How We Live Now: GW2

Unlike most MMO developers, GW2 doesn't do Producer Letters. (Edit: Oh, wait, now they do!) Officially, that is. There is, nevertheless, someone in charge, an individual who sets the tone and announces the direction for the game.

For a long while that was Colin Johanson. He fell on his sword after Heart of Thorns failed to perform as well as expected. His replacement, who was supposed to be taking on the role only for as long as it took to find someone to do it permanently, was Colin's "boss" Mike O'Brien, one of the three people who created ArenaNet back in 2000 and the only co-founder still working there.

As each episode of The Living World arrives, ANet host an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. Since Mike's been in charge he's tended to open the proceedings with a statement that can be read as his Producer's Letter.

They don't tend to be very revealing or even interesting, unlike some of Colin's more explosive statements. The current one from a day ago doesn't divulge a whole lot of facts or plans but tonally it says a lot about where the game is now and where it's likely to go in the next year or two.

I found it to be both a reassuring and a depressing read. Also annoying and frustrating. There's an unmistakable tone of satisfaction that borders on smugness. Here are some quotes that should give an idea of what I mean:

"I want to take a moment to celebrate the journey we’ve been on together this year.

I think with Season 3 we’ve hit a really good balance.

I think and hope that this year’s releases have been the best work we’ve ever done.

I think we’re finishing this year in a good position."

From that I take it that Mike has the business in the shape he wants it and we are likely to see things carry on much as they have been for the foreseeable future. That's good to hear, in terms of the health and longevity of the game, but somewhat unnerving if, like me, you feel GW2 has largely been spinning its wheels since Colin left.

Not that you'd know it from this AMA. For all Reddit's reputation as a bear pit, it's obvious why ANet prefer to host discussions there rather than on the forums. The AMA is stuffed with easy set-ups, soft questions and fawning. To read it you'd think the game had nothing but happy, docile fans.

The official forums tell a very different story. Comments on the feedback thread for the current LS episode are more nuanced. Many people are happy but by no means all of them. The praises and pans run about 50-50, with the negative comments mostly focusing on the gameplay and the narrative:

"Probably the weakest episode to date, in fact of all the Seasons.

I’m sorry, but if I had wanted to play a puzzle game, I would have bought a puzzle game instead of this game.

Surprisingly disappointing. I feel like the trailer tricked me.  

This episode left me saying why? why? why? Do you switch writers literally every episode? I felt like none of them made a coherent story and that reveal was not shocking but left a feeling of " this was dumb waste of time"

The real problem for me, though, comes not from Mike's - arguably complacent - satisfaction in a job well done or his understandable preference for chatting with a friendly audience rather than taking on a hostile one. No, it's some of the structural changes that have been made under his watch that concern me:

"We’ve always been good at shipping things, but with our renewed focus on quality above everything, we’ve had to get better at not shipping things. We now develop new content and features with a default assumption that they won’t ship, and then if they turn out great, we proactively decide to ship them".

Pre-launch, the mantra was Iteration. Everything had to be done and done again until it was done right. That ran completely counter to what has become the prevailing mode of the industry, the "bash it out now and tart it up later" ethos of Early Access and it inevitably slowed the whole process to a crawl.

If Iteration seemed to take forever, imagine how much more delay "not shipping" must add. GW2 already feels like one of the slowest-to-react MMOs I've played and it's infamously one of the most tight-lipped. Now we can just imagine them all, hunched over keyboards in their double-locked security cells, working on projects we'll never see, while problems in the game that have persisted for months and years go unaddressed.

Not an encouraging picture and one with which I have little affinity. I hugely prefer to get my hands on something rough but functional now, the chance to play around with it while it gets smoothed and polished, rather than wait months and months to get something that's supposedly "the best work we’ve ever done" and yet which turns out to be, as one comment in the official thread ironically puts it, "a solid 3/10".

When it comes to World vs World, considered by most aficionados to have been in free-fall for at least a couple of years, the following assertion raises a very hollow laugh:

"With PvP and WvW...the community owns the game modes and chooses what we work on...our goal this year was to develop more incrementally, test with the community on Live, and take feedback every step of the way". 

I can't speak for PvP players but WvW regulars, as they express their feelings on the forum and in the various chat channels in game, mostly feel ignored, not listened to and sometimes actively trolled by the developers. It would probably be not too far from the truth to say that WvW fans play the game mode despite the development attention it gets not because of it.

For all that, GW2 is clearly a stable, successful MMO. It's about to launch its second expansion and we'd better hope its a good one because the guy who's been in charge of development there, Mike Zadorojny, is about to take over the direction of the core game. If, reading between the lines, the new Xpack doesn't do a HoT:

"You’ll see a lot of him in the lead-up to the expansion, and then he’ll join the Live side too, and I expect he’ll eventually take these reins". 

At this stage I'm sanguine both about where things are and where they're headed. This is not the GW2 we were promised before launch, nothing like it. The Manifesto was torn up and burned long ago. This isn't even the GW2 of Living Story 1, an era when, as Mike O'Brien now claims to regret,

"Guild Wars 2’s content model [was] all about exciting events happening in the world" and "we went for the literal version, constantly shipping changes to the existing world".

Yes, we complained about it then but be careful what you wish for, as they say. Instead of something approximating a "Living World" we got a series of Unliving Tableaux, each "a slice in time" in which every map is zip-locked, a museum exhibit that never changes and never will change.

The original GW2 project was to create an ever-changing world, a dynamic environment in which no two players would have the same experience and no two sessions would play the same way. The current orthodoxy is

"It’s a game, after all...a game that doesn’t need reinvention but mostly needs a steady stream of great content, so we can focus on delivering great content."

I get it. It's just a game. I won't take it any more seriously than it deserves.

Now entertain me.

The Great Spring Update or Here, Let Me Show You How To Do It!: GW2

GW2's Spring Update dropped on Tuesday and so far the reaction seems mostly positive, which might be a first. As expected, there was little in the way of new content, with the meat of the patch being system revamps and revisions.

The parts of the game under focus were World vs World and the Heart of Thorns maps, all of which received substantial makeovers or, in the case of HoT, nerfs. Seldom can such extreme pruning and cutting have been greeted with such enthusiasm.

The ever-unpopular Desert Borderlands had their barricades torn down, their bridges widened and their annoying House of Fun mechanics toned down or switched off altogether. Where once awkward jump pads or dangerous scrambles provided the fastest routes now hastily bodged-in ramps make access to key areas faster and less fatal.

That all went down well with everyone other than the awkward cusses who professed to have liked the DBLs all along, although I can sense a certain nervousness around the impending return of the Alpine Borderlands among those who can now see the potential in the new maps that was previously hidden behind the Extreme Sports aesthetic.

Almost universally welcomed was the addition of sPvP style "Reward Tracks" to WvW. I've long been of the belief that adding extrinsic rewards to game modes in order to encourage more people to try them is counter-productive. There's some real-world evidence for this.

Given that "lack of rewards" has been one of the top three complaints about WvW since launch, though, rather than fight the concept I can only comment on the execution, which is not at all bad. It's a cut-and-paste from SpVP, for sure, with just one new track specific to WvW added, but it adds some flavor and more stuff is more stuff, however you cut it.

One very clever move was giving Commanders the option to allocate a portion of the reward credit accrued by a squad to specific squaddies, who might be away from the main action on guard or scout duty, tagging siege or walking the commander's basenji.

The main problem with that is that it feeds off a new "Participation" mechanic, whereby players' activity is tallied over the fifteen minute intervals between "ticks", finalizing and handing out permanent reward credit only at the "tick", when the War Score is incremented. That just happens to be the exact same mechanic that this patch removed from the PvE Heart of Maguuma maps (the new, official, name for what has sometimes been referred to as Magus Falls). A little consistency would be nice.

Last night the second shoe dropped for WvW as server merges world linking redued the number of competitors in the North American league from twenty-four to a round dozen. Yak's Bend linked with Anvil Rock, which made about as much difference as an eye-dropper does to an ocean. My third-account server, Ehmry Bay, linked with Henge of Denravi, which might be a tad more noticeable. Gone are the days of wandering around doing dailies and taking camps without seeing a red name, I fear.

It hasn't been half a day yet so how all this will pan out is anyone's guess but by far the strongest reaction on the forums was outrage at the huge queues, hundreds strong and hours long, that most servers had at reset. I suspect that will be seen as a big win at Anet Towers. If nothing else the changes will have at least attracted the interest of a lot of dormant players who are now piling back in to see if the game they didn't like enough to keep playing has anything left to offer.

That, in a nutshell, is the overriding theme of the Spring Update: do whatever it takes to get people back through the doors. The suspicion is that Heart of Thorns under-performed at launch and then proceeded to tank hard, dragging the rest of the game down with it. Colin Johansen fell (or was pushed) onto his sword, leaving Mike "Two Hats" O'Brien to awaken from his slumber, remount his shining charger and ride in to Save The Game.

And on this evidence he just might. The WvW changes, while not by any means perfect or complete, have been better received than anything done for or to the game mode since launch. The threads on the Forum are positively glimmering with faint praise. As for the downgrades to difficulty and upgrades to rewards for PvE in Heart of Thorns, if map chat is anything to go by people there are even happier.

No longer do you need to commit a minimum of an hour, maybe as long as two, just to be sure of getting the loot you came for. Participation has been replaced by straightforward as-it-happens, by the event rewards. You can drop in, do two or three events and leave or you can stay all day; it's up to you. Either way you get something worth having.

And what you get has improved. A lot. The reward tables have been fleshed out and plumped up. The various chests have more in them and better. The event rewards have a chance for desirable drops including Ascended items. The rate at which the various map currencies accrue is many times faster.

There's a permanent 50% increase in xp for killing mobs, the hated "diminishing returns" debuff that discouraged farming and grinding is gone, there's increased frequency of access and reduced difficulty for Adventures.  Many existing events have been restructured and many new events added to facilitate solo and small group play.

I soloed one Veteran mob last night that was flagged as an event. It took about twenty seconds (berserker staff ele - ymmv) and I got better rewards than I would have expected from fifteen or twenty minutes of Old HoT.

Oh, and you now get a free upgrade to level 80 with every purchase of Heart of Thorns, complete with all the gear you need and all the waypoints opened so you can jump straight into the expansion content without any of that tedious leveling nonsense. If you already have HoT and all your character slots are filled with 80s, don't worry - you get a big pack of goodies including dyes and some gold.

ANet are on a major love offensive with this update, that's obvious. The "new" regime is clearly prepared to break with any and all of the precepts of the team that got us to where we were until last Tuesday. The new mantra is "give the punters what they want". We even got autoloot in WvW and our old fireball graphics back. It's almost as though someone was actually listening to feedback!

Take dungeons: I don't do them myself so I have no anecdotal evidence to offer but it looks as though there has been a complete climb down on the aggressive decision taken months ago to all but kill that game mode off. Now the talk is all about how that was "unnecessary" and there are new rewards and plenty of encouragement to get back underground.

There's more - a lot more. It's all in the mother of all patch notes if anyone wants the full details.  The key takeaway, though, is that this seems to be about the best-received update I can remember for the game and that's almost entirely down to a complete 180 degree change of direction.

This update acknowledges what the majority of players and commentators have been saying for half a year or more: Heart of Thorns was misconceived, aimed at the wrong demographic (and missed it, too) and was bad for the future of the game. I actually liked HoT a lot more than I expected but I'm certain I'd have liked it a lot more, even than that, had it launched in this latest version.

The "Buy Heart of Thorns" pop up is back in the corner of the screen for my non-HoT accounts. Having done the unpleasant and humiliating work to make the expansion more palatable to those players who voted without their wallets, ANet naturally want to reap the reward of more sales.

I would already have recommended HoT because, as I said, I've enjoyed it and I feel I got my money's worth long ago. This re-envisioning is even easier to recommend. It's slicker, more polished, better-targeted and more accessible. Whereas I previously had no plans to add HoT to my second or third accounts, not because of the value but because I wouldn't have wanted to repeat the required grind, now it's quite likely that one or both will receive the upgrade at some point.

GW2's Spring Update isn't a second coming on the scale of FFXIV:A Realm Reborn but it's a major change of direction that bodes very favorably indeed for the second expansion. If they really have learned their lesson, as, on this evidence, it appears they may have, then the next expansion could be a real cracker!

Must Be This High To Ride: GW2

Small sparks of GW2 news continue to sputter and spit from the embers of PAX Prime, starting scattered brush-fires across the blogosphere. For example, we learn from Colin Johanson that the coming of raids does not presage the addition of any kind of Raid Finder functionality to the game.

Of course it doesn't. That would be far too easy. And too like WoW. It would also undermine the uphill-in-the-snow-both-ways, harder than thou ethos of the new GW2. After all, raids are

"intended to be coordinated endgame content, not something a PUG can tackle" (MassivelyOP's paraphrase of something Johanson said) and

"We have content that you don’t have to group for and some that you can do in ad hoc groups. Basically, you can go anywhere you want to join in with other players already." (An actual Johanson quote).

Or, if you will, "Get lost, scrubs. Go back to petting quaggans in Lion's Arch and throwing snowballs at those Norn kids in Wayfarers. This is content for real gamers." (Me, taking umbrage).

A raidfinder would be kinda pointless anyway, since we already have our own ramshackle but perfectly effective LFG tool. It's been taken closer to heart than any similar player-controlled grouping mechanism I've encountered elsewhere and no doubt it will get plenty of use for raids. It's not making up 10-man groups that's going to be an issue, it's what you do with them when you've got them.

Jewel has an absolutely fantastic rant up in which she rips into ANet mercilessly over their radical change of direction. I hope someone at the company reads it and passes it around. Aywren has a more measured but equally devastating take on where it all went wrong.

It's wasted on those of us still trying to cobble some kind of shelter together out of the wreckage of the game. We shuffle and cough and make excuses and work out coping strategies while all around us the barbarians tear down the walls and butcher the innocent. Kind of like Neebo Terrace gone global.

Can't do better than quote Jewel's final summation:

"I just don’t get why they keep feeling the need to change their game further and further away from the original vision. The vision I, and many other people fell in love with. A design that was unique and a breath of fresh air within the industry."

Me neither. And we can't even blame it on pressure from big, bad NCSoft any more. According to ANet president Mike O'Brien:

"ArenaNet is taking over the publishing of Guild Wars 2".

Wait? What? What does that even mean? They're still owned by NCSoft aren't they? So what does being their own publisher give them that they don't have now? What does a games publisher actually do anyway? I feel this ought to be a big thing but I don't know why. Or how.

I'm close to having had enough of all this. The very best news to come out of the whole sorry affair, possibly the only good news, is the confirmation that "moving forward, everything brand-spanking new coming to the game will be specifically designed for players who have bought Heart of Thorns" and that the "story itself has moved to Maguuma", meaning "new Living World updates will happen over there".

Why's that good news? Because it means they are going to leave the rest of Tyria the hell alone, that's why!

"After the announcement of HoT, many players were concerned that the old game content would be left in the dust. Unfortunately, that is partially true."

Wait, let me just correct that for you...

"After the announcement of HoT, many players were hoping that the old game content would be left in the dust. Unfortunately, that is only partially true".

Even as I wrote this some more bad news arrived, Well, news about news. More content I don't want and won't use for me to ignore, I imagine. I'm getting good at that now. I should be. I'm getting enough practice. 

If it wasn't for the SMS requirement I'd be making a F2P account right this minute, just to guarantee that I can go on living in my blinkered, siloed, tunnel-visioned, rosy-tinted spectacled, old-school bubble. Given that I don't own a mobile phone I'll just have to settle for my two non-HoT accounts when I need to go to my Safe Place.

 How long before the demands for a "Classic" GW2 server begin?

Exploring In Heart Of Thorns : GW2

After I finished writing up last night's adventures in the Heart of Thorns closed  open  public  buyer's-only beta it was midnight so I went straight to bed.

Kidding! Of course I didn't. I went exploring. Well, eventually I went exploring. First I followed  the streams of new arrivals down the ramp towards the sounds of a mighty battle because, well, you do, don't you?

It was all very busy in the expected Silverwastes/Dry Top style: big orange circles all over the map and orange prompts in the upper right corner of the screen telling us on where we should be and what we should be doing when we got there. Which would all have been very well only most of it didn't seem to be working. In scenes very reminiscent of my time just about anywhere south of Lornar's Pass or north of  Diessa Plateau a couple of weeks after launch, map chat rang with discussions on whether events were bugged or we were just doing them wrong.

Within a few minutes the consensus view hardened. We weren't all hopeless idiots after all.  Most of the stalled events were, in fact, bugged. Conclusive proof of that pessimistic analysis came as people networked with friends on other maps and found instances where various broken events appeared to be functioning normally. Soon a fleet of taxis was being organized.

"Taxis" are a GW2 player-created phenomenon, whereby parties are created and advertised via the LFG tool for the sole purpose of moving from one Megaserver instance to another. You hop in the group, transfer to their instance of the map, then immediately drop group so someone else can hop in and do the same. It's commonly used for big set-piece events like Tequatl and Three-Headed Worm.

We used to do something very similar back in the pre-Megaserver day, when we'd use the "Guest" system to move from server to server in search of a map where a particular event was actually working. We had to if we wanted to get anything done. For months after launch a very significant number of GW2's signature Dynamic Events just didn't work reliably. Long chains were particularly prone to breaking and some individual events barely worked at all.

When ArenaNet announced recently that they were planning on public testing of only a small portion of the expansion content so as to keep the experience fresh for players when it goes live I had flashbacks. It's a great idea in theory. I'm one of the players who doesn't want his first, lasting encounter with the new content to be no more than a retread of something already made over-familiar by previews.

In practice, however, it's an approach that would require much better internal testing than there's ever been any sign ANet is able or willing to provide. On balance, I still think it's the right tack to take but it's definitely a case of the lesser of two evils. On previous experience and on the evidence of the little we've been allowed to see of Verdant Brink I'd suggest anyone wanting a smooth, polished run through Heart of Thorns, when it arrives for real (this year - believe it), would be better off waiting at least a month or two after launch for the most heinous bugs to be squashed.

It was getting late so I declined to hail a taxi and opted instead to go walkabout. That turned out to be a good decision. I have a lot of apprehensions about this coming expansion, which is stuffed with features that don't appeal to me at all - Guild Halls, Fractals, Precursor crafting, more "challenging" combat, raids - and very light on ones that do. Probably my biggest concern, however, is over explorability.

As a player who routinely tests very strongly on the Explorer scale of Bartle's infamous archetypes HoT doesn't look great, what with the entire expansion taking place in dense jungle filled with hyper-aggressive, overpowered wildlife and featuring a three-dimensionality that requires a mastery-point grind to overcome. It was with considerable surprise and pleasure, then, that 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.

Chatting to the locals didn't seem to be an option - I hope that's because someone's still writing and recording the dialog, not because all these new frog friends are the quiet type. The big problem with a jungle setting became quickly evident, though: it all looks the same. It's absolutely beautifully rendered. ANet arguably have the best environmental art team in MMOs and they always produce to the highest of standards, but really, when you've seen one rope walkway you've seen them all.

I think there's a real problem with a whole expansion that takes place in the wilderness. I'm hoping that at some point there's an urbanized area of some size and significance (and no, neither a reconquerable area for Guild Halls or a giant frog treehouse is going to count). A lost city, ruined or inhabited, that's what this jungle needs as a centerpiece.

Again, though, as with the first taste of the Personal Story, I like the flavor more than I expected or imagined I would. I did feel able to wander around doing what I wanted without being pushed and shoved into endless Important War Fights all the time. And for all its sameness this jungle certainly looks a lot more visually complex and appealing than the empty dunes and mesas of Silverwastes.

How much more time I'll spend in this beta I'm not sure. I'm definitely not going to start grinding away at Mastery Points just to see how those work (although I got one MP while I was afk writing last night's blog so how hard can it be?). Nor do I plan on working diligently through all the new skills and elites and so forth. I find all these things very hard to concentrate on without a permanent character to hang them on.

More screenshots though? That I can do.

Hands Up! Who'd Kill For A Heart Of Thorns Beta Invite? : GW2

Well now's your chance!

As of tomorrow anything you kill in Dry Top or Silverwastes has a chance to drop a "rare portal" to the Maguma Jungle. Looting one will flag your account for the next closed beta event.

Full details here, although I notice there's no mention either of when the "next closed beta event" is scheduled to arrive, nor how long the event preceding it will last. Or, indeed, exactly what time tomorrow the whole thing begins.

Whenever it is, you can bet your last copper that everyone will be jammed into umpteen instances of those two maps as soon as the flag goes up, laying waste to the Wastes as though the Last Days were upon us.

It's a really clever, genuinely innovative idea. It fires up excitement about the beta and drives player activity in the game at one and the same time. It also acts as a self-selecting filter, ensuring that the next beta is filled with people who a) actually have a character capable of participating and b) also have sufficient interest in the game to play that character.

Added to that it makes participating in the beta feel like both a reward and, at least in some small way, lore-appropriate. No doubt there will be people who'll find the randomness uncomfortable but it happens to fit right in with my preferences, which tend to favor serendipity, fortune and chance. Plus there's nothing fairer than a lucky dip, right?

As it happens I'm not particularly interested in beta-ing HoT. I think my days of getting all fired up about early, temporary access to content I'm going to end up playing for weeks and months in a permanent version are pretty much over. On the other hand - blogging opportunity ahoy!

It's been months since I set foot in either of the maps in question, other than to do a couple of quick vistas for the dailies. I liked them both well enough when they were a novelty but that's very much what they were - novelties. I feel neither has much persistence outside the original Living Story unless it's to grind for the various armor sets and similar gew-gaws. Without this incentive I might never have hunted there again.

As it is, I imagine I'll do a couple of sessions. More, maybe, if this turns out to be a full two-week event as I suspect it might. If a Beta Portal drops, so be it. If not, can't say I'll be very disappointed.

Rearranging The Furniture : GW2

If there's one thing ArenaNet really is good at it's running a sustained promotional campaign. The build-up to GW2 went on for a long, long time and even though I was by no means invested in The Project back then in the way so many were, there are PR pieces and interviews I can still remember quite clearly several years later. The skills that were honed in that campaign are coming into their own as the long run-in to the release of the first expansion, Heart of Thorns, grinds remorselessly onward.

We still don't have a release date for this thing, let's remember. We haven't even got a date for the beta. The content tap has all but been turned off in the live game. There's precious little for fans to focus on other than the carefully-managed flow of information - I would hesitate to call it "news" - that aims to open a window into our collective future.

The latest additions to HoT's "Pending" folder are two posts on the official website, catchily titled Specializations, Part One and Specializations, Part Two.  Between them they go into considerable, if repetitive, detail on the Specialization system that arrives with the expansion, whenever that might be.

So old school...

The gist appears to be some kind of paring-down or simplification of the existing Trait system and the replacement of the cumbersome Skill Point As Currency concept with a more straightforward version. It's a typical MMO mid-life crisis, in other words, the kind most MMORPGs undergo sooner or later. Mechanics and processes that were touted as revolutionary or paradigm-breaking back at the launch of the game are now deemed to be in dire need of an overhaul.

I would say that it puzzles me, why just about every single MMO I've ever played has to go through this constant unpicking of the seams, this endless re-upholstering and refurbishing. I would, only it doesn't. It's exactly what's happened around me in every job I've ever held for more than a few years. People can't leave well alone and no-one ever got on in life by saying the guy before him did a great job that can't be bettered. Not even if the guy before him was him.

It's annoying, all the same, this ineluctable desire to fiddle with things that are working perfectly well already. There's every chance the new Trait system will be fine and I'm sure we'll all get used to it in a few days. There's almost no chance, however, that it will be radically better than the old system. It certainly won't be such an improvement that, a couple or three years down the line, someone won't feel the need to change the whole thing up all over again.

Shooting for a round thousand by HoT. And that's just on one character.

It's tempting to pick away at all of this, worrying over the specifics, spinning conjecture and speculation out of the many gaps and elisions, but is there any point? As the writers take great pains to emphasize, "as with all things currently in development, there may be differences between the updates ... here and the traits that make it to the live game".

In practice most of the changes and additions will, I'm sure, appear in the finished version, in some form very close to what's being described. The lid of the box wouldn't be open otherwise. Whether they are very similar or strikingly different, however, as players we won't be in any position to judge the effect on our enjoyment until we experience these changes in play.

Often it seems MMO players find it all too easy to get worked up into a state of near-hysteria about proposed changes to games they love. Sometimes they seem to be able to reach a rolling boil of outrage about changes to MMOs they've barely even heard of. In the end, most of those changes turn out to be less invasive, less destructive, less interesting than anyone imagined. Barely noticeable in fact.

One of the reasons we still talk about the NGE is because it was an exceptional case, where a change to systems and mechanics really did make a huge difference to many players' ability to enjoy the game, or even go on playing it at all. I can think of half a dozen of those, maybe, in a decade and a half.

For the while all we can do is read, watch, listen and wait. No point crying over milk that's not yet been poured, much less spilled.

The View From Ehmry Bay or What's Wrong With This Picture? : GW2

A while back, when ArenaNet had the first of their 75% Off! sales, we each bought a third GW2 account. Since the coming of the Megaserver it really makes little difference which server you choose at character creation unless you plan on making some kind of serious run in the three-realm World vs World stakes.

Nevertheless it's not something you can opt out of nor is it something over which you have an entirely free hand. Here's a screenshot of the North American server list taken at 2pm UK time today, Tuesday. That's nine in the morning on the U.S. East Coast and six a.m. in the West. On a workday.

There are several Worlds that I have never seen other than full during my European play hours so I can only imagine they are permanently unavailable. As far as I'm aware, you can neither create a new character on a Full server, nor transfer an existing account there.

It seems rare for any server to fall below "Very High" these days.The rather well-handled, ongoing PR push for Heart of Thorns seems to have brought back a lot of lapsed players, while heavy discounting has filled the starting areas with eager ingenues. The ever-open-door policy of "Buy Once, Play Forever" means that no-one can ever really stop playing, only take a sabbatical, and almost every day sees the return of a flurry of names from the past.

Since we already have two accounts on Yaks Bend it seemed superfluous to add a third. I had already decided to concentrate all my efforts there onto a single account anyway as a result of the increasingly common and, to me, increasingly irritating trend of MMORPGs to move to an account-based model.

It's been so refreshing recently to return to playing EQ2, where each character has to stand on his or her own two paws rather then being towed along, willy-nilly, on the coat-tails of others. Even there the creeping specter of unearned perks looms, what with Heirloom items shared across the account, Daily Veteran Rewards being credited to the account not the character and experience bonuses being given for the account based on how many max level adventurers and crafters it has. Still, as yet it's a far cry from the Player-as-Unit model that GW2 suffers.

So, with all that in mind, I rolled my new account on Ehmry Bay, a server I still remember fondly from its brief moment of glory as Yak's Bend's Little Brother in Season One. I took a little tour before deciding, rolling on lower-ranked servers Devona's Rest and Ferguson's Crossing, but life in Tier 7 and Tier 8 looked just a bit too sedate.

EBay, as it has always, inevitably, been known, turned out to be a charming second home. In EU hours we generally have, at most, a single commander running and his "zerg" rarely adds up to more than a dozen even on a weekend. Most times gameplay in the Mists feels more like single-group play than zerging, with all three teams fielding single figure forces. It's all very 2012.

It feels refreshing, re-taking towers with a single, regular ram placed dead-center of the gate or marching to take a Keep with all of two alpha golems and half a dozen ground troops. Everything takes longer, the pace is stately, there are some amazing fights and even as a lowly uplevel I always feel both welcome and useful.

Good for me, but not, presumably for ANet, who can hardly wish for half of their servers to be providing content that appeals only to a fraction of one percent of the population. That, though, is scarcely the full picture.

World vs World is and has always been intensely volatile. Guilds move servers en masse, seeking all kinds of advantage or change, from the elusive "Good Fights" and the perennial, doomed attempts to set up the perfect environment to turn WvW into GvG - Guild Vs Guild - to a straightforward wish to just win a damn match for once or for their guild to be something other than cannon fodder in the pecking order.

Tier 2 has been a roiling cauldron of machinations and Machiavellian plots ever since we beached up there at the end of Season Three. There have been alliances, spies and trolls, concerted efforts to force Yaks Bend back into the outer darkness whence we came and, latterly, a grudging acceptance of the status quo. The hotly-tipped Yaks Bend Implosion never happened. We thrive on pressure. Meanwhile, around us, servers have been bandwagoned only to see the wheels fall off time and time again.

Currently Dragonbrand, who made it to T2 and looked for a while as if they'd push out Sea of Sorrows, are reportedly in freefall back in T3, their expected destination somewhere south of T5. Rumor is their ambitious guilds have gone to Henge of Denravi, something that seems likely given HoD's sudden surge, although for certain some came to The Bend.

This did not end well.

Maguuma, meanwhile, erstwhile home of some fragment of the infamous Goonswarm Federation, one-time worshippers of the Flame Ram and trainers of The Grub, always the least predictable, most volatile of servers, having crashed and burned for the how-many-is-it-againth time, is once again on the rise. They're burning through the tiers like a runaway sun on their way back to their supposed spiritual home in T2. Fear them.

It all makes for rough seas for small boats. Yaks Bend, being made of battleplate steel around a spent uranium core, takes the buffeting with grim determination and something almost like joy. Inside that bubble it's entirely possible my vision is warped. Having seen things from no other perspective in the 30 months I've played until now it's been very interesting to observe the action from EBay.

In the short time I've been there we've weathered HoD and Maguuma, neither of whom were a barrel of laughs, although I admit to always enjoying a match against the Magpies so long as I know they're going to be off fighting someone else the week after. With those forces of nature in effect I hadn't realized how much stronger than us Crystal Desert were, so it came as a shock to be knocked around by them like the inflatable dummy of a salaryman's boss for the last two weeks.

And then. And then this week we drew a wildcard and dropped a peg to face Sanctum of Rall and Anvil Rock in T6. I can't say we're having it entirely our own way, and indeed according to our Glicko score, which has fallen a little, we really should be doing better than we are, but suffice it to say that, when I logged in this afternoon, we owned everything. Everything.

Genius At Work.

This sort of thing happens a lot more often than you would expect. In order to render the whole affair less static and predictable, ANet long ago added a "wild card" system, whereby each Friday, when the new match begins, an algorithm runs to decide who will face whom. There's a very small chance for Worlds to be promoted or demoted not by merit but by luck. I say it's a small chance but it seems to happen surprisingly frequently. There have been suggestions that the "algorithm" is actually Colin pulling slips of paper out of a hat...and then swapping them around until he gets a result that amuses him...

When it does happen, however, the result is very often the same. The team that drops a tier steamrolls the unfortunate pair it meets - especially so if some unlucky world also got a wildcard up. What's more, because of how the Glicko system works, that server needs to steamroller without mercy because if it doesn't win by a wide enough margin it will lose standing in the rankings and begin to slide. 

It all tends to point up the extreme differences in coverage and population between the tiers, a very real problem of which everyone is already all too aware. A weak T2 server destroys the strongest in T3 and so on. Only when a server slumming it on a wildcard in the tier below chances to meet a bandwagon server bullying its way up do sparks fly and that doesn't happen very often.

When the expansion arrives we know we are getting new maps and new mechanics with them. We have been told there will be greater emphasis on and rewards for defense. For a while, as everyone comes to grips with the new environments and rule sets, there will be opportunities. The tectonic plates might even shift enough to crack open a passage into the closed shop of T1.

Aw, Bless!

If the underlying scoring system isn't addressed, from Glicko to Transfers, chances are such changes will be fleeting. For those of us enjoying the fights and feeling server pride perhaps that may not matter all that much but it won't do anything at all to improve the reputation of World vs World for those already jaded with its shortcomings.

That does at least represent some kind of hope for improvement, way off in the future somewhere, beyond the still-unanounced  launch of HoT. While we wait all we can do is make our own entertainment. Hence the plotting and the churn.

This would seem to be the ideal time to keep the masses happy with bread and circuses. A WvW season, derided though they always are, still gets people fired up. Surely one can't be hard to organize? In the absence of root-and-branch reform I'd take a meaningless competition with useless rewards. For now, anyway.

As yet there's no sign. It's now been more than six months since the last Season and several months since the ineffectual experimental rule change that was supposed to be the first of many. Like most aspects of GW2 other than the Gem Store and the failed eSport offerings in sPvP, everything seems to be on hold until HoT arrives. Whenever that might be.

A Strong Showing For Stronghold : GW2

Last night was my first chance to try some of GW2's hot new content. Or should that be new HoT content? Either way, for 24 hours only, the upcoming sPvP map featuring the new game mode known as "Stronghold" is available for testing, using the "we beta on live" system that so impressed Ravious a short while ago.

I say "available". If you play unranked arenas, as most people doing dailies probably do, you'll be testing The Battle of Champion's Dusk, whether you like it or not. For a day and a night the new map replaces all others in that bracket.

You'll take this one and like it.

Not everyone reads patch notes or visits the news section of the official website so this seemed to come as a surprise to many. There were some lively discussions going on in map chat as I waited in the PvP lobby for my number to come up.

All but one of the PvP maps GW2 has had since launch rely on holding territory for points (the exception being a free-for-all brawl) so there was some confusion over what to do on a map that had no marked points where you stand in a ring to score. I'd taken the trouble to read the long and detailed overview so I had a fair idea of what was expected but it was still very confusing first time round.

Stronghold For Dummies

Confusing but also a lot of fun. I've never played a MOBA but according to what people who had were saying this is roughly how they work. To me it felt very much like a WvW mini-game, with keeps and Lords and siege engines and NPCs to hire.

For most of the lifetime of the game I've studiously ignored GW2's instanced PvP. It was the felicitous synchronicity of a couple of Jeromai's posts and the first 75% off sale that changed all that. Suddenly I had a new character on a new account, who had to do all three of his three (count 'em - three!)  dailies every day (one PvE, one WvW, one PvP) to get the "I've done three dailies" reward.

So I started doing instanced PvP and found I enjoyed it well enough, something that really shouldn't have come as a surprise given the countless hours I've spent doing the much same thing in WoW, Rift, Warhammer and EQ2. And, to pick up a theme, the recently-added extrinsic rewards for doing PvP are now so good they amount to open bribery.

There are two things you certainly can't say about GW2's PvP maps: as already outlined, you can't honestly say they offer much variety in gameplay and neither do they match up to the visual elan we're spoiled with throughout the rest of the game. The new map addresses both of those shortcomings.

A Pirate Captain, I !

Visually it's the only PvP map that looks as though any thought has gone into it at all beyond the necessary design that relates to functionality. Behind you at the spawn point is open sea with several impressive sailing ships moored at a dock. The fighting takes place in a small town that looks and feels like something you might find on an explorable map.

There's even some story going on somewhere. We appear to be working for someone to some end although I have no idea who or what that might be. A portentous voice-over does a little more than yell the usual banalities and statements of the obvious, suggesting some kind of life for our characters before and after the events in train.

Okay, Charlie!

All of that may be fluff when it comes to instanced PvP but it does set a tone and creates an atmosphere that makes this map feel more grounded than any of the others. Of course, for all I know there may actually be some narrative or storyline to sPvP as a whole that I've completely missed. In the end I guess it doesn't matter all that much because we're here for the fights and in the matches I played those were pretty good.

Seems clear enough...

I won't rehash the mechanics here but there's a lot more going on in than in any of the existing maps. You get a good deal of agency as a player above and beyond the usual "shall I go Home, Mid or Far?". There are plenty of options and they all feel like WvW to me: run supply, guard vital NPCs as they move across the map, fight NPC guards, break gates, kill the Lord.

Most of these activities also occur in the older PvPs but only in a nominal way. There it never seems to make much difference whether you do them or not because in the end everything comes down to one of two things: standing in a circle or stopping the other team from standing in one.

In Stronghold the ancillary activities actually matter. For one thing, the gates of the keep are impervious to player damage so if you don't spawn your bomb-carrying Skritt door-breakers then you won't even see the other team's Lord let alone kill him. And you won't have any Skritt unless you buy them with supply so better get running that.

I hope we get shore leave - it looks nice here.

NPC guards are also quite hard for players to kill so you'll need those NPC archers, which means more supply. If your team has two turret engineers (the go-to choice for lazy scrubs like my main PvP character) you can sit the pair of them on the two supply dumps and laugh at the other team because without supply you are stuffed. Or so they said in map chat. Only they didn't say "stuffed".

We didn't do that. We all ran around, swapping lanes and roles in the chaotic manner you'd expect from five people who'd never met before, who disdained the very idea of communication and anyway didn't remember or understand most of the rules. It was great!

Holding out for a Hero

I played two rounds, both of which were much longer than usual PvP matches. In the first my team was ahead on points right up to the end and I was confidently expecting a win on the timer when suddenly our Lord was dead, Game Over, you lose. Next time round it did go to the wire and we won by 285 points to 270 with both teams in the other's Keep, still hammering on the Lord as the timer ran out.

Colin in full spate.

When HoT arrives and this map enters regular play I foresee it being very popular. Certainly the feedback in open conversation in the PvP Lobby was very positive, which must have been sweet music to the three ANet devs, including Colin Johanson, who were hanging out there. I enjoyed it a lot, although like all instanced PvP I can only do two or three rounds in a row before I lose concentration.

Once people have more than a single day to get to grips with the map and the mechanics no doubt behavior will become more mandated, tactics codified and much of the chaos will leech out. You can easily foresee roles being assigned and blame being attached to those who don't stick to them and follow the prescribed path. Even then, I think it should be a fun diversion.

I just hope the Desert Battlegrounds turn out as well.

Another Green World: GW2

Information continues to trickle in about the upcoming GW2 expansion, Heart of Thorns. Little of it sounds encouraging at least to my ears. After more than a year of hoping for something new to buy in a box it's quite a surprise to find myself considering whether I'd be better advised to keep my credit card firmly in my wallet.

The broad-brush strokes of the original reveal at PAX South left a lot of unanswered questions and the answers, as they begin to fill in, are creating just as many doubts. The prospect of a jungle setting didn't set my pulse racing to begin with but the idea of a jungle filled with the unrelenting , largely uninteresting, uncommunicative, cognitively inert Mordrem is stimulating a desire to be somewhere, anywhere else.

Caledon Forest is already more jungle than I care to deal with.

If only there was somewhere else... As far as the expansion is concerned the options of where to go would seem to be limited. It's now confirmed there will be few maps and they will all relentlessly follow the War With The Plants theme. Those few maps we do get threaten to be exaggeratedly three-dimensional, requiring a new device, the Hang Glider, designed to be difficult to manage, in order to navigate. These maps will be densely packed with nested events and feature timed, map-wide objectives along the lines of the never-ending cycles of Dry Top and Silverwastes. All of this will be cranked up to "challenging". It begins to sound like a fair version of a jungle hell.

A few voices have already piped up on the forums to protest that it was the variety and heterogeneity of content in popular maps like Queensdale and Wayfarer Foothills that made them popular in the first place. Those voices will certainly be lost in the general approbation and approval of what is set fair to be the consolidation of a change in ethos and gameplay both long in the making and much desired, if not by me. It's clear that GW2's design team sees a through-line, from the stumbling start of the Lost Shores event, via the equally stumbling but ultimately successful iterative development of the Living World, to some kind of design epiphany in Dry Top and Silverwastes, finally arriving at last at what they confidently claim to be a high point in GW2 design - Heart of Thorns.

In fact - swamp, forest, jungle - I'm not entirely sure I can tell the difference...

While there are dissenting voices still to be found among the playerbase it's probably likely that, on this long journey of learning by trial and error, ANet have tacked more towards giving their core audience what it wants than they have kept to their original course. So, what is it that the audience does want?

Permanence or the illusion thereof has been a clear and present demand from the start. The concept of huge, one-off, world-changing events died in the karka-infested water around Lion's Arch over one chaotic weekend back in 2012. Clear character progression that doesn't rely on a gear ladder is another. The Ascended tier that was introduced shockingly soon after launch to howls of anguish remains sufficiently controversial, even now, that pledges never to step that way again need to be repeated periodically and unequivocally by senior management.

You've got karka on your face - rock dog edition.

Then there's the perceived lack of both "difficulty" and "challenge" that has formed a recurring theme in endless forum discussions over the life of the game. Gameplay that could readily be celebrated as the defining trope of GW2 - content designed to allow players of all skill and interest levels not only to co-exist but to co-operate and enjoy synergy - has consistently been denigrated as EZMode or zergfest. The developers response, rather than to stick to their original, inclusive, open-hearted ethos, has, equally consistently, been to increase complexity and require higher levels of skill, commitment and dedication from anyone wishing to participate. Latterly they've simply fallen back on the traditional and unequivocal flat level-based barrier, locking out any player currently unwilling or unable, for whatever reason, to complete the journey to 80.

Unsurprisingly I find little of this is to my taste but then it's becoming very apparent that GW2 is no longer an MMO made with players like me in me mind. Players who like to potter around performing small services for imaginary powerless individuals for which we receive minimal recognition or recompense. The kind of players who enjoy helping a young child to impress his father with the severed head of a moderately oversized domestic animal. Players who don't mind spending ten minutes keeping harpies away from the cattle while a crazed charr calculates the correct trajectory for flinging cows with his self-built siege
engine.

If they'd announced a tundra-themed expansion this post would have gone in entirely another direction

Ironically, given that, unusually among major MMOs, it has no formal raiding structure, not even a UI panel, Guild Wars 2 is gearing up to become a fully raid-focused game. I have never raided with anything like serious intent and I don't have any desire to start. I was not one who welcomed either the changes to the Tequatl event that required a raid-like level of organization or the player-created solution of huge cross-server guilds to meet that challenge.

I do find the refinement of that process, the near-self-generating, rolling critical mass of players acquired in Dry Top and Silverwastes through the addition of numerous incentives and goads, to be preferable but I still don't like it. It's artificial to an obvious and uncomfortable degree, one of those buildings with the pipework on the outside, only without the aesthetic justification. I might feel differently if any of the incentives actually incentivized me or if any of the goads did in fact sting. They don't.

Dredge. They're so much more interesting than dragons.

What all this has done, however, as may or possibly may not be apparent from the above, is make me think. Think about why I play these games; pursue this hobby. Think about what I do, what I enjoy doing and what I do without really considering whether I enjoy doing it or  not. About what I want and how likely I am to get it. About how I could be spending my time in future.

Even if I don't get much value from playing HoT, and I suspect that I won't, I'm already getting plenty of value from thinking about it. For that I thank the developers. I'll tell you if you also get my money when I've seen the beta.