exactly, but we do know it's not a head-count. It's an algorithm or I imagine it is. Everything's an algorithm nowadays. All ArenaNet will admit to is that they calculate how busy Worlds are by reference to a number of factors including but not limited to how many people log in to WvW, how long they stay and what kind of things they do while they're there.

By that measure, earlier this week about two-thirds of the servers were flagged "Full". Today it was just over half. It changes all the time but if there's a pattern to it I don't know what it is. 

I do know that when people wanted to move to a server that was always "Full" they would sometimes stay up until three or four in the morning in the hope they could catch it in one of the brief windows when it dropped to "Very High". Back in the days when people used the forums for more than just arguing and badmouthing developers, you'd sometimes get public-service posts letting everyone know some server or other had opened for transfers, which, naturally, meant that server would be "Full" again at the next update.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had a brief discussion abut it in guild chat as we were running to defend something or other this morning. I was venting my irritation at people who don't care about the match result and Mrs. Bhagpuss was explaining to me why I could go boil my head. She takes the very widely held view that server pride died when ANet changed the rules on transfers and moving to the winning team every six to eight weeks became the meta. 

I can't really argue with that. Server pride doesn't make much sense when there's a whole playstyle devoted specifically to switching servers. Even harder to take it seriously when you factor in the link system, where you don't even know which server it is you're on half the time. 

Just keep telling yourself that.

Even so, a competition is a competition and a match is a match. You don't get a prize or a title for after a pick-up game in the park but I would contend that you do still care who wins. Yes, when you all come back the next day and pick teams again you're probably going to end up playing alongside the kid you were trying to kick in the shins the day before but each pick-up match is a discrete event and each one matters or else none of them do.

That is the problem in a nutshell for a lot of people. None of them do. So why do they bother? Same million reasons anyone does anything in mmorpgs. Loot, gear, achievements, bragging rights, social pressure, fun, boredom... When GW2 began, ArenaNet wanted WvW to be the endgame. They included the maps in world completion and tied a bunch of stuff in the Mists to other features of the game. 

You can guess how that went down with PvE players. Once the dedicated WvW crowd that arrived expecting DAOC 2.0 had left in a huff, ANet moved quickly to pacify the people they had left. The problem was, they had a set of maps, rules and mechanics designed neither for pure PvP players nor monster-bashers. We've been living with a series of passive-aggressive compromises ever since.

Just keep telling yourself that.

All the many, many redesigns have failed. The last one, the supposed mega-revamp that would do away with Worlds entirely and heave everyone into some kind of ludicrously over-complicated parody of high-school, with everything built on popularity and cliques, thankfully appears to have died of lack of interest. What might replace it remains unspoken. 

My guess would be nothing. There's a conspiracy theory, so widely accepted now it might as well be confirmed fact, that ANet make major bank on transfer fees. Another of their dirty little secrets is how the links are decided every other month. Some of the decisions seem so nihilistic that monetary gain appears the only rational explanation.

Whether it's true or not that they couldn't do without the income generated by thousands of people paying to change the name of their team every few weeks, I suspect another well-founded theory will be proven to be correct. There's no-one left at ANet who cares enough about WvW to try to make it less disfunctional. 

Okay, maybe don't keep telling yourself that. And definitely don't tell anyone else.

There was a moment of moderate shock recently when one of the former WvW devs returned to work on it again. That was seen by some as a sign that life might be about to be breathed back into the corpse. It seems a bit of a stretch. It's not like much changed the last time he was in charge. Or, rather, things did change. Just, well, nothing that mattered...

The moment of truth will be when we get to hear the full feature list for End of Dragons. Back when Heart of Thorns was in development it included the biggest shake-up WvW has ever had. That was an unmitigated disaster. Path of Fire didn't even mention WvW let alone change anything there. PoF is generally reckoned to have been a popular, successful expansion. A lot of people still detest HoT. Draw your own conclusions.

As far as I see it, WvW is in maintenance mode now. It's there. It works. If you want to play it you can. People do. Still, even now, quite a lot of them. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it for five or six hours today. It was fun.

Maybe that could be the WvW slogan: "Raining out? Bored? Can't think of anything better to do? Come play WvW"!

There are worse ways to spend a wet friday in May.

Beginning Of The End : GW2

We know what it's called:

 We know what it looks like (er, kinda...)

We know when we're getting it.

The only thing we don't know is - will it be any good?

By my count, so far ArenaNet are two for three.

The original Guild Wars 2: excellent.

The first expansion, Heart of Thorns: also excellent.

The second expansion, Path of Fire: very bad.

This is a personal opinion. A lot of current and former GW2 players, almost certainly most of them, would disagree with all of those assessments.

It's easy to forget now but GW2 was not that well-received after launch. The game claimed to break the MMORPG mould and for many it succeeded all too well.

Droves of confused and disatisfied MMO tourists tried the open world levelling game, couldn't understand it, didn't like it and left.

Veterans of Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer and other fans of large-scale, faction-based PvP tried World vs World, didn't like it and left.

Small group players tried the chaotic, trinityless dungeons, didn't like them and left.

PvE zergers who made it through the levels to Orr, found their supposed endgame an unfinished, buggy mess. They tried it, didn't like it and left.

PvP players were embarassed by Anet's determination to make GW2 into an in esport. Whether they stayed or left, who knows? No-one was watching.

The game muddled along for a couple of years, stumbling from crisis to crisis. The Karka debacle, the Ascended gear scandal, the Scarlett fiasco. Content cadence flipped and flopped as ANet struggled to come up with a flow that worked. And failed.

Through all this, there would never be an expansion, we were told.

Then there was an expansion.

Heart of Thorns was tough, uncompromising and difficult. It put the challenge back into a game that had gone soft. It sorted the casuals from the hardcore.

So some said.

Heart of Thorns destroyed solo play, drove casuals to despair and nearly killed the franchise.

So said others.

It seemed pretty easy to me. It was a lot of fun, solo or in zergs. I played it all the way through, twice, and then parts of it a few more times, for fun.

Still, it was widely seen as a mistake. Pandering to the hardcore, Anet had abandoned the core. GW2 had been touted as a game for everyone and somehow now it wasn't.

Also, WvW almost closed down. The Desert Borderland revamp, not strictly part of HoT but added alongside it. was almost universally hated. Players shunned them and eventually Anet first re-revamped then largely removed the entire thing. Even so, the game mode never fully recovered. Most likely it never will.

A couple more years passed and Path of Fire arrived. Second expansion, not the same as the first.

PoF was where I fell off the bus. Until then I'd rolled with all the punches and generally had a good time. PoF was not a good time for me.

I disliked it from the get-go and over the  years I've come to loathe it. I never go there if I can avoid it. I played the story through, once, with gritted teeth. Never again.

That was PvE. PvP I didn't follow. No-one ever seems happy with PvP, though.

WvW fell deeper into despond. PoF elite specs and mounts fractioned the playerbase. Populations dwindled. Servers "linked", which meant merged.

And yet, Path of Fire seems widely admired. It's generally considered a significant improvement over Heart of Thorns. Why? Beats the hell out of me.

And so we look ahead to the third expansion. You'd think, given the trajectory, I'd be pessimistic. The first one, that I liked, failed, relatively speaking. The second one, that I hated, succeeded, relatively speaking.

And if PoF was bad for me, the live content that came after was even worse. The nadir of the game so far.

Only, things have changed. At ANet, things are always changing. Somehow they turn stasis into churn, constantly thrashing yet never seeming to move forward.

A lot of people have left the company since Path of Fire. Not co-incidentally, I'm sure, a year ago, things began to turn. From the start of the Icebrood Saga there seemed to be a new attitude. Someone seemed to want things to be fun again.

And they have been. Mostly. Even when they haven't been fun for me I could see how they would be, if I was still as invested in the game as I once was.

So, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm hoping that End of Dragons navigates a path between pandering to the hardcore and pacifying the casuals. Evidence suggests that can happen.

Also, expansions need Must-Have Features and the features have to be something that can be monetized. HoT had gliding. PoF had mounts. I loved the first, loathed the second.

What will it be next? Could it be housing? I doubt it. I'll be happy just so it's something that gets ANet off of mounts for a while. God, I hate mounts in this game.

As for the story, well, End of Dragons. You'd think that says it all. And it would be neat. That would make a ten-year arc, near enough,  the supposed expected lifetime of the game. I know we don't talk about Guild Wars 3 but this is looking suspiciously like the end of an era.

And now, of course, we wait. Heart of thorns had a long build up. This is going to be longer still. Maybe. Depends just when in 2021 the train arrives.

I'm sure plenty of people are speculating already. I'll pass on that. I don't care enough about the story or the game any more to spend energy guessing. It'll be here when it gets here and that'll be soon enough.

It's nice to know it's coming, at least.

Making Plans

As I mentioned the other day, it was only when I went to make some Ascension spells with my EverQuest II sage that I realized he'd never started, far less finished, the signature tradeskill questline from 2018's Chaos Descending expansion. As I was wheeling him around the various elemental planes to grub up the hundreds of ores, roots, logs and pelts the series of combines required, I found myself wondering what else I'd forgotten to do over the last few years.

In theory, this is where having a blog should come in handy. I ought to be able to flip back through the posts and pick out the plans I made but never carried out. Only a blog doesn't really work that way. Or mine doesn't.

Yes, I have tags or "Labels" as Blogger calls them, but I apply them in a chaotic fashion. I do sometimes go to my tags to find posts I want to link but it takes me a lot longer than it should, even when I know what I'm looking for. And chances are, if I wrote about something I was thinking of doing in the body of a post, there'd be no tag for it, anyway.

Titles are even more useless, thanks to my predeliction for self-amusing obscurantism. I can't tellwhat most of my posts are about from the titles. If looking at them reminds me of anything it's only what song I strip-mined and often not even that.

Of course, I could just pick a date, say three years ago, and start reading. I'd guess I might get through a month of posts before that wore thin. I do love to re-read my own stuff but scanning for unfinished plans sounds an awful lot like work.

So I thought I might just jot down a few things off the top of my head, just to put them out there, in the hope I might come back to the list now and again and see if I can't tick something off. Fat chance, I know, but still...

A List Of Things Undone

Ascended Specialized Class Weapons - Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns

I finished several of these and enjoyed myself quite a lot. I have a few more in various states of incompletion. From what I recall, it's mostly running around maps collecting things. I can do that.

Calaldbog - GW2

I made one of these! I remember saying some very positive things about the experience. I also remember saying I was going to do at least one more. I never did.

Ranger Pets - GW2 - Path of Fire

By the time I got to the end of the storyline in Path of Fire I was heartily sick of everything about it: the narrative, the zones, the mobs, the whole expansion. I've made a concerted effort never to go back since. I have two rangers on my PoF-enabled account. One of them has most of the pets, the other only has a couple. It should just be a case of checking the locations and going there? How hard can that be?

Princess - GW2 - Seriously, how long have I been meaning to do this on my second account?
Five years? It only takes about an hour!

Advanced Logistics Mastery - GW2 - This one's a bit harder but it's so useful. I keep reading it up, realizing how much work it will be and going to do something less intimidating instead. Just knuckle down and do it!

Housing - EverQuest - I used to have a house but I let it lapse. Or possibly collapse. Now I'm logging in every day again, I ought to have somewhere to live. It's embarassing, camping out in the Guild Lobby like one of those people who ends up living in an airport.

More Housing - EQII - Where do I even begin? Why buy prestige homes if you're never even going to visit them, let alone decorate? And it's fun. This is something that's a positive pleasure to do, so why keep putting it off?

Leveling my Fury - EQII - She's been level 89 for months. Either use a token and get her to 110 the easy way or get on with leveling her old school.

Blood of Luclin Mercenaries - EQII - I literally have a whole guild bank vault full of them (ok, not literally, but nearly). Just go get them already! For everyone! Then throw the spares away!

That should do to be going on with. Any more and I'll scare myself.

I might as well throw in the games I meant to keep playing but somehow didn't, as well. Not the ones I dropped for a reason, just the ones where one week I was logging in and the next I wasn't:

Neverwinter Online - I was making some real progress and having fun.
Star Wars: The Old Republic - More than a year since I last logged in.
DCUO - Definitely going back for Wonderverse in August but why wait 'til then?
Elder Scrolls Online - I was enjoying my last run there more than I expected. No idea why I stopped.
AdventureQuest 3D - See ESO.

Try playing a few of those again, why don't you?

And you could finish Divinity: Original Sin 2 while you're about it.

Okay, now I'm talking to myself in the second person, which should probably be a hint this has gone about far enough. All I have to do is pick a project and get started. 

It's that simple, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's The Point? EQ2, GW2, WoW

I sat down at the PC this morning not sure what I was going to do. I have the week off work (yes, I do get a lot of vacation time, thank you very much) but I have no particular plans other than to enjoy myself.

The night before, I'd logged off  about two-thirds of the way towards the total number of Hero Points I need to complete Mirage, the Path of Fire elite specialization for the Mesmer. Contrary to my previously expressed doubts I'm finding PoF somewhat more sticky than expected. Partly this is because, after a full month's break, by far the longest she's ever taken from the game, Mrs Bhagpuss is playing again and we've been duoing on and off in the new maps.

I think it was Aywren who mentioned somewhere (I'd link it if I could find it) that the PoF open world content is a lot easier to handle in a duo or a group. I'm not at all convinced of that. It seems to be just as relentless with two - and "relentless" is definitely the word I most associate with this expansion.  I firmly believe PoF to be the most "hardcore" open world content ANet has released since the original Southsun - far more "hardcore" than anything I experienced in Heart of Thorns.

At one point in Desert Highlands, up around the plateau where the giants roam, we had the most intense fifteen-minute running battle I can ever remember outside of an instance in GW2. It all kicked off when Mrs Bhagpuss spotted a necklace near a nest of skelks and made a beeline to grab it.

Skelks were thick along the ramp up to their nests and much thicker still at the top. There were many veterans and the respawn rate was ferocious. Skelks have the annoying ability to stealth and teleport so it was impossible to tell which were respawns and which were just the ones already in play, flicking in and out of existence.

Tyrian Giants are proper big.

Added to that we had aggroed a Giant on the way up and he was hurling boulders at us. I'm sure there were other kinds of creatures mixed in as well but it was so hectic it was hard to tell. It also didn't stop or even slow down.

After a quarter of an hour of non-stop combat I called a retreat and we withdrew. At no point did it ever look as though we were going to get ahead of the game. We could still be there fighting skelks now.

This, I find, is entirely typical of the whole expansion. Bringing more people just seems to increase the number of mobs. Not that there aren't plenty to begin with. I soloed a Hero Point in Crystal Oasis last night, the one where you fight a Djinn of the Air. When I started it was just him and me. When I finished it was him (dead) me (2% health) a Veteran Hydra, a Veteran Sand Shark and a pack of hyenas. Probably some sand eels in there too - there usually are.

The big difference between fights like that in PoF and similar all-pile-ons in HoT is that you do feel you can win in the desert. I did win. It was flippin' hard going, there was a lot of dodging, I stealthed and reset a couple of times and once I kited the Djinn so far he leashed, but I always felt I could do it.

What people mostly didn't like about Heart of Thorns Hero Points was that some of them were intended not to be soloable. Putting a Champion instead of Veteran at a Hero Point will tend to give that impression.

That dam' HP's gotta be around here somewhere...

The PoF Hero Points are all soloable by intent but you still hear people asking for help with them in map chat because they're bloody hard. Whether you prefer the on-demand, manic chaos of PoF to the much more straightforward but by appointment only predictability of HoT seems to me to be largely a matter of taste. I'm fine with either.

The upshot of all that is that I very well might have sat down this morning ready to carry on where I left off. Only I didn't. First, I ummed and aahed over whether to re-sub to WoW. Had I read Stroeb's post on his belated Legion experience first, I almost certainly would have subbed up right away.

As it was, I didn't read that until after I'd finished adding a level to my Shadowknight on EQ2's Fallen Gate progression server. I ended up there because, while I was trying to make up my mind, I went to check if any new pre-expansion content had been patched into EQ2. It hadn't but I saw it was a double XP week for Prog servers.

So I logged in and did that. It's all so...random. I'm not in control of my own actions! Do I need an SK on a Progression Server? Do I need to to level him up? Does it make any frickin' difference if he's Level 30 or Level 31?

Mount skins? We don't need no stinkin' mount skins!

No, but it's fun and that's pretty much all you need to know about it. Syp was wondering why he grinds levels through the Dungeon Finder in WoW when he could be out there questing and seeing the world (again). I don't know. Don't look at me! I don't know why I do any thing in these games...other than it's what I feel like doing it when I do it.

My SK woke up in Butcherblock so that's where he leveled today. It's a really great leveling zone. I've done it many times, both end to end - every quest - and piecemeal as required. With full vitality, 100% server bonus and the 10% from boost from the Clockwork Calamity illusion (which is, surprisingly, usable on all servers) it still took me nearly two hours to do the whole of level 30.

It felt just about right. I'd hate to do it with no vitality and baseline xp though.

I hadn't seen a single other player in Butcherblock all morning. Out of curiosity I typed /who to see if I was alone in the zone. I was. Not unusual in a lower-level zone during the middle of the night by American clocks.

Both EQ games have a handy function few other MMOs offer: you can type /who and it will tell you the name of every character in the zone you happen to be in right now. Or you can type /who all and it will tell you the name of every character currently logged onto the server.

Claws off, birdie! That's my egg.

I guessed everyone must be wherever the level cap has gone. I've lost track of which expansions are active on Stormhold right now. I typed /who all, expecting the usual truncated list of 100 names, which is where the function caps, making it useless for guesstimating the current popularity of the game or your server.

Well, usually it's useless for that. Not so much when the result that's returned is four names. There were four people online on Stormhold.

I'd like to say it was at that point that I remembered the server is due to be closed and all remaining characters transferred to Ant. Bayle. I really should have twigged it when I logged in and the game gave me a free transfer token. I think I even mentioned it in a post a while back...

Embarrassing to admit but I only remembered it when I was halfway through writing this.

All of which makes the two hours I just spent even more completely pointless than I already thought. Except that I really enjoyed myself and I'd happily do it again. Maybe I'll go for Level 32 later today.

That's why, once again, I don't think Gevlon has it exactly right. Or, this time, Syp, whom he cites, either. Sometimes the sheer fun of doing something is all it takes to make something worth doing. When it comes to entertainment, maybe always.

Is Path of Fire A Better Expansion Than Heart Of Thorns? : GW2

No. It's not.

Oh, you want more than that? Okay, then. Here goes...

Looking back at the posts I wrote about Heart of Thorns when it was new, what comes across more than anything is how surprised and delighted I was by just how much I liked it. My first-day impression was overwhelmingly positive: "The whole game feels like someone took it into the yard, ran the hose over it, washed off the dust then buffed it up until it just shines."

A few days later I observed "By far the most frustrating thing about Heart of Thorns is having to choose between playing it and blogging about it." (Not a problem I've encountered with Path of Fire, by the way). I took a day off work to make a long weekend for the HoT launch and the only downside I could find was "I wish I'd taken a week. It's been very irksome, having to go to work every day only to spend most of the time daydreaming about playing." (Ditto)

My upbeat reaction to Heart of Thorns, which continued and indeed strengthened the further into the expansion I progressed, wasn't shared by everyone. Over the course of the next six months there were course corrections aplenty as ArenaNet attempted to right the wallowing ship until finally the Captain was cast adrift and the crew turned back for safer waters.

This time has been very different. The general response to the second expansion has been far more enthusiastic than the critical mauling the first received. The forums are, by forum standards, warm and fuzzy and I couldn't begin to count the number of in-game conversations I've seen comparing PoF favorably to HoT.

I regret to say that I'm not really feeling it. My loss, I'm sure.

It's not that Path of Fire is in any way a poor expansion. It's not. It's perfectly fine. Fair value for money. Spectacular to look at. Entertaining. All of that. No, the problem is that, as I suspected almost from the outset, it doesn't have a hook.

What's clear from my posts about Heart of Thorns is that for all its supposed problems GW2's first expansion dug its claws into me from the start and never let go. I found the change in emphasis exhilarating.

Back then, when the furor was at its hottest, I wrote "I do believe these design decisions, which must be difficult to make at the best of times, have been taken with the best interests of the players in mind. Often players really don't have the clearest view of what's good for the long-term health of the game." That seems bitterly ironic in hindsight.

Path of Fire represents a major retrenchment from the position taken by Heart of Thorns. It's easier and more accommodating. It's populist and crowd-pleasing. Mounts are the exemplar: far more so than gliders, they represent a marketable move towards the mainstream, as the enormously successful introduction of mount skins to the gem store at the first opportunity amply demonstrates.

You could interpret all of this as a welcome move towards a less paternalistic, more egalitarian approach. You might say it's just giving the people what they want. You might recognize it as a business belatedly acknowledging commercial reality. Or you might see it as a climb-down of massive proportions, a battered and bruised team throwing in the towel in the face of unrelentingly hostile criticism.

It's all of that and plenty more but what it undoubtedly is, more than anything, is a decision predicated on necessity. Heart of Thorns under-performed commercially as we know, unequivocally, from the subsequent NCSoft quarterly reports. Making the game more challenging resulted in less money coming in. The hope is that making it easier will reverse that trend.

The problem for me is that I never found Heart of Thorns to be in the least part "difficult" to begin with. I found it to be pitched almost perfectly to match my limited skills. I described HoT as "solo heaven... a classic interpretation of the MMORPG solo experience" but I also loved the signature GW2 open raid play, which reached its apogee in the mesmerizing Dragon's Stand meta event.

Filling out the then-new Masteries, opening the Elite specs on all eight classes and completing the lengthy and enjoyable collections for the associated Ascended weapons kept me busy and engaged for months and I was still eagerly running Dragon's Stand on new characters well into the following year.

Indeed, once Heart of Thorns dropped, I didn't spend much time anywhere else in Tyria (other than World vs World) for a good, long while. That has very much not been the case with Path of Fire.

It took a few sessions to finish the story, which was, at best, alright. A bit thin. Unengaging. Having seen it through, I have no desire to do it over on any other character. Certainly not now and quite possibly not ever.

Acquiring the four advertised mounts turned out to be exceptionally simple. Completing the masteries for them has been quick and easy too, which is probably just as well because there don't seem to be many worth making the effort to acquire. Thin, once again, is how I'd describe that offer.

If it wasn't for the hidden mount, the Griffin, the whole mount thing would have been a bit of a bust for me. The Griffin quest remains the highlight of my expansion experience so far. Shame it only lasted a handful of sessions. I wish it had been longer. Or per character not per account.

Path of Fire does include a new, Elite specification for every Class, along with a Collection for a new Ascended weapon to go with it. Exactly the same set-up as Heart of Thorns, in other words, about which I was so enthusiastic last time.

The difference is that back then I barely had any Ascended weapons. The opportunity to "quest" for genuine upgrades was exciting. Chances for meaningful, vertical progression in GW2 don't come along every day - or every year.

This time around, I already have Ascended weapons for every character I play regularly and multiples for most.  What's more, the new Elite specs for the classes I play most regularly don't appeal. I will not be changing from Tempest to Weaver or from Druid to Soulbeast so the new Ascended weapons would languish in the bank, unused.

I'll probably get them in the end, just for the skins and to have something new to do, but therein lies the real problem. Path of Fire is fun enough but little or nothing in it seems necessary. I have the mounts but I don't use them if I can avoid it  because they're awkward and clunky. I'd rather run. Or glide. I'm not excited by the new Elites. The new armor collections are, it goes without saying, hideous and unwearable.

Exploring the maps is enjoyable, or rather it was, for a while, but once the visual novelty wore off I confess I began to find them a bit...samey. As I've said, I'm not much of a one for map completion, but I'll probably get it done eventually. It's hardly what I'd call a hook, though.

It's not quite a month since Path of Fire launched and I missed the first few days, yet I already have the feeling I'm close to being done with it. Not with GW2, which I'm playing every day just like always, just with the expansion itself. I'm spending most of my time either in WvW or pootling about in Core Tyria ot the Heart of Maguuma. I even did map completion in Bloodstone Fen the other day.

I've gone back to doing The Maw and Jormag several times a week for no reason other than I like doing them. It'll be Teq next and Auric Basin. I miss the camaraderie of those huge events. Bounties, are no substitute for real World Bosses or map metas, that's for sure.

And of course there's the Halloween event, Shadow of the Mad King, which is in full flow right now. There must be scores, maybe hundreds of instances of the Labyrinth running 24/7. I've been there more than anywhere this week, not because I need anything from the event but because it's good-natured, communal fun.

Maybe there's some of that, somewhere, in the Crystal Desert. I'm not seeing much of it but that could just be me. Thing is, I've spent so little time in any of the Path of Fire zones lately that I can't even estimate how popular they remain. Megaserver technology will ensure there are at least a few fullish ones for the foreseeable future, I'm sure, but unless and until some future update adds a compelling reason to travel I may not be there to notice.

All of which isn't to denigrate Path of Fire as an expansion. It is, as I said, perfectly fine, as far as it goes. It's safe, unambitious and a little bit obvious but those aren't necessarily bad things. Not at first.

In the good old days, when EverQuest knocked out a full expansion every six months, if you didn't particularly like one it didn't much matter. There'd be another along soon enough. Even nowadays EQ and EQ2 players only have to wait a year (not to mention the increasing feeling that we're fortunate to be getting expansions at all, given the age of the games).

For GW2 it matters a bit more than that. Expansions are a Really Big Deal both in absolute terms for the immediate effect on the bottom line and as an increasingly rare opportunity to expand the audience via reviews, press coverage and word of mouth. I'll be very surprised (and absolutely delighted) if we see GW2's third expansion before 2019 so, with a minimum two-year wait between them, expansions need to have staying power.

I'm not convinced Path of Fire does.

Sun Is In The Sky : GW2

When Heart of Thorns was first revealed as a jungle-themed expansion there was considerable pushback. Plenty of people, it turns out, don't like jungles and for good reason: they tend to be dense, confusing and hard to navigate.

With ArenaNet pushing "verticality" hard there was considerable apprehension over playability. For many players anxiety turned to anger, when the short beta tests confirmed the only new map on offer to be vertiginous, claustrophobic and, worst of all, teeming with mobs far more aggressive and powerful than anything previously seen in Tyria.

Re-reading my own words on that first beta weekend it's revealing and surprising to see just how far away from that consensus opinion I was even on first call. Far from the expected "dense jungle filled with hyper-aggressive, overpowered wildlife and featuring a three-dimensionality that requires a mastery-point grind to overcome" what I got was a stroll in the park. Literally.

"I found myself wandering about largely unchallenged for the best part of an hour along valleys and branches and rope walkways filled with non-aggressive boars, behemoths and various stripes of civilized frogs.

Even the creatures that did attack on sight, mostly bats and some new kind of ambulant mushroom, weren't the 'roided up nu-mobs that throw shapes and take forever to kill. Just normal wildlife. It seemed easy enough, pleasant even, to wander about, take screenshots, admire the view."

With only a portion of Verdant Brink to judge by, I did worry about variety. "The big problem with a jungle setting became quickly evident, though: it all looks the same." That concern faded fast when launch brought the freedom to explore the new maps at leisure. I was so taken aback by what I found that I had to shout about it:  "IT'S NOT A JUNGLE! It's a FOREST!"

ANet have been widely praised for not making the same mistakes with Path of Fire that they made with Heart of Thorns and so far, broadly at least, that seems fair. In one respect, though, they seem to have dropped into exactly the same hole.

The antipathy to deserts seems smaller than that expressed towards jungles but there was still some concern over an entire expansion filled with nothing but sand. I'm fairly sure there would be objections to any thematic environment from tundra to lava so the question has to be why bother?

Really, why is it that expansions for MMOs come with such restrictive labels? Path of Fire is no more a "desert" expansion than Heart of Thorns was a "jungle" one. It has areas of desert in it, some of them quite extensive, but that's hardly the same thing.

In the long years before it launched I don't recall anyone feeling the need to market GW2 as an "Alpine" themed MMO, even though much of the environment looks like Bavaria or Switzerland. And of course the environment was far more varied than that - from wetlands to jungle, Edwardian dreamscape to Lovecraftian nightmare and back.

Path of Fire marks what seems to be a concerted attempt to reinstate much of what people supposedly loved about the original game. I may go into what that means for the gameplay at some point but as far as the environment is concerned it means a bit of everything.

There's a lot of sand, yes, but a large area of Desert Highlands is snow and ice, where it pushes north into Deldrimor Front. Most of the rest of that map is some kind of Roger Dean fantasy (yes, him again) with lush foliage on surreal stonestacks and deep caves filled with alien vegetation. Further south, the Elon Riverlands are - spoiler alert! - a river delta. Beyond that comes The Devestation, which resembles no environment ever seen on Earth.

Even the parts that are apparently supposed to be desert, like Crystal Oasis have more flowers and gardens than Kew. There's a colossal water pumping station for heaven's sake! And some sea-front real estate that would have billionaires from across Tyria flying in for the season. I bet Evon Gnashblade has a penthouse marked out already.

All this, mind you, in the midst of a refugee crisis caused by an impending God-War. What the place must look like in peacetime beggars the imagination.

If I was running ANet's marketing department I wouldn't have run with "desert-themed expansion". That's all I'm saying.

From A Distance : GW2

After yesterday's mammoth post and chunky comment section I'm going to attempt to keep this short. We'll see how that goes...

Jeromai has an excellent piece up about GW2's failings when it comes to introducing new or returning players to its particular mechanics. As I was reading it I had a small epiphany about just why I don't seem to experience the same difficulties others do when traveling through Heart of Thorns maps.

I posted a lengthy reply and came here feeling all clever and wise, only to read some of the comments that appeared overnight, after which I realized that my so-called epiphany was in fact a case of me not having been able to see some very obvious wood among a number of extremely large trees.

Here's the thing: I don't melee in GW2. Never have. Not on any character, not on any class.

It's not that I have anything against melee, aesthetically, conceptually, practically or any other adverb. I melee non-stop in EQ2, where I usually play a Berserker. I tanked for years on a Shadowknight in EverQuest and on both a Disciple and a Dread Knight in Vanguard.

Before I ever played GW2, though, I read a lot about it and all the talk of active combat and dodging worried me. I did a bit of research, asked a few questions and when the first beta weekend arrived I rolled a ranger.

Without me he's nothing!

That worked incredibly well. It removed all my apprehensions about GW2 at a stroke. I realized I would be able to play GW2 just like I played EQ or WoW or LotRO, if that's what I wanted, because GW2 had a class with a pet that tanks.

I wrote about it at the time, concluding with this advice: 

I would encourage anyone who found the whole action combat hype too daunting to make a Charr ranger next beta [and] let your pet tank pretty much anything you're likely to want to solo.

That advice still stands (the details I've cut out of the quote, about hunting drakes to craft your own armor and equipping Troll Unguent and Signet of the Wild...well, MMOs change over time). There's a reason why "Bearbow" rangers are looked down on and even laughed at - it's because playing one is choosing to play GW2 on Easy Mode.

I haven't played  a Bearbow ranger for almost five years. I rarely play a ranger at all these days, although Druid is my go-to class for story instances. The thing that carried over from that initial experience, the thing that has stayed with me ever since is this: if the mob can't get to you it can't hurt you.

In GW2 I play ranged. On every class. One of the big advantages of the way the game is set up is that every class can play ranged. Whether every class can also play melee I'm not sure. I haven't tried. They probably can, with the right build.

Jeromai astutely points out that prior to the arrival of Heart of Thorns, the GW2 dungeon meta was Berserker build, stack in a corner, melee cleave. I didn't do dungeons then (I was ahead of my time - now no-one does) so that particular meta passed me by. GW2 is a game very much prone to having "metas" and most of them pass me by so nothing unusual there.

Come here! Yellow stuff bad!

Consequently, when HoT intentionally and by design shattered that meta into a thousand pieces I barely noticed. I arrived in Verdant Brink ready to play the way I always play - stand well back, drop a lot of AEs at maximum range, be ready to get out of Denver at a millisecond's notice.

As I examine this playstyle choice I begin to see just why I find some of Jeromai's detailed accounts of what Mordrem and other mobs actually do to be so surprising. Vile Thrashers, apparently, leave acid trails. Leeching Thrashers heal up to full if you melee them. Who knew? Not me, that's for sure!

And why would I, since I never get close enough to any of them to find out? If I'm traveling I avoid everything I can avoid and use all my tricks to dodge anything I can't. I'm not going to stop and fight any of them. Why would I do that?

If I'm doing events then either I do them with others, in which case someone else can jolly well eat all those CCs, or I pick only the events I can complete comfortably at range. I don't really recall many - possibly any - events that I had to solo.

And yet, soloing is arguably what Heart of Thorns was made for. Certainly I argued that. I wrote about it at some length at the time, in a post wittily entitled "Soloing in Heart of Thorns". In it I suggested that

To me, "soloing" in MMORPGs means having complete freedom to do whatever I choose, while having that choice meaningfully progress my character. It means walking out of the city gate into adventure, alone, and returning, who knows how much later, still alone but stronger, wiser, battle-scarred and proud.

That's not everyone's definition but it's mine and I found HoT matched it perfectly. I summed it up thus:

So, yes, this is solo heaven. For me, anyway. It can be for you. Pick the right class and build. Take your time preparing. Explore until you feel you know how the land lies. Learn your escape routes. Practice your tactics... It's a classic interpretation of the MMORPG solo experience and classics never go out of style.

 And that's exactly how I still feel about it. Only with this caveat: pick ranged.

If you love to melee, if you're never happy unless you 're getting all up in the mob's grill, maybe HoT isn't the best fit. MMOs generally don't come in one size fits all, though. You do need to adapt.

Stick to what you know.

That's where builds and all that jazz come in. Again, Jeromai has some pertinent observations and good advice. You really should have some kind of stun break loaded and these days a condition cleanse too.

Tyler comments 

 "I don't think I've ever even had a stun break equipped on any of my characters. There's nothing in the game that says you should, and in most MMOs such things are considered to only be relevant in PvP, so it never even occurred to me it might be necessary".

He's right. I never used to have one either. I do now but it has nothing to do with Heart of Thorns.

I hate changing builds and I hate changing spells/abilities. I like to set my characters in stone when they hit max level and by preference they would never change after that point until the game closes down. I might not like changing builds but sometimes I have to.

The last time was when the big Condi change happened. World vs World became almost literally unplayable without a condi cleanse and a stun breaker loaded so I put some in. If I didn't play WvW I wouldn't have bothered but it turns out that choice has also stood me in good stead for Heart of Thorns.

Never mess with those who carry round a fire hose.

In this, GW2 is like every other MMO: it changes, sometimes radically, over time. It also changes across different game modes, at different levels, on different classes and on different maps. What worked in Wayfarer Foothills might not work in Frostgorge and what worked there could falter in Verdant Brink. Tactics that work for a Guardian might not have the same happy outcome on a Necromancer.

So far, though, in five years, in the open world, at every level, on every class and every map, what's worked best for me is range. Range and perpetual motion. Put those together and you'll stay alive longer. Probably.

Somewhere down the line some smart ANet dev may decide ranged classes are having it far too much their own way. We may get an expansion that favors the good old axe to the face approach. If so, I'll have to deal with it. Until then I'll be the one at the back, throwing fireballs.