I'm Going To Need A Bigger Boat

Less than two weeks after the launch of Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons, I find myself in the unexpected position of feeling as if I've almost finished it. Given that it took ArenaNet nearly four and a half years to produce and that they've only managed three expansions in a decade, that would present a serious problem for me as a regular player. If it was true.

It's not true, of course. As I said, it just feels that way. It's just that I seem to have done a lot by this stage, compared to what I remember from the first two expansions. So far, I've

• Finished the storyline.
• Got the 250 Hero Points required to open all the skills on the new Elementalist specialization, Catalyst.
• Completed map exploration on two of the four new maps, with the third almost finished.
• Gained enough Mastery Points to complete the full Mastery lines for the three that interest me, Fishing, Skiff Piloting and Jade Bots

For many GW2 players that would barely count as a scratch on the surface but for me it already completes most of the vague goals I had in mind when the expansion launched. I'm not really a "goals" kind of player but even I need some kind of loose framework to keep my whims and fancies in check.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the promotional push for EoD. I didn't watch any of the livestreams or follow any of the discussions on the forums or Reddit. I didn't play most of the so-called "betas" which, as far as I could see, consisted mostly of running around the live game exploiting a bunch of half-tested new abilities in whatever way would annoy other players as much as possible. I did try out the new Elementalist weapon, hammer, for all of five minutes but that was it.

Running flat-out!

Coming in, about all I knew about the storyline was the title of the expansion itself, which I figured had to be some kind of clue. I also knew we were getting some kind of boats called skiffs and that there would be fishing, possibly from those self-same skiffs. 

Other than that there would be an indeterminate number of new maps, I was guessing four or five, and a whole bunch of stuff I didn't give a damn about, like new Legendary weapons, the stupid turtle thing and some hub zone you were expected to waste time building up until it was nearly as good as whatever hub zone you were already in the habit of using.

The whole thing seemed less than thrilling. I figured I'd pick away at it over a few months, slowly fill out the few bits that interested me, then maybe, if it was any good, go back a few times with other characters over the next few years until ANet ponied up either a fourth expansion or Guild Wars 3.

What I didn't expect was to find the story both interesting and accessible enough that I wanted to finish it in a series of big bites. Nor was I imagining the maps would be so enjoyable to explore I'd find myself so close to map completion just poking around that it seemed rude not to finish.

Does the attitude come with the spec?

If I had any plans at all for becoming a Catalyst they revolved around playing World vs World enough to get the 250 points I needed there, which is what Mrs. Bhagpuss is doing. There's a handy vendor who sells them for the Testimonies of Jade Heroics you can get out of skirmish chests, dozens of which I stack up in a normal week's play anyway.

As for the Masteries, I liked the sound of the skiff and fishing seemed like something I might enjoy (Although I think, if we're honest, we'd probably all have to admit that fishing in most mmorpgs is hardly thrilling.) The one I was probably most interested in was the Jade Bot Mastery, if only for the on-call updraft it was supposed to add to gliding.

Based on my previous experiences, I didn't expect the mastery points to be all that difficult to come by but to get enough for three full masteries would, I thought, take either some time or some effort or most probably both. I seem to remember taking quite a few weeks to get enough points for the ones I wanted in HoT and working quite hard at it, too.

In retrospect, HoT, my benchmark for Masteries, now looks like something of an outlier. To fully complete all five Heart of Thorns mastery tracks requires 142 Mastery points. Path of Fire only asks for about half of that. End of Dragons probably comes between the two but a lot closer to PoF than HoT.

Someone really likes the idea of hiding mastery points on ledges. I  must have found a dozen at least.

If I sound uncertain on that it's because one of my End of Dragons' Mastery tracks is still locked. I do not have access to the Stupid Turtle. That suits me fine because I don't want the idiotic creature. I would rather have a Mastery track that allowed me to hide the damn thing on my screen when anyone else was using it. That would be a Mastery worth having!

As of now, Turtle Blight isn't a big problem in GW2. The big controversy of the expansion is the way access to the two-seater eyesore is gated behind the Dragon's End meta, a massive event that until several recent nerfs almost no-one could finish. Now it's been bug-fixed and toned down and a lot of people still can't finish it. Even if they can, then they have to do a hard mode strike mission...

From an entirely selfish point of view, that should at least keep the number of turtles to a manageable level for a while longer. They will be a huge problem when everyone has them. I saw my very first siege turtle at The Maw last night. The player riding it parked it right on the Shaman and it was so big you couldn't see the boss at all.

From an objective point of view, though, the hoops players are being asked to jump through to get the thing are ludicrous, something that seems to be a theme of the expansion. I looked at the Collection for the Catalyst specialist weapon today and was stunned to find out it requires you to complete the storyline as a Catalyst. 

 And if it can be in a hidden room off a ledge, even better!

Since I just completed the storyline as an Elementalist, that means I'd have to do the entire storyline again, on the same character! And then, if I wanted to get the specialist weapon for the other eight classes, I'd have to do the bloody thing eight more times!

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread about that, too. I would be surprised if there aren't adjustments to both issues over time, although ANet can be both extremely stubborn and glacially slow, so it might not be this year.

Luckily for me, neither issue is crucial or even tangential to my enjoyment of the game at the moment. It does speak badly of the underlying design, though, with many players already suspecting shenanigans. Like Wilhelm, I tend to favor cock-up over conspiracy but I guess we shouldn't really be surprised. In a game known for its soul-destroying grinds, what are a few more?

My own grind, such as it is, looks set to focus on xp, at least in the immediate future. I may have the Mastery Points I need, thirty-two of them at time of writing, but I also need another seven full bars of EoD experience to spend them all. Filling xp bars is something I enjoy so that's not likely to be a problem and seven "levels" shouldn't take more than a few sessions.

All worth having, I think, if only for the exta 2,500 hit points each one adds to your skiff. I've been sunk by sea creatures three times already today.

The real problem is going to be what then? I have a couple of minor goals - getting my two rangers their new pets, for example - and I guess I might fill out the mastery for that hub zone just for convenience. 

After that there's the question of which, if any, of the other classes I care enough about to get the Hero Points for the Specializations. I hear the Engineer spec, the Mechanist, is good. In fact, what I hear is that it's so good it's due a massive nerf. I should probably get that before ANet sand it down and take off all the sharp edges. 

If I'm realistic, though, despite having all the classes, some of them multiple times (There are eleven characters on my EoD account.) I spend about 90% of my time playing my Ele and I'm more than happy with the Tempest build she uses already. I just finished all the EoD content I listed above in that spec so why would I want to change it?

I do sometimes play one or other of my two rangers, one in the base game Ranger configuration, the other as a Druid, so I'll probably try the new Untamed spec for one of them. In fact, as I check on it now it seems that's required to get the new pets so I guess I'll have no choice but to get it for both.

Yes, it's a PoF pet. I only got it yesterday, four years late. It took EoD to remind I'd never gotten round to it.

That probably just leaves the Necromancer, whose new spec is the Harbinger, which is, at least, a decent name. I did try to play as both a Reaper and a Scourge, the two previous specs, but I got bored of both after a while and went back to Core Necro. Chances are the same will happen this time.

Other than going round and round the maps grabbing the same Hero Points over and over (Actually a more appealing prospect for me than I'm making it sound.) there's also Fishing to consider. If I'm bothering to master the skill, shouldn't I use it as well?

Fishing's one of those things, though, isn't it? It turns up in pretty much ever mmorpg ever made, eventually. If it's not there at the start you can bet someone will get around to adding it later. 

I first encountered it in EverQuest, where it was a single key press and a random result, a limitation that didn't stop most of us enjoying it anyway. EQ fishing got fleshed out a lot more later, with bait and tackle boxes and hooks and all sorts but it never turned into the kind of mini-game players expect in their mmorpgs today.

Finally! A use for all these jetties and piers.

GW2's fishing looks to be aligned with the industry standard. Lots of fish of different kinds and qualities, different baits and lures you can use, a variety of difficulties in sundry locations. You can use the fish for recipes and every new species you catch goes into a collection. 

Catching the fish or losing it depends on your skill with one of those mini-games I mentioned. It's about as enjoyable as any of them. I spent an hour or so fishing in various seas and lakes across Tyria this afternoon. I was planning on writing a whole post about it but then I ended up writing this one instead. In my experience that's what always happens when I sit down to write a post about fishing in an mmorpg. If anyone really wants to know how it works, I recommend this guide.

It was enough fun that I can imagine carrying long enough on to fill out those collections. That should keep me busy for a while. I think I have enough mini-goals to keep me going and no doubt new ones will occur to me as I play.

I don't think it'll be like Heart of Thorns, where I played non-stop, taking character after character through the maps and the weapon specs, but it's not going to be one and done like Path of Fire either. I think End of Dragons is settling down to be a nice, cosy, middle of the road experience, which I suppose is what you might have expected from an expansion that listed Fishing and Messing Around In Boats as two of its key features.

Just so long as you weren't expecting an easy ride on that turtle, I think it's going to be fine.

Meanwhile, Back In The Jungle... : GW2

Tomorrow sees the official reveal of GW2's second expansion. We'll find out how much of the information leaked in May was real (hint: all of it). Looking back through a few of the posts I wrote about the first expansion, it surprises even me just how very enthusiastic I was about Heart of Thorns right from the start.

I did remember that I liked it a lot more than I expected to and I know that I've had a huge amount of entertainment and enjoyment in the jungle maps ever since, but I'd forgotten that I'd said such positive things about the expansion, across the board. Here's just one of many such, from my Day One Report :

"It all feels better. The UI changes, the Guild changes, the minion changes, the spell effect changes... 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".

At one point I even went so far as to offer the suggestion that perhaps ANet knew better what was good for their game than the players did: "It's almost as though someone at Anet knows what they're doing." Cold comfort for Colin Johanson now.

I did understand that things were going to have to get easier but the position I took back then looks even further from the canon view that HoT was a failure from the get-go. I'd forgotten that just one specific complaint thread on the forums reached 57 pages and 3000 comments in the first couple of days.

The issue that was burning hottest back then was Hero Points; specifically, their acquisition. One of the pillars of the expansion was the addition of an Elite Spec for each class. This came with both a new weapon (weapons being class-locked in GW2) and a set of new abilities which, though we only suspected it at the time, would turn out to be the default build choice for most classes for the next two years.

What Anet hadn't made clear enough in advance of launch (although it had been explained for those who cared to pay attention) was that these Elite Specs had to be earned. The initial requirement was completion of all class training and specializations from the core game plus another round of training in the expansion itself.

In addition to 398 points from the base game, 400 Hero Points were required specifically from Heart of Thorns challenges. Each HoT challenge is worth ten points so that meant finding and completing forty, which happens to be exactly all of them.

When the expansion first dropped most of those challenges were clearly not intended to be soloed. Some of them required specific Masteries which themselves required points that had to be earned, some of which also were not easy to solo. And all of this had to be done not once for the account but repeated separately for every character on it.

At the time I observed that GW2 had turned almost overnight into a Gated Community. What surprises me, looking back at what I wrote, is how sanguine I was with that change. Again, I was more than willing to give ANet the benefit of the doubt:

"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."

All the same, it was very clear that something would have to change and soon. And it did. The 400 point requirement was reduced to 250 points and many of the challenges themselves were altered either so as to become directly soloable or to scale much better for small groups.

As the weeks and months passed there were numerous nerfs to the overall difficulty of all Heart of Thorns maps and content. Colin left the company, new promises were made, the direction of the game altered. Just about everything got easier. Just about everything got grindier.

Six months after launch the 2016 Spring Update added a Level 80 Boost to all HoT accounts, new and old. It kitted out the character that used it in full exotics and filled in all the Core Tyria requisites needed for your Elite spec.

With that, the final barrier to entry was, nominally, removed. People still complained HoT was too hard, of course, but at least they could complain about it while playing through it rather than staring at it from outside as they trudged through Tyria trying to find 398 one-point "challenges".

I used the boost on my main account so long ago I no longer even remember which character got the benefit. As I've mentioned often, however, I have three accounts for GW2 (four if you count the F2P one). One of those still doesn't have HoT but another one does and until this weekend I'd never used the boost.

More than that, I still had one of the original five character slots empty. That account is linked to the Ehmry Bay server for World Vs World and Mrs Bhagpuss recently moved one of her accounts there as well so I found myself in The Mists as an Engineer. I only had two 80s there and the other is a ranger so...no.

I have no idea how to play an Engineer in PvE, much less WvW, so I had the bright idea of using both the free character slot and the boost to add an Elementalist to the roster, Elementalist being the class I have vague pretensions towards knowing how to play. I'd forgotten about the Hero Points.

The prospect of exploring Verdant Brink, Auric Basin, Tangled Depths and Dragon's Stand all over again did not fill me with dread. Far from it. I was looking forward to it. I'd missed it. I took one of every class through most of the content during the first year or so as I worked on each of the class Ascended Weapon collections (a couple of which I have still to finish, come to think of it).

I certainly wasn't concerned about soloing the whole thing. When Heart of Thorns was just a week or two old I wrote at length about what a great addition it made to the solo content of the game. I described it as "solo heaven...a classic interpretation of the MMORPG solo experience", a description I stand by 100%. And that was before it got nerfed into the bedrock.

Back then I had other concerns about the future of those maps. It wasn't that future players would struggle to solo through them - it was that they'd have no choice. I imagined the jungle two years on, empty, forgotten, ignored in favor of the newer end-game content that would surely have arrived by then.

Well, newer end-game content certainly has arrived, in the form of raids, the Living Story and a clutch of new maps with very desirable rewards. So, are the HoT maps dead?

Like hell they are! Last night I had one of my most amazing MMO experiences of recent years and when I say "MMO" I mean exactly that.

I'd done a few of the easier to get to Hero Points in Verdant Brink last week and I'd followed the main storyline as far as Auric Basin. I did the Meta Event in the center of the map a couple of times on Sunday morning then logged out to do some WvW on my main account.

When I returned to the jungle at about 7pm on Sunday evening literally the first thing I saw in map chat was someone inviting all-comers to join her for a "Hero Point Train" through Auric basin and Tangled Depths. A Hero Point Train is when some masochistic cat-herder tries to lead an unruly pack of ill-equipped newbies through dangerous and inaccessible terrain so they can complete difficult and deadly challenges that will most likely be too much for many of them.

Fun, in  other words. I've done a few here and there. The best I've managed is maybe four or five challenges before either I fell off the train or the train crashed and burned.

Last night was different. In one of the most impressive displays of both charisma and patience I've seen in any MMO, a pink charr in what appeared to be a guild of one, filled a squad with fifty random players and then took them through the entirety of two maps, the second of which is generally reckoned to be the most awkward to navigate in the entire game.

She hit every Hero Challenge in both maps along with all the waypoints, many of the Mastery points, some of the Strongboxes and a few of the vistas. She ported everyone who didn't have the gliding skills required, she went back and collected everyone who got lost or fell off. She waited for anyone who'd missed a checkpoint and re-did every challenge for anyone who didn't get credit.

She did the whole thing in her second language over a less-than reliable internet connection with unfailing good humor and immense competence. The whole thing took almost three hours and was one of the best examples of why, for me, there is simply no comparison between MMO gameplay and any other kind of video game. I tipped her after the first map but by the end of the second I was so impressed I doubled my donation.

When we were done I had exactly the number of points required to fill out the Trait wheel and become a fully-fledged Tempest. I just hope the Pink Charr is around when I decide to take the next character into the jungle.

What both this exemplary experience and my return to Heart of Thorns reveals about the state of the game is more than encouraging. My pessimistic prediction that "I wouldn't be surprised to find much of the new land opened by Heart of Thorns underused, even neglected in a few months' time." has, thankfully, turned out to be very wide of the mark indeed.

With the next expansion about to arrive, there are still a lot of people working their way through the last one. We had a full squad of fifty people throughout and there were more outside the squad running with us. People dropped out along the way and were immediately replaced.

The maps themselves remain busy and populated. As we passed by in our train there were plenty of others working on the Metas, asking questions about the story in chat, and just generally pootling about doing stuff. I'm sure ANet would always like to have more players but there certainly doesn't seem to be any sign they don't have plenty already.

All of this has left me more excited than ever for what's coming next. I very much hope that I'm able to say in a few weeks or months, about the as-yet unnamed expansion, as I did about Heart of Thorns, that "I'm a satisfied customer right now. For once I'm getting what I want."

Yes, I really did like HoT that much. I'd forgotten. This is why I blog. So I can remember how I felt then without feeling it through the filter of how I feel now.

New expansion! Bring it on!

New For Old: Hunting Hero Points Aross Tyria : GW2

When ANet announced a reduction in the number of Hero Points required to complete the new Elite Specializations I was mildly interested. The option to add a new weapon type to each of my characters and strut about calling myself a Dragonhunter or a Herald might be fairly low on my list of Things To Do When The Expansion Arrives but at least it's on the list.

The fuss and fury over the 400 HP requirement was frenzied for a while. It would have been almost impossible to play and not at least be aware there was an issue. Still, I hadn't really given much thought to what it would actually be like to try and get those four hundred points. More specifically, it hadn't hit home to me that the 400 came in addition to the 398 required to complete all the skills and specializations in the main game.No wonder people weren't happy.

Theoretically, those of us who've been paying attention have known for most of this year that we'd need all the Hero Points we could get when Heart of Thorns arrived. We've had the best part of nine months to go round all the maps, doing all the Hero Challenges and filling everything out. Unfortunately, doing that would have gone against all my instincts and preferences; so I didn't bother.

I have asbestos pockets. I don't like to spend anything unless I have a very good reason. I'd always rather have money in the bank and that attitude transfers to just about any and every kind of in-game "currency". As I level my characters in any game I tend to look at what they have to have to progress and leave it at that. I see spending any points on skills or traits I'm not using as a waste even though in practice those points rarely have any other function beyond being spent on a set range of options.

Consequently I came into HoT with a whole load of level 80s that appeared to be sitting on a pile of unspent points. When the requirement for Elite Specs was reduced to 250 several of my characters were there or thereabouts already. So I thought.

The extremely salient fact I'd overlooked, of course, was before you can start spending the 250 points on the Elites you must have spent the full 398 points on all the other stuff. That came as a bit of a shock, particularly since I only worked it out when I went to spend the 250 points I had in the bank. In a bleak moment of clarity my Ranger went from job supposedly done to finding himself still well over a hundred points shy of becoming a Druid.

Hero Challenges in Heart of Thorns maps are worth ten Hero Points each (Core Tyria challenges give just a single point per) so on the face of it that doesn't sound so bad. In practice, though, it's not as easy as it appears.

It's not entirely because of the supposed difficulty of the challenges themselves. It's true that some of them do spawn Champion mobs that are unlikely to be within the capabilities of most soloists but as previously discussed you generally aren't alone in GW2 even when you do solo. Someone will usually be along to help within minutes at worst. And in any case many, perhaps most, of the "Challenges" turn out to be "Communes", which require you to do no more than press F and wait for a few seconds.

No, the main problem is finding the darn things. Exploring in the new maps is incredibly good fun in and of itself providing you are doing just that and that alone - exploring. Set out to get to a series of specific objectives with anything like comfortable efficiency, however, and your patience can wear thin. Not only is it hard using a two-dimensional map to traverse a three-dimensional space but many of the locations require specific Masteries to reach, some of which I don't yet have.

Also, I'd already picked off most of the readily-accessible ones as I wandered about over the preceding few days. I spent about four hours hunting HPs I'd missed across all four maps on Saturday with some success but come Sunday morning I was still fifty-five points short. Diminishing returns had kicked in and I rationalized that it would be faster to find fifty-five single-point challenges in the Old World.

Which is how I came to spend eight hours in Orr. Over much of Sunday my Ranger found and completed every Hero Challenge in Straits of Devestation, Malchor's Leap and Cursed Shore. He'd done a few already but it still clocked in at nearly forty. And it was a real pleasure.

Orr may have been a nightmare in the old days but now it feels like a holiday. With time to stop and admire the scenery it becomes unmistakably clear that these are heart-stoppingly gorgeous maps, something Jeromai tried to tell us long ago. The art design is as good as anything in the game, which means as good as anything in gaming I'd say. Just stunning.

I took over seventy screenshots as I roamed and I could have taken 700. Or 7000. After a while you realize there's just no point - the wonders are never going to stop. When the HPs ran out I flipped around a few more maps and cherry-picked the ones near waypoints until I had my 250. Since that character had barely 40% map completion even after Orr there was no shortage of options.

So now he's a Druid, which seems fun so far. In more than three years I've never felt the least need or desire to work on map completion and I don't plan on starting now but the coming of Heart of Thorns has perversely kick-started a fresh desire to see more of the maps that came with the base game.

Just as well. I have half a dozen more level 80s lining up to be next and a couple more wannabes behind them. What with that and all the new collects and crafting it looks as though ANet's plans to keep the original maps alive has legs. And, as a result, the whole game feels more solid than it has for an age.

A Gated Community : GW2

When I said yesterday that there'd been a bit of grumbling about the grind needed to open Elite Specializations I may have been guilty of understatement. Just a tad. The thread on the topic on the official forum is currently clocking in at fifty-seven pages with nearly three thousand comments and more than seventy thousand views.

It's not unusual for the GW2 forums to blow up over some perceived injustice, of course. More like business as usual. Even so, a rebellion of this magnitude is hard to ignore.

ArenaNet have made some effort of late to show willing when it comes to engaging with their public over contentious in-game issues. It's perhaps harder for them than for other game developers because of the strict policy of "we don't talk about what we're doing until we actually do it" that they've employed for as long as anyone can remember.

Still, even they appear to have realized that following that line with fanatical zeal causes more problems than it solves. Hence the following announcement from Colin Johanson:

"While we never like to rush and make snap decisions, in particular with a game that’s basically been out less than three days; I think there are some fair points in here for us to discuss. Much like other feedback about HoT, we’ll be discussing this as well!"

So, expect a row-back on difficulty or a reduction in requirements or possibly even the conversion of the entire system from Character to Account Based. Conceivably all three at once, I guess.

It's always a difficult balancing act. The expansion has, as Colin says, only been out for a weekend. New content in MMOs almost always seems a lot harder when it first drops than it will ever feel again in the lifetime of the game. Without making any changes at all, things that seemed impossible yesterday will most likely look manageable by next week and downright easy by Wintersday.

In some ways it might be more logical to open with a lower level of difficulty and tweak it upwards as players gain knowledge and their characters gain power but MMOs rarely take that risk. Few players respond well to having the edge taken off their swords.

It leaves developers trying to present content that isn't off-putting now yet will still have some appeal throughout the months and possibly years before it's replaced. Don't fancy that job much.

In this case, however, while the "difficulty" is part of the issue (Hero Challenges in Heart of Thorns are, by and large, not soloable) the real bone of contention is content gating. A lot of people - and judging by that thread it really is a lot of people - were under the impression they'd bought new Elite Specializations they could use right away.

They weren't planning on having to explore their way across several very confusing, and dangerous new maps to find twenty or thirty Hero Challenges before they could fire up their Scrapper or Chronomancer and take it for a run. It seems many of them were kind of planning on making that the first thing they did after HoT finished patching so having to wait hours, let alone days or even weeks has come as something of a surprise.

There are those who just power through, naturally. By Saturday word was that it took around nineteen straight hours to grind out the points for one full Elite Spec. Obsessive, yes, but at least once it's done it's done, right?

Well, not if you happen to have one of each class, which quite a few players do. Or more than one. GW2 has been famously friendly towards those who like to make lots of characters. With a level 80 of each of the nine classes just getting Elite Specs for all of them while playing a generous thirty hours a week would take something like a month and a half if that's all you did. And to add insult to injury you'd have to do the exact same content all nine times.

Clearly that's a worst-case scenario but it points up the core issue: the Elite Specs are gated behind repetitive content. That's not an image that fits GW2's supposedly open, jump in and play playstyle.

Heart of Thorns is big on gates. This is just the squeakiest. Raids, we hear, will be gear-gated, and the storyline is gated by Masteries. That's mildly annoying although it makes some kind of internal sense.

The idea is to introduce players to the various skills and concepts they'll need to explore the open maps, also gated by Masteries, by building them into the stages of the Personal Story as it crosses the landscape. That has the side-effect of predicating which Masteries a player chooses to open, which is unfortunate to put it politely.

For example, I would have preferred to train Glider to V before starting on either Nunoch or Exalted Lore but at the grindingly slow pace they unlock to do so would mean leaving the story for a week or two. Chances of avoiding spoilers by then? Slim. Not to mention that the story is actually rather interesting and I'd like to follow it to the end before I forget what happened at the beginning.

It would have been better in retrospect to have given the player character these abilities, temporarily, as they entered each instance that required them. That would have had the dual benefits of introducing the skills and creating a desire for them yet leaving it to the player to allocate his or her priorities and time outside the storyline.

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. Although it's true that there's a commercial requirement to keep people playing I don't really buy the argument that the motivation behind all this is based on stretching a small amount of content out for as long as possible.

Nevertheless, while the intention may have been to introduce people to the new movement and language skills gently and steadily and to make opening the Elite Specializations meaningful and satisfying, the effect has been almost the reverse. That's dangerous. Angry players who feel they've been short-changed or tricked don't make the best long-term customers and they certainly don't make good advocates for the game.

It may be true - I think it probably is - that there are far more players playing and enjoying HoT than posting angrily on the forums but those players aren't the ones making the news. Therefore it looks odds on that HoT will get easier sooner than the developers intended.

The Countryside Code says you should always "leave gates as you find them" but Tyria's another country altogether. Let's hope they do things differently there.