The Long Lost Shores: GW2

In a comment to a recent post by Syp at Bio Break, Telwyn said

"Guild Wars 2 makes me sad, it’s a game I loved for a year or so after launch and played with close friends and family. As you said in your post, I didn’t feel like the game was catering to my sort of player anymore, especially with Living Story season 2. I doubt they’ll come back to what the game was at launch, why would they? But that’s the game I wanted to play."

This is a sentiment often expressed, both by ex-players and some who still play. I've said much the same myself, often. I wonder, though, how true is it, really?

For quite a while, years, the infamous Manifesto would get dragged out and waved about like a torn and bloodied flag. That happens less now, although it's been linked and excerpted several times on this very blog, mostly when I wanted to rail against some betrayal of faith or hold some errant dev to account.

If the brave claims and promises of that proud document were ever enacted in the game itself, though, it was only briefly. People talk about the second Living Story marking a step-change for the game, the moment when most of the lore action moved to instances that could be packaged for cash shop sale, but the first and so far only expansion, Heart of Thorns, seems to be the tipping point most commonly defined.

My contention has always been that if GW2 did lose its way, the turn from the righteous path was taken long, long before any of that. The only version of GW2 that resembled the vision so energetically promoted in dev blogs and PR promos throughout the long march to launch was the one we saw in the six beta weekends and in the game's first three months. Everything since then has been ANet's New Game Experience.

Forever Ascalon

GW2's short-lived Golden Age ended with the catastrophic release of the game's first major live event, The Lost Shores, on November 16th 2012. With a prescience they could hardly have predicted, the ANet PR department trailed the update with the tagline "a massive one-time world event that will change Tyria forever!"

And it did. Player feedback was so virulent, so corrosive, the entire direction of the game changed as a result. The fundamental conception of the GW2 project, that there would be a dynamic, unpredictable, ever-changing world that players could affect and be affected by, was abandoned almost overnight.

From then until now the direction of development has been focused on making as certain as possible that no-one can say they didn't have at least a fair chance to do everything. If it isn't exactly "all must win prizes" it's certainly "all must have an equal opportunity to win prizes". And, failing that, buy them.

Maybe I did buy my hat in the Gem Shop. What's it to you, pal?

The result has been a relentless slide towards predictability. Everything happens on a schedule. There is always a tick list. Some things have a limited duration, it's true, but the limit is measured in weeks. Any sense of event or surprise is meticulously excised. There must never be any suggestion that anyone might miss out on anything.

It took a long time and many of ANet's famous iterations before these processes were sufficiently codified, tested and confirmed. The first season of the Living Story failed to take replayable accessibility into account, an error that means it cannot now, years later, be offered to those who missed it, tied up in neat Gem Shop bundles the way Seasons Two and Three have been. There are still plaintive posts about that on the forums now and again.

Once the revisionist steamroller began to pick up pace, though, it flattened everything. Megaserver tech removed variations between worlds, annihilating server cultures and collapsing alternate timelines. No more guesting to find a version of Tyria where the battle against Zhaitan's Risen was succeeding when it had failed in your own.

Even in the days of the Megaserver a very late map can give you that 3-man Maw experience you crave.

World bosses lost their power to surprise, weak as it was. Instead of a somewhat randomized "window" in which they might appear they were all issued with a strict schedule. Every quarter of an hour, to the second, a specific major threat would step out from behind the curtain, make a short speech and wait to die. There's a timetable.. More than that, there's a train.

I could go on. For four and a half years, beginning immediately after the perceived failure of the Karka Invasion of Lion's Arch, GW2 has stumbled towards order. The game that exists now, the game many ex-players dislike and avoid, is merely the later stage of the process that has been with us almost from the start.

Like the apocryphal frog who never notices the warming water it may be that those of us who stayed don't realize the trouble we're in. That's not quite how I see it. More likely, I think, the changes most widely reported and condemned seem more onerous, more divisive, less optional, when seen from the outside, than they really are.

Yes, I heard you the last seven hundred times.

Raids, for example, are entirely ignorable in exactly the same way raids have been entirely ignorable in every MMO I have ever played. No-one needs to raid. Most MMO players never raid. Raids stand to core GW2 play as sPvP used to and still does stand. If you played GW2 in 2012 and never felt like you "had" to do sPvP then you can equally play GW2 in 2017 and never feel like you "have" to raid.

Fractals, that infinite hamster wheel of achievement, are equally avoidable. What happens in Fractals stays in Fractals. Don't do them and you will never need to do them.

Ascended armor, the once controversial extra gear tier ANet either said they'd never add or always said they'd add depending who you believe, is a useful but absolutely optional addition. If you do choose to raid you'll need it because raiding is about marginal efficiency. If you WvW it's better to have it than not but only if you WvW seriously, with the whole VOIP and guild-build nine yards.

If you're raiding or WvWing in that manner then getting good is part of the deal you accepted. Everyone else - just chill! There is nothing anywhere else in the game you can't do in Exotics. Frankly, I doubt there's much you can't do in Rares. And you absolutely can WvW in Rares - I have characters doing it all the time - when there's a map call and I'm at the bank in Citadel I go with whoever I happen to be. You don't have to wear pink to fire an Arrow Cart or fix a gate.

Map calls know no color.

Heart of Thorns is an issue. Not having that flag on your account is a limiter, there's no denying. There's still a lot you can do without HoT but ANet's clear intent is to tie most new content to ownership of the expansion even when the content doesn't happen there.

After nearly five years, though, it hardly seems unreasonable to ask people who want to do anything more than dabble in the game to pony up just once more. Or, indeed, just once if it really is the first time.

And contrary to what you may have heard, Heart of Thorns is good. It's beautiful, it's content rich, it's varied and above all it's fun. It never was anywhere even close to being as "challenging" as the reviews suggested but what little added difficulty it ever offered has long since been nerfed into history.

I've been wearing this outfit since 2012 and I see no reason to change.

Masteries are mostly soloable and enjoyable to collect. The big events mostly run regularly and successfully even now, something that still surprises me. If you prefer to potter and wander and explore, though, then the Heart of Maguuma is your playground. And gliding in Verdant Brink is worth the price of entry on its own.

So, the game absolutely isn't what it was, or what they promised it would be, but then, when was it? That time was so short it seems like a dream. If I hadn't recorded how it was back then I'd scarcely believe it ever happened.

All MMOs change, at least while they live. GW2 has changed, for the worse and for the better. Whether it's shifted further, either way, than any other MMO I've played I somewhat doubt, although, maybe, it stumbled and lurched a little more along the way, trying to get there. I'm pretty sure it did that.

I wouldn't let what it's become stop me enjoying what remains of what it used to be, though. There's plenty left. And more besides.

No Need To Be Crabby About It : GW2

It ended with a bang. After two hours of non-stop mayhem, the Ancient Karka slipped under the hitherto unseen lava, lurched back up like any good horror film baddie, then slumped over the lip of the pool, dead. And a massive chest appeared.

You should see the other guy

I wasn't expecting loot. During the two-hour event many people made jokes about what reward we might get for our many, many deaths. Diddly squat was the consensus, if we were lucky. In the end I got a couple of rares and a couple of exotics, one of which I could actually use, and everyone got a 20-slot bag (worth about $10 in real money) and a level 80 exotic jewellery item. Some folks even got Legendary Pre-Cursors and if you don't know what those are then bully for you.

But it's not about the loot, is it? No it isn't! That wasn't a rhetorical question! It's about the fun and the camaraderie and the being there. And weirdly, this time I can say that without irony. I did the entirety of Lost Shores Phase 3 on an Overflow server, where people come together who may never meet again and yet the whole two hours passed in excellent spirits.

If I hear one more crab cake joke...

Despite many setbacks there was a steady stream of hearty, good-natured, articulate banter. Much as happens on the Frontiers of WvW, leaders arose spontaneously to direct the efforts of the zerg and were heeded and after a great deal of struggle, at several points during which I found myself wondering if ArenaNet had thought of providing a Failure condition, we eventually prevailed.

Is this the line for JBoots?

All's well that ends well, then. Unless you were one of the unfortunates who disconnected before the chest dropped and couldn't get back in (the log-in servers seem to have died - I'm writing this now because when I took the ship back to Lion's Arch the game crashed and that appears to be my lot for the evening). Or who wasn't able to play at all for whatever real-life reason. Or who had so much lag it was impossible to do anything meaningful and gave up.

Clearly these events are problematic. The forums are mildly busy with discontent. It needs to be recognized that not everyone enjoyed themselves. I had a great time, though and map chat for the two hours the event took suggested a lot of other people did too. 

I thought you had the nails

On balance I thought Lost Shores got better stage by stage. Phase One was really very buggy indeed. It's probably fair to say that as far as the "quests" went more didn't work than did. There were patches and deadline extensions and a lot of scrabbling to try and get the loose ends tied. The invasion of Lion's Arch was fun but laggy. I expected the Karka to win and take over the city for a day or two so I also found it somewhat anti-climactic when we ousted them quite easily.

Phase two was late starting, much shorter, a lot less laggy, largely bug-free and over in about three-quarters of an hour. The introductory re-invasion didn't even happen on the Overflow server I was on. The ship just appeared and off we went. The core of the event was a chain similar to those we've seen many times before. Good fun but nothing amazing.

Phase Three was the "multi-hour" climax. It qualified, on the smallest possible value of "multi", finishing in about 130 minutes. I almost missed the beginning, having to run one and a half times around the entire island before I found the Lionguard Detonation Team but from then on it was action all the way as we went up and down the spiral ramps of the Karka hive laying bombs and harried the Ancient Karka hither and yon  across the salt flats.

Last thing crabmeat needs is more salt

I think we were all expecting the finale to be the exploding of the charges we'd set and the collapse of the mountain, which would have been truly spectacular. In the end I didn't notice the detonation at all, if it even happened, and the event ended with the Ancient Karka trapped at the bottom of the Hive succumbing to our withering fire.

Success? Success??

Was it a success? Well, I enjoyed it. I'd do it again, or another like it. For me, the fact that it was a one-time event made it worthwhile. It felt like an event in the non-gaming sense of the word. I was glad to have been there and done that. If it was going to happen every three hours for the next few days then I might well not have bothered with it. Oh alright, I probably would. But I'd have been sighing the while.

Will ArenaNet stick to their guns and carry on pumping out content that vanishes into the aether of memory after a single outing? I hope so. They seem surprisingly prone to vacillation right now, so I'm less confident of their stubbornness than I was, but yes, I do hope they keep it up. It may be wasteful and controversial and it may provoke discontent but I know that if I'm playing another game and they announce something like this again, I'll be back.

Lost In The Mail : GW2

To begin with a digression, I was about to rummage in the cliche bag and come up with "much-heralded" as an opening to this brief run through the first phase of Guild Wars 2's "Lost Shores" event when it occurred to me what an inappropriate phrase that would have been. Much hyped, certainly, but heralded? I haven't heard a peep from my own personal Herald for weeks. Perhaps my singular lack of enthusiasm for any of his previous proposals has led him to seek employment elsewhere. Or maybe it's just because I never paid him.

There's something in the waterrrrrrrr!

His absence hasn't quietened the flapping of my letterbox, though. Far from it, and that's my main complaint about Lost Shores so far. But we're getting ahead of ourselves again. Let's recap.

It'll be nice when it's finished

At exactly 8pm last night a very brief cut-scene signaled the Karka invasion of Lion's Arch. Given the completely unexpected, surprise nature of this attack it was incredibly fortunate that several hundred heavily-armed adventures just happened to be holding an impromptu fireworks party around the Lion Statue plinth, where rebuilding work has just begun.

Kill the babies!

There ensued half an hour or so of the kind of chaos and mayhem that I thoroughly enjoy, although other opinions are available and were indeed volubly expressed in map chat at the time by some who might have been better-employed crabbing than carping, given that the invaders turned out to be crabs. Big crabs, I'll grant you, with very tough shells, but crabs all the same.

As huge MMO events go, it was nowhere as laggy as many I've attended. I was able to move, fight, communicate, loot and follow instructions reasonably well. It fell squarely within my tolerances for playability, although those are admittedly broad. I didn't get any Karka Samples until the Asura collecting them announced he had sufficient - in fact I was barrelling towards him with the two I'd managed to hack off some baby crabling a minute before when he decided to shut up shop. After that, of course, I got dozens.

Eventually the concerted forces of the Lionguard and sundry adventurers drove the Karkan horde back into the sea and the inquiry began. After a brief examination and dismissal of the new hand-ins at the Mystic Forge, which Mrs Bhagpuss rightly identified immediately as not much more than a new item-sink, we moved to the beach where the wreckage from the boat that sank in the opening cut-scene had washed up.

I love beachcombing, me

Confusion ensued over crowbars. The ones lying on the beach appeared not to work. The server briefly hiccuped a roll-back after which I found myself next to large chest filled with the things and I had soon had the top off a barrel. Incriminating evidence led me to the incredibly annoying Blingg. If I never hear the word "CITIZENS!" again it will be too soon, that's all I'm saying.

He soon cracked under our skilled interrogation and it was off on a merry chase around Caledon Forest and Kessex Hills. Karka were fought and defeated, clues were discovered and deciphered and around midnight after a fruitless search for Lionguard Tyrro we called it a night.

Come on! He can be hurt! I just did 12 points of damage!

As events go I enjoyed it. I didn't die once, I was largely able both to follow what was going on and to participate effectively and the Karka turned out to be surprisingly convincing invaders. There were bugs and glitches but I've seen much, much worse. So far I'd give it about seven out of ten.

The one thing I really didn't like derives, I think, from ArenaNet's stubborn insistence on reinventing a wheel that wasn't broken. What follows the invasion is by any rational analysis a questline. Only GW2, of course, doesn't do quests. Consequently, where other MMOs would have a nice, neat journal entry with stages that tick off tidily when completed, what we got was a series of bizarre notes in the mail and a lot of vague hints in the Event descriptions.

Here, I'll just write it in your journal. Oh, wait...

It's a half-assed, clumsy way to deliver content of this type. It works, but in the way that tying a piece of string between two baked-bean cans worked to talk to the kid next door fifty years ago. We have mobile phones now, maybe you noticed?

That cavil aside, I thought it all went off nicely. I certainly had a lot more fun doing just that first part than anything that was thrown at us for Halloween. Looking forward to phase two tonight. 

Lost Shores - Be There or Be Square: GW2

Probably as a result of the furor that followed the Mad King's controversial one-time literal pop-up event in Lion's Arch, ArenaNet decided to post a schedule for the upcoming Lost Shores extravaganza. It comes in three Acts, beginning on Friday November 16th and running through Saturday and Sunday with a special event each day at Noon PST.

The press release is fascinating, showing, I think, just how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be to balance a genuinely "dynamic" virtual world with customer expectations of a commercial product. Taking ANet's description of the event at face value, there's an intrinsic and apparently insoluble problem and in just three-paragraphs they hammer home relentlessly precisely what it is :

"we want to make sure that you are not missing out"

"an Event in Lion’s Arch that you don’t want to miss"

"make sure you will not miss it"

"this will only run once, so make sure you will be there!"

C'mon bird! You must have seen something!

Whether the event will live up to the hype, whether it will be truly world-changing, that doesn't matter. What does matter is the insistence that this is something all Guild Wars 2 players must not miss. That raises expectations that simply cannot be met in full. A lot of people aren't going to be there, no matter how much they'd like to be. The balancing act between building excitement and fostering resentment is a high wire to walk, that's for sure, and the fall is steep on either side.

The timing of the events is intriguing in itself. The opening Act falls on a Friday which is, as far as I can tell, a normal workday in the United States. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management Schedule of Public Holidays for 2012 has nothing listed for November 16th, anyway.  The first event that we don't want to miss kicks off at midday Pacific Standard Time, which is three in the afternoon on the East Coast and eight in the evening GMT.

An elephant? No, wait, is it two camels playing Twister?

Well, it works for me. I'll be comfortably home from work when it all gets going. Much of America, however, will still either be at work or at school. Just as well they "will be able to enjoy additional content afterwards even if [they] cannot make the kick-off time" then, although whether that will make up for missing the unmissable special event (albeit an event not as special or unmissable as Sunday's "big Finale") I beg to doubt.

The same timings repeat on Saturday and Sunday for the following acts. Less problematic, obviously, on a weekend, but again I'd say it strongly favors players in GMT timezones and using the exact same times does risk locking out the same people from each phase. The timing seems especially odd when you consider that GW2 has separate European servers, but as other MMOs have discovered, letting half your customers in on a secret before the rest get to find out what it is never plays well.

Ships they come, ships they go...

All in all, what I conclude from this and from my time in Rift is that truly dynamic events are hard to bring off without riling up a sizable portion of your player-base, and that's without even considering what events different players would recognize as "dynamic" in the first place. Trion made a lot of tweaks to the way they did theirs, with the result that, in my opinion at least, they bled virtually all of the dynamism out.

ArenaNet seem much more determined to match the addition of ongoing, universally available content ("There will be plenty of content available to enjoy that will remain permanently in the world as a result of the outcome of this event") with genuine Saint Crispin's Day moments. So far, at least. Going to be very interesting see how the policy plays out over time.

One thing's for sure - my much-anticipated first weekend of Storm Legion is now holed below the water-line!

The Carnival Moves On : GW2

Call that a dynamic event? It's cultural vandalism, I tell you! The empty plinth in the Grand Piazza stands in mute testimony to the lengths to which some people will go to get attention. And I'm not just talking about Mad King Thorn, either!

There's something missing...

The pumpkins have all been packed away, the bats have flown back to their caves. The candy corn high as an elephant's eye has popped (although once in a while you can still see one flicker into view in some ghostly glitch). All that's left is that empty plinth and a guy in an unconvincing home-made Mad King costume.

I'd be spitting nails if it wasn't for this from ANet Dev Josh Foreman:

"I worked way too hard on that thing to throw it away! That would make me cry. Haha… spent a lot of my free time on it actually. You know it has 4,000 frames of animation, and I had to hand track every single frame that a splash happened on every single fish for the audio guys to sync it up. Not that we will never permanently destroy anything. In fact… well, I can’t say more than that. But NOT the lion statue. It’s the symbol of LA. Like the Statue of Liberty is for New York or the Eiffel Tower is for Paris."

You're a lot shorter than I expected

Although later in the same thread, from "North American Community Team Lead" Regina Buenaobra:

 "The Lion’s Arch lion statue is gone for now. Mad King Thorn really did a number on it. As to whether it will return—anything is possible."

I'm all for meaningful change but not the Lion !!  Which, of course, is the problem. You can have change to things that don't really matter and no-one will be upset, but then no-one will care much either. Or you can make a real and lasting change that affects everyone and trust the thrill to carry you through the complaints. The Lion is a great example of how hard it is even to tell which is which.

There's been much discussion of late about whether MMOs can or should have change. How much? How often? How deep? How sudden? Azuriel and Syl  both have something to say about that and so do their commenters. Some people think removing a bit of street furniture barely qualifies as change at all, while others practically need counseling.

C'mon, lady! Get a grip!

When it comes to change there's concern both over how sudden and unexpected it is and whether it's a one-time "you had to be there" thing or a "no hurry, we'll be here all week" affair.

When Rift threw its very first major event the climax was a one-off that many players missed. It didn't go down well and Trion have made sure since then to keep their events inclusive, in keeping with the changes they made throughout the game in late beta and just after launch, when the inconvenience of planar armies wiping out quest hubs and invading troops killing players all along the pathways was deemed to outweigh the excitement and Telon became a blander, if safer place.

I think it says something about spoons

It's far too early yet to say which way ArenaNet will jump. With Halloween down they've moved surprisingly quickly to announce the next, non-holiday event Lost Shores. The iconic statue may have vanished but at least we have beached whales! And flyposting! And endless speculation between now and the 16th of November, a day on which both I and Mrs Bhagpuss will be at work.

Will we miss it all again, like we missed three-quarters of Halloween? Whether we do or don't, plenty will. Does that matter? For all I know we may be enjoying Storm Legion so much by then that we'll opt out anyway. In the end we can't do it all and it would be crazy to try. On balance I'd rather miss out on something amazing than never have anything amazing to miss out on.

As to whether something can truly be called "amazing" if it goes on happening indefinitely to order, well that tends to depend on what's so amazing about it to begin with. If it's a Mad King tearing down a giant statue, that can really be amazing only once. An incredible, intricate work of art, though, that has the power to be amazing always.

Put it back. Now.