GW2 Halloween Mount Rental Can F Itself

Once in a while I'll find myself wanting to write about something for no better reason than it's been on my mind or because I like it and want to talk about it. Which is fine if I have something to say about whatever it is, but not so fine if I sit down, look at the screen and realize I have no real clue what I'm doing.

When that happens, the sensible thing would be to put that topic to one side, at least for a while. Write about something else instead. I tend not to do that. 

I tend more towards this, what I appear to be doing right now, namely typing and hoping. Hoping something will begin to fall into place. Hoping I'll somehow spontaneously generate some sort of insight or inspiration, frame a thesis or an argument or at least come up with a wisecrack or two.

The source of my troubles today isn't a video game. I have a few posts I could throw together about those. Mostly about New World, no surprise to anyone, since I seem to be spending almost all my gaming time there right now. As I mentioned last time or the time before that, I'm not short of ideas for things to write about when it comes to Amazon's mmorpg/survival crossover hit (Currently basking in the warm glow of a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam.)

Even though it's my blog and I have no obligation to keep anyone entertained and amused other than myself, I do tend to get a little self-conscious if I find myself focusing exclusively on a single title day after day. God knows why. It's not like I haven't done it before - and often.

In recent years it's happened with WoW Classic, Valheim and to a lesser extent with many others. Bless Unleashed, anyone? And it's not as if, with New World, it wouldn't be justified. It's not every year we get a major AAA mmorpg from a Western publisher, let alone a pretty good one.

Still, I'd like to break things up a little. Get some light and shade going. Variety, spice, all that stuff.

And there are other things I could be posting about. Something mildly annoying happened to me in Guild Wars 2 today, for example, that I might have used as a peg for a minor rant although really it's so trivial it would barely merit a tweet on that Twitter account I don't use.

Oh, maybe I'll give it a couple of paragraphs, anyway. It's mount-related, which I'm sure won't shock any longtime readers. My antipathy to mounts in GW2 isn't any kind of news around here.

Mrs. Bhagpuss is doing all of the Halloween content on three accounts this year, as she usually does. That wouldn't directly affect me, only there's a mount race. Ever since mounts were added to the game there's always a mount race.

I actually like mount races, believe it or not. It's content specifically designed for mounts that doesn't de facto screw over the rest of the game. And while I'm not very good at them (I never win or place until late in the day, when most people who actually know what they're doing have gotten all the rewards they wanted and moved on to other things.) I'm not terrible, either. I can get round in the timers required to get the achievements, handily enough.

So could Mrs. Bhagpuss, if she didn't get motion sickness just from looking at a mount. I am not exaggerating for effect there. Today she actually got motion sick just from talking to me about them.

What always happens is that I do the mount races for her. As I said, I like mount races. It's a pleasure for me to run a few extra. Or it is anywhere other than in the Mad King's Labyrinth.

At this point, anyone who plays GW2 is probably imagining I'm going to complain about the endless stuns, snares, and knockbacks, the insane mob density and the extreme hazards of Steve and his frightnight friends jumping out in front of you at any second. Nope, that's all just par for the course, to mix a sporting metaphor.

Here's the problem: to do the race in the two minutes allowed to get the annual Halloween holiday achievement you need a mount. Obviously. It's a mount race. Duh! And to have a mount you need Path of Fire, which is fair enough in content released during and after that expansion but which might be considered unreasonable in content that was around before. 

ArenaNet think so. They'd really, really like for every GW2 player to buy PoF but they hate to leave money on the table and they don't want to look like big meanies so as soon as they started to introduce mount races to holiday events they also added the option for anyone to rent a temporary mount for a few silver.

That means we can do the full smorgasbord on all our accounts, should we so choose, not just the PoF ones. Only there are strings. Of course there are. If the rented mounts were as good as the real ones, what would that say about the game? (That GW2's a generous and open-hearted kind of game? Nah. That everyone who'd paid for the expansion had been ripped off, of course!)

The mount you get is always a raptor and with no masteries it waddles along like an eggbound duck. It's slow and awkward but it is fast enough, just, to get you round in time if you really go at it. Well, in all the other races it is.

In the Lab there are a couple of extra hurdles to jump. Not literally. That would actually be easier. The first is the mount rental vendor. It's not a permanent fixture. In thematic keeping with every other utility vendor on the map, someone has to pay the Mad King's Herald to get the mount guy to spawn. 

Hiring the vendor costs the outrageous price of one gold, which is a lot of money when you realize the vendor only hangs around for about ten minutes. Meta, isn't it? You literally have to rent the guy who rents you the mount. 

What's more, unlike every other holiday event, where you can use the rented mount over and over again even if you lose it, in the Lab you get one go and that's it. If your raptor gets clawed to death by griffons or torn apart by skeletons as he almost certainly will, he's gone for good.

Wait, it gets worse. When you pay the Herald, the vendor spawns at the foot of the central ramp, close to where the race begins and also near to the NPC who allows you to take a time trial when the race isn't up, a trial that also counts towards the achievement.

Sounds fine, doesn't it? Unfortunately "close " isn't the same as "close enough". You can't talk to either of the NPCs from the vendor. They're too far apart. 

Never mind! It wouldn't make any difference if you could. You have to register for the race or the time trial, whichever you want to do, but if you rent your raptor first, when you speak to the NPC the raptor despawns. You can't re-summon it so you have to go back to the rental guy for a refresh.

For the race proper that's not so bad. There's a couple of minutes wait before it begins so you have plenty of time to get set. The race, though, only happens once every fifteen minutes or so and you need to do it successfully, within the two minutes, three times for the achievement. If you did it perfectly you'd need to be there for 45 minutes and you'd have to pay three gold for the rental (well, someone would - if you're lucky it might not come out of your pocket every time.)

You'd be very lucky to succeed three times out of three on that clapped-out lizard. Chances are you'll need more goes than that. And that, too, would be fine if you could just pop the time trial and keep going over and over until you got the three Silver finishes it takes.

Except the time trial begins the moment you accept, at which point you do not have a mount because, even if you did, speaking to the time trial guy made it despawn. You have to leg it up the ramp, click on the vendor and accept the dialog option to make the mount spawn. That takes several seconds and you're still a second or two from the starting gate.

The timing on the rented mount is so tight those few seconds are more than enough to make you fail almost every time. I say "almost" because I know for a fact it is possible to get silver on the rented mount since I did it today. Once. With just under two seconds to spare. 

If anything, knowing it's possible makes it even more annoying. It means you can't just write it off as a total waste of time. It can be done so it's got to be done. It's just not going to be done with any pleasure or enjoyment or good grace, more like with a lot of cussing and in a temper.

It also means ANet would be perfectly within their rights to shrug like Mad King Thorn and walk away. Not everything has to be fun and anyway you should have bought the expansion if you wanted a mount. The race is easy enough with a real one.

Halloween in Tyria goes on for a very, very long time. Over a month. I have until 9th November to get that race done, successfully, five more times. It will happen. I don't like a challenge but I will accept one, once in a while. 

I think someone could organize the whole thing better, all the same. How about stopping the mount from despawning every time you speak to an NPC? Oh, wait, all mounts do that. Terrible design but I guss we're stuck with it. 

Okay, how about allowing the player to resummon the mount from a hot key instead of having to go back to the vendor? That shouldn't be beyond the abilities of someone to code in, surely?

Or maybe you already can and I just don't know how to do it. Maybe there's a keyboard shortcut. Y'know, I just bet there is. I probably should have looked into that before I started ranting.

I would have, too, if I'd known this was what I was going to write about today. Turned out to be more than a couple of paragraphs, too, didn't it? And I never even got around to mentioning that original topic, the thing I said I'd been wanting to write about but didn't know what I was going to say about it.

It was Kevin Can F Himself, the metafictional postmodernist sitdram starring Annie Murphy from Schitt's Creek currently showing on Amazon Prime, by the way, just in case you were wondering. I guess you got that?

It's a shame, because something did start to come to me as I was hammering out those opening paragraphs, just like I hoped it would. Something that would have tied in with yesterday's post, too.

Oh well. Too late now.

Pumpkin, Pumpkin

It's that time of year again. Pumpkins, candles, spooky stories, all that stuff. It's going to be a bit of a strange one out in the real world. Can't imagine too many people wanting to take their kids trick or treating in the middle of a pandemic, although then again...

Nothing to stop the celebrations going ahead as usual in virtuality, though. There's no need to socially distance in cyberspace although ironically most of our characters are probably wearing masks anyway. 

Next week sees the return of the indescribably dubious Mad King shenanigans in Guild Wars 2. Seriously, does anyone at ArenaNet ever actually listen to the argument between Mad King Thorn and The Bloody Prince? It was disturbing enough when I first heard it nearly a decade ago but the world has changed quite a bit since then. There are things that sounded "edgy" in 2012 that just sound completely off in 2020 and that routine is definitely one of them.

Then again, maybe my pop culture compass needs re-calibrating. I watched the first episode of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina last night. It felt like it would be seasonable and I thought it would make a nice wind-down from the harrowing six seasons of Bojack Horseman I just put myself through. I mean, it's Sabrina the Teenage Witch, right? The girl from the Archie comics? The one with the extraordinarily badly-animated cat?

 

Yeah... no. Not really. So, Sabrina's an actual satanist now. And the cat's a demon. And her wacky aunts drain the blood from human corpses for their satanic rituals before eating the leftover flesh for dinner. But, hey, Sabrina's gender politics are impeccable, so there's that. I will, of course, be watching the rest of the series. The first episode was pretty good, even if I did literally have to close my eyes for two whole scenes. A fluffy, relaxing romp, though? I don't think so.

Bad taste dialog notwithstanding, I'll most likely still end up running round and round the Mad King's maze with my Necromancer, firing off ground target AEs and hoovering up the loot. Some people do it all day for the entire event and make tens of thousands of gold or so they claim. It was always mindless but with the addition of the autoloot mastery it's now so mechanical it's hard to stay awake. I can usually manage about an hour before I'm literally nodding off at the keyboard. 

Other than that I probably won't bother with any of the other activities. They're always the same, near as makes no difference, and I've done all of them more than enough times already. 

Nights of the Dead has already begun over in EverQuest II. The options there are staggering. It's one of the big holidays of the year and SOE/Daybreak/Darkpaw add something new every time. In a decade and a half that really adds up.

The quality is high, too. There are several big set piece events - the Hedge Maze, the Haunted Mansion, Wake the Dead and so on - as well as a wealth of collections, achievements, quests and crafting activities. New this year is a series of Overseer quests given by a halfling on the Nektulos Forest docks and an upgraded version of the Headless Horseman public quest, now with new loot.

I did the PQ twice yesterday. It was popular. There were three instances of Nek Forest up whenever I logged in and people were calling the event as it started and sending out raid invites. It took about ten minutes to kill him each time and everyone was very good humored about it.

Drops were good, although I have to wonder what the point is right now, with the panda quests already giving out items for just about every slot that are better than anything else I've had all year and certainly better than the PQ drops I've seen so far.  

If the last few years are anything to go by, the panda quests will upgrade most anything a solo player's likely to be wearing, then a few weeks after that finishes we'll get the expansion and a box on the floor next to the first questgiver will upgrade the panda gear. Then the quest rewards from the signature questline will upgrade the stuff from the box and the drops from the third season of Overseer quests (not yet confirmed but you know there will be one) will upgrade everything from the Sig line and on we go with the dance.

It's how the game works. Nothing is permanent and most things barely last a couple of months. I like it. It gives me things to do along with a spurious sense of purpose and satisfaction but I can see how some people might find it wearing.  

I might do a few of the other Nights of the Dead events just for fun. The PQ requires someone to have the lost necklace from the Hedge Maze to get it started so there's an element of social responsibility there. And even as I fact-check for this post I see there are a couple of events I can't remember ever doing so maybe I'll give those a go, too.

I imagine just about every MMORPG will have some kind of Halloween-related event on the slate. Probably quite a few unmassive live service games, too. Like Christmas, it seems to be a holiday no-one can resist. I never really paid much attention to it at all before I started playing MMORPGs but it's firmly on my calendar now.

Candy Cornucopia : GW2

I was mildly annoyed when I found out that the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event was scheduled to start on the very day we flew to Barcelona for a week. After a day' spent dancing with the Mad King I'm beginning to think it was lucky timing.

Oh, I'd have liked to have seen the Mad King himself burst out of the fountain in Lion's Arch. That must have been spectacular. I just hope someone's got the blueprints to put that statue back together. One of my favorite places to hang out, that was.

The decorations are jolly good. Of course, Halloween decorations are all much of a muchness but these are mucher than most. The spooky lighting effects are efficiently atmospheric and the hanging bats that furl and unfurl their wings made me smile. Most of the work seems to have gone into Lion's Arch but there was a camp in Plains of Ashford that, I think, appears when certain events are completed and no doubt there are others. Even the Mists have been decorated, which struck me as beyond the call of duty.

As for the content, variable would be a diplomatic way of putting it. I spent an hour or so doing the first six stages of the Scavenger Hunt, which was moderately entertaining. It wouldn't have been much fun without the walkthrough  I had up, but then what scavenger hunt is? The Mad King appears to have been born that way, judging by the tales told by the many, many ghosts his increasingly psychotic childhood outbursts left behind.

It's true that one shouldn't do these things for the reward, but it has to be said that the reward when it came was paltry in the extreme. When I realized there were another six volumes to collect I decided I knew as much about the Rabid Royal as I cared to and left it at that.

The Lunatic Inquisition looked like a lot more fun. It wasn't. It was okay, if confusing. It's basically Sardines with added violence. Each thirteen-minute match seemed to comprise about five minutes of action at best, with the bulk of the time spent with almost everyone converted into Lunatics chasing round and round the map looking for the last Villager. Maybe there were just some good hiders on when I popped in.

Reaper's Rumble was better, in that it was a lot easier to follow and there were actual fights. Made me nostalgic for Rift's Warfronts or EQ2's Battlegrounds. Ah, Rift and EQ2. The former has Events down to an art and the latter has enough Halloween content to launch an entire F2P title. Maybe I'm spoiled after those, and this is GW2's first ever holiday event after all, but the comparisons don't favor the newcomer.

It's not that there isn't plenty going on. There are new, easy recipes that make food and potions (two things I never remember to use and which I really don't have the bag space to carry). There are fantastically demanding recipes that make skins for weapons, which you'd probably need to be as mad as the King to attempt, although you can get the same looks on a four-hour fade from Merchants for your Candy Corn.

Candy Corn is the currency du jour. You can mine it from nodes that look quite disturbing. Or you can just buy it in vast quantities from the Trading Post from people with more time and patience than you. Going rate as I write is 7c per corn. I bought 150 to finish my Monthly, where the mysterious ??? has now resolved itself to a frankly banal demand that we gorge ourselves silly on the sugary stuff.

Pumpkin Carving is another activity on offer. I do like the frenzied animation that goes along with it. Whether I'll get a hundred and fifty of the things chipped out in  two days I doubt. There are the doors that pop up inviting you to Trick or Treat and then there's a dungeon, which I haven't entered and jumping puzzles, which sound hellish. The little jumper right outside the bank in Lion's Arch nearly drove me demented so I'll not be trying the others. I did eventually manage to jump into the pot and get spat out as a spider. Once was enough.

Goodie bags drop passably frequently. So far all I've had out of mine is yet more corn and a smattering of food. Whether they can cough up anything worthwhile I'm not sure. Possibly there's a tiny chance one of the many new Holiday items from the Gem Store might fall out. That's where a lot of the supposedly interesting stuff is - costumes, pets, skins and the like. None of it actually interests me and ArenaNet have to make money, so good luck to them. I did take the free pair of devil horns, which look quite debonaire on an Asura.


That's my first impression. There's probably lots more going on that I have yet to discover. I'm glad it's all going to be over in a couple of days and I'm not at all sorry to have come late to this party. I have mixed feeling about holiday events in general and this one has a particularly enervating edge.

I just hope they put that fountain back the way it was.