Layers And Players

MassivelyOP's talking point for the day asks "Is ‘layering’ tech actually MMO community poison?" A little over-dramatic, maybe, but it's a worthwhile topic for discussion. Predictably, perhaps, much of the commentary revolves around "making friends" and whether instancing and layering makes that less likely to happen.

I have to wonder if focusing on whether or not people “make friends” with each other isn't kind of missing the point of what a community is. A community doesn’t rely on friendships, it relies on acquaintances. 

Think of your local community, whatever that happens to be. A school, a college, a workplace, a neighborhood. Anywhere people find themselves gathered together out of circumstance. In just about every scenario you can call to mind there's an expectation that some kind of community will result. Communities aren't an aberration, they're a norm.

Welcome them or shun them, communities are what we all know, and in any of those communities "friends" will make up, at most, just a small fraction of the whole. It's entirely possible to feel part of a community - and be accepted by others as part of it - without having any friends there at all.

Sam Kash, in the in-house intro that frames the MOP thread, offers an excellent example of how community is founded on experiences other than friendship. He talks about his time in Final Fantasy XI, when there was "the character who remained in the kneeling position by the shops... He wore a pumpkin head and was always there, like a fixture of the landscape". Sam goes on to describe the day that "fixture" got up off his knees and ran to the trading post: "It was like the whole map was involved, like a celebrity was moving amongst us".

It's exactly why layering and instancing works counter to the spirit and intent of any virtual world. For community to form there doesn't need to be friendship but there does have to be familiarity. You have to be able to recognize the same individuals over time.

In a real-life community or neighborhood there will be any number of them, people you recognize only by sight, about whom you know only a very little. Their presence seperates the place where you live from the places where you don’t. It's the difference between feeling like a stranger and feeling like a local. At its best it brings a sense of belonging but at the very least you know where you are.

You don’t need to talk to these people, although it might be nice if you did. You certainly don't need to befriend them. All you have to be able to do is retain a vague sense of familiarity. You have to know them but you don't have to know them.

When the mmorpg genre was young, no-one had to engineer any of this. The technology to sift players into discrete copies of the same zones didn't exist. Would-be virtual worlds cleaved much more closely to the conventions of the physical. Zones had maximum capacities in just the same way sports stadia or cinemas do.

 

Back then, if too many people wanted to be in the same place at the same time there would be overcrowding. If things got really bad some players - paying customers - might have to wait outside until others left. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't popular with either the players or the companies and since the companies were the ones paying people to manage the situation and deal with the complaints they were more than happy to employ technological solutions to prevent it happening.

By the time those solutions became available the direction of travel for the genre had already begun to drift. The whole concept of "virtual worlds" was going out of fashion. Mmorpgs, having begun as something new and strange, were being re-integrated into the mainstream as just another type of video game. 

The advantages were clear but for a few, at least, so were the disadvantages. Not every company was thinking about the effect the new technology might have on community but some were aware of the risks they were taking with the glue that held their games together.

 

When Guild Wars 2 implemented their megaserver architecture they used some fairly sophisticated parsing to try to make sure people got sorted into new maps alongside roughly the same subset of other people every time. As you can see from the conversation (okay, monologue) I recorded in screenshots when the change came it wasn't an immediate success but ANet iterated on it for a while and in the end it worked out okay.

These days I never think about it but by and large I do tend see the same names pretty regularly even when there might be several instances of the same map. Long after the megaserver took effect I would run into the people I'd added in my test, particularly on the World Boss train, something that regularly kicks off secondary maps. I still see a few of them even now, on occasion. It's not as obvious as the glory days of Lion's Arch, when I'd both see and hear the same people chatting in the same place day after day but it's something, at least.

In GW2’s World vs World, however, where the old single server architecture still applies and there’s no instancing at all, I see the same people all the time. (Until the bi-monthly relink resets the whole thing but that’s a different issue altogether…). I’m still playing alongside some of the same people who were in the Mists with me six, seven, eight years ago. I don’t chat with them, or not often, but I “know” them, right down to how reliable their call-outs are likely to be, whether I can expect any back-up if I call for help and what I can expect to hear in chat when one of the team's "characters" logs in.

 

Phasing, instancing and layering all work very efficiently. If all you want from your mmorpg experience is a single-player or co-op game that's always available and which gets a steady stream of new content, it's a done deal. And that's exactly what many, quite possibly most, modern mmorpg players do want.

If you still yearn for that sense of stepping out into a living, breathing, persistent virtual world, though, finding yourself being sliced and sorted and separated in ways you can't control can be disorienting, disheartening and destructive. It risks turning the entire experience into a succession of unrelated episodes instead of the long-running soap opera it ought to be.

That's the problem right there. It's nothing to do with making friends. Layers don't stop you talking to anyone you meet and adding the ones you like to your friends list. Instancing doesn't prevent you sending people whispers. Nothing about the siloing of content mitigates against discussing strategy in guild chat let alone meeting up with online friends at conventions, assuming such things ever come back.

Layering doesn't even remove all possibility of chance encounters. You still see other people all around you. You might even see some of them more than once. 

What layering does strip away is context. You don't arrive at a world boss knowing the show-off who always does a count-down in /say will be there. You don't log in after an update expecting to recognize the names of half the people logging in alongside you. These things might happen but they probably won't. Everything feels much more random than it was. And the human mind does not enjoy randomness half so much as it enjoys patterns.

Layering doesn't harm the gameplay, though, far from it. The opposite in fact. The reason the technology was implemented in the first place was to make playing the game easier for everyone. If all you want is to get to the designated fighting area as quickly and efficiently as possible, kill your requisite number of rats and get out, then layering and instancing were made specifically with you in mind. 

 

If you want to feel part of something that feels a little more, somehow, than just a video game, then the picture's a lot less clear. You haven't lost everything, not even nearly, but you've lost a little. And when it comes to community, every little counts. 

I'll go back to that soap opera analogy. Soap operas last for years, decades even. Episodic dramas come and then they go. Mmorpgs need to emulate soaps if they want to survive because the alternative is simply too hard. No-one has the resources to provide a never-ending stream of content at the pace players eat it up but communities create content, continually, for free.

Just think of your school, your office, your neighborhood. Most of the people there aren't your friends but they are what you and your friends talk about. Other people are content but you have to be interested in what they do to care to consume it. You aren't going to hold that interest for long if you only ever see someone once and never again. 

None of which is to say there should be no technological solutions to the problems of lack of access and overcrowding. There should. Those are real problems. They deserve sensitive, well-designed solutions not quick fixes.

It'll Be Like Before You Were Gone

On Friday, ArenaNet announced a "Welcome Back" month for Guild Wars 2. More than a month, in fact; five weeks, starting Monday March 25.

It was a very low-key announcement, nothing more than a forum post. Surprise was expressed. Shouldn't there be some kind of awareness campaign? Rubi Bayer, who appears to have drawn the short straw after Gail Gray's unceremonious dumping, clarified:

"There will be livestreams, guides, and some more surprises that I won't spoil now, but there will be a full outline and schedule on our site Monday morning. Today's post is just a heads-up on various channels to get the word out a little bit in advance, so those who are interested but don't remember their login info can work with our CS team to get that taken care of. It's so frustrating when you want to participate in something that has already started and can't remember your password, so we thought a head start for those people would be less stressful."

Does that make sense? Are people who can't remember the password for a game they no longer play likely to be on the forums in the first place? Or following Twitter or Facebook or whatever those "various channels" might be?

Maybe they sent out emails as well. I get a lot of emails from MMORPGs I haven't logged into for years, telling me about their promotions and events. Of course, since I tend to use unique adresses for registering games, adresses I never visit and don't link to my main account, I only see those offers on the very rare occasions I log back in to check something. Usually years too late.

Still, it's a well-established route for marketing departments. A back channel to the past. As Holly Windstalker Longdale openly acknowledged in that recent PC Gamer interview, for an aging MMORPG, luring former players back into the fold is a higher priority than attracting people who've never played before.

It really does make sense. After all, as a six-year old game, let alone one twice or even three times that age, you'd have to assume that just about anyone who was ever going to give you a run would have gotten around to it by now.

No need to feel blue. We're still here. Waiting.

The first few years post-launch offer a handful of well-known opportunities for new account acquisition. You can bring your game to a different platform - console conversions must be expensive to produce but they do open a door to an entirely fresh market. Less spectacular but worth a shot is a Steam launch. Steam isn't really a famous breeding ground for MMOs but it's not nothing.

If you were canny enough to start off with some kind of entry barrier, a box or digital download with an up-front fee, say, or maybe even an actual, honest-to-god subscription, always assuming that decision didn't sink your entire operation, there's a major PR opportunity available when you announce your game is going Free to Play. That's a one-time deal, though, and it can smack of desperation.

Last and very definitely not least, you can run some kind of permanent free trial, allowing the curious and uncommitted to try before they buy. That became pretty much industry standard log ago.

Whatever you do, even if you eventually try all the options, in the end you run up against the same buffer: your game is old and getting older. Potential customers have either heard of it and already rejected it or they are just now discovering it only to find out it's been running for years and everyone playing is way, way ahead.

Your elderly MMORPG already starts with the major disadvantage that, from the perspective of a new player, the graphics look sub-par. Possibly stone age. For those who can get past that, the staggering amount of legacy content, all of which comes before you even get near to the part of the game everyone else is playing, is more than enough to bring the shutters down.

Did I mention we have sitting in chairs now? Tempted?

In recent years companies have tried all kinds of bootstrapping to get new players over the hump  - super-fast leveling, instant max-level characters, flat-leveling the entire gameworld. They all come with issues of their own. You can accelerate or remove the leveling process but there's no way to instantly install all the necessary knowledge of systems and mechanics your end-game players take for granted. It's not much more fun floundering at the top than at the bottom.

That's why people who used to play but don't any more are seen as a more realistic commercial prospect. There's the currently-hot nostalgia ticket to sell them for starters. Re-working your game so it looks a lot more like the one returning players remember seems to be well worth the expense, if you get it right.

Your game probably needs to have been around for quite a while before you play that card. The current Live game needs to have diverged so far from the original conception that bitter veterans hate it and all it stands for. If you alienate them just enough you can bring them back on board as advocates when you appear to bow to their conviction that things really were better back in their day.

Rift probably failed mainly on that count. Once the new server reached the first expansion, Storm Legion, there just wasn't enough difference between Prime and Live. The game never had enough periodic content to run a true Progression server. It might have done better with a straight Classic server, maybe even one with an expiry date, which would wipe and re-start every so often, allowing transfers to Live first, of course.

Starting over clean can be a big draw. Sometimes a Fresh Start server is all that's needed to re-kindle interest. You don't even have to play the nostalgia card with a retro-revamp. A level playing field is enough. Maybe a few tweaks, perks and inducements along the way. A slight variant ruleset. Some titles. A leaderboard. The big risk there is fracking your existing playerbase into smaller shards but with luck you'll give everyone a jolt of excitement and when it all settles down you'll have a few new customers on the back of that buzz.

There's no need to worry. You won't feel silly. We all feel silly.

Brand-new servers have one immense advantage when it comes to persuading former players to return. Everyone starts in the same place. It's almost the same as a new game except for one thing: when confused and lost players plaintively ask questions in general chat, instead of crickets chirping or, worse, sarcastic trolls suggesting a swift return to WoW, they'll get help and even encouragement.

I'm seeing this every day on EverQuest II's Kaladim server. The population is a good mix of current, active players on vacation from Live, lapsed members of the flock re-discovering their religion and a sprinkling of    "I wish I''d tried this game years ago". Questions don't just get answered, they spark amiable discussions and often lead to reminiscence and general bonhomie.

It's a well-trodden path by now. Any marketing department worth its red suspenders should be able to slot in several pre-fabricated options, tested and found successful in other games. At worst it's a burst of publicity for cheap. At best it's a shot in the arm for sales and retention.

For a few MMORPGs, though, there's a roadblock standing in the way of those easy wins. Classic, Progression, New Start: all those options come with a suffix. Server. What if your game evolved to the new normal of a few years back and did away with the entire concept of separate shards?

When you threw that bathwater out the possibility of farming the nostalgia market went down the drain with it. So did any chance of starting over on a clean page. You put all your eggs in one megabasket and your chickens hatched and came home to roost.

There are things you can get on top of that you never got on top of before. This isn't one of them but trust me.

All MMORPG hobbyists know what a hurdle re-starting on a Live server presents. All the new systems you don't understand. All your old assumptions that don't follow any more. The drops and rewards that mean nothing to you. The jargon in chat you can't unpick. All that stuff in your bags and banks you don't know whether to destroy or broker or sell or salvage. The understanding that you know less than everyone around you and they probably don't care, just that you stay out of their way.

If you run a campaign to get former players to log in again but all you can offer them when they do is a world that looks familiar but feels alien, what are the chances they'll hang around long enough to acclimatize?

The good news from ANet's perspective is that GW2 hasn't really changed all that much. You can still fight centaurs and Sons of Svanir until the dolyaks come home. You can do the same events on the same maps that you did in 2012. You can join the World Boss train and knock over a giant loot pinata every fifteen minutes with thirty new best friends you'll never have to talk to.

The races haven't changed, the Personal Story is the same and if you haven't bought either of the expansions there aren't even any new classes and hardly any new maps. Other than a bunch of giant gerbils and lizards running everywhere with player characters clinging to their backs it all looks - and plays - pretty much the same.

If you like it enough to pay some money and buy the expansions or the Living Story packs, well you'll be on exactly the same terms as the rest of us were two or three or four years ago. All the maps are still active for the group stuff  when you need it, although most of it was single-player content anyway and, while Anet's claim that they have the best community in MMOs may be somewhat overblown, by and large it is pretty welcoming. If you have questions you'll get answers, provided you ask nicely.

When you get right down to it, though, nothing much has changed.

So what's the point of this five week long "Welcome Back" event? Better than not having one, I suppose. And it co-incides with the annual rerun of the ever-popular Super Adventure Box, something I'm sure is no co-incidence. There will be plenty of drop-ins for that so why not see if some of them can be persuaded to hang around?

I'd be very surprised to see this result in any significant, lasting uptick in activity, all the same. GW2 has just about the lowest barrier to re-entry of any MMORPG I've ever played. People drop in and out literally all the time. I see names every day that I haven't seen for years. My friends list flickers and sparkles like witchfire and always has.

I wonder how many how many genuine ex-GW2 players there can be, anyway? People who really did stop playing a long time ago and never came back. And of that demographic, how many ever would? It can't be that they wanted to but it was too expensive or too awkward, surely? It's free and simple and always has been. It's the Hotel California of MMOs.

If anyone did leave for good, most likely it was because they never enjoyed the game much anyway or didn't like what it turned into once the short trip to the cap was done. Has any of that changed? Not really. Endless fractals. Dead dungeons. Gutted WvW. Grind, without end, for everything, everywhere, always.

Same as it ever was.

Raiding, I guess, but if you'd left because no raids wouldn't you have come back when raids? And if you left because raids, well, we still have them. Worse luck. No, it all seems much the same to me. Except I'd take a Launch State Classic server in a heartbeat so I guess I may have been boiled in my tank.

Tomorrow we'll find out if ANet have anything more up their sleeves to entice former players to give the game another shot. There's some speculation about things like rentable gliders or mounts in Core Tyria open world to tempt returners into ponying up for the expansions but they'd still have to pay for the real thing. Maybe a sale on Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire? Or the two as a bundle?

If there's no financial or in-game incentive it's hard to see the value of a promotional push that comes down to just some streamers saying how much fun the old game can be. You probably know that if you ever played. Or you disagree, in which case I don't see much to convince you otherwise.

And even if a promotion succeeds in getting players invested it's hard to keep them feeling the love. The huge boost in numbers World vs World saw as a result of the recent, super-hyped introduction of the Warclaw mount (plus a double WvW XP week) has already dissipated, leaving nothing more behind than bad feeling and disgruntlement to show it ever happened.

Still, better to try than not try, I guess. We'll find out tomorrow if there's anything to get excited about. I'm not holding my breath.

Starting Over

Telwyn, inspired by Chestnut, posted about starting over in MMOs, saying "I’m an altaholic but usually stick to one server in a given MMO". That made me think about just how much my own habits have changed over the years. Not, I suspect, always for the better, either.

When I started out in EverQuest one of the very first things I had to learn was what a server was and why I should care. Before the game would allow itself to be played it wanted me to pick a name from a very bizarre list.

Almost everything looked as like a scattering of random letters from a Scrabble bag - Xev, Xegony, Bertoxxolous... Maybe not so random, come to think of it. Someone was clearly fond of the letter "X". Maybe they were working on a high score...

There was a smattering of semi-coherent options - The Rathe, The Nameless - but even those seemed alienating. What was a "Rathe" anyway and why couldn't anyone come up with a name for "The Nameless"? In the end I went for one I thought I might be able to remember - Prexus. Another "X" now I come to think about it.

It soon transpired that I might as well just have flipped a coin because I didn't last very long at all on Prexus. I tried Brell Serillis and Test before two new servers, Luclin and Lanys T'Vyl, popped up on the same day as SOE attempted to accommodate EQ's ever-increasing population, something that would be repeated many more times over the next four or five years until the arrival of WoW shattered the paradigm, along with Smed's hopes and dreams of never-ending fortune and fame. Or not.

During that now almost unimaginable period of continual expansion I developed the habit of making new characters on every fresh server as it opened. On their opening days and mostly for a few weeks more I played on The Seventh Hammer, Antonius Bayle, Stromm, Maelin Starpyre, Tholuxe Paells, Mordern Rasp, Morrell Thule, Sullon Zek and probably a few more I've forgotten.

All of which meant that I took "starting over" as the norm for MMOs. How was I to know that it wasn't meant to be that way? Let's not forget that those were also the days when "twinking" was almost as dirty as it sounds, when people genuinely agonized over whether passing a Shiny Brass Shield from an old character to a new one meant they'd lost their moral compass.

When Mrs Bhagpuss and I moved, fairly briefly, to Dark Age of Camelot, an MMO with a tri-partite structure that forbade anyone to play characters of different Realms on the same server, what was the first thing we did? Made characters on three different servers so we could play them all, of course.

As the years rolled by and with them more and more MMOs, the pattern repeated itself over and over again. If a game chose to segment itself by race or alignment or region then I'd do my utmost to make sure I rolled and re-rolled until I'd seen it all. Well, all the starting areas, at least.

For the most part that meant more than just playing through the same levels a few more times with a different backdrop. It meant starting completely from scratch, without hand-me-downs or pre-acquired skills or a bank account groaning with gold.

The one thing that could always be ported was knowledge. Even with the best role-playing intentions it's hardly feasible to unlearn your understanding of how the UI works or where one zone lies in relation to another. Even so, in those days before Free to Play gave us all more worlds to play with than we could ever find time to explore, Starting Over allowed anyone to experience something of that New Game rush at will and at no extra cost.

Trends changed. Convenience took over. Exclusivity began to be seen as an impediment instead of a selling point. While many MMOs continued to pay lip services to RPG tropes like alignment and race it became commercially expedient to separate lore from practice.

Good guys and bad guys joined the same guilds, battled the same enemies, used the same banks. Player characters from races who'd been at war for millennia cheerfully traded magic items with each other while characters owned by the same account used shared facilities that meant they could help each other out even though, since they could never be online at the same time, they could never meet.

By the time we got to Guild Wars 2 the unit of participation had become The Account. Well, mostly. At the beginning there was still an inelegant melange of Character and Account Based play, something that persists to some degree even today in aspects such as Map Completion or Personal Story.

For the most part, though, every character is part of a team, whether they choose to be or not. All the myriad currencies go into a single wallet no matter who earned them and the achievements of one are the achievements of all.

There are no servers, or "Worlds", any more, other than for the competitive game mode of World vs World, which is in terminal decline, most likely to be replaced one day by a less archaic format. As far as PvE is concerned, we're all one big, happy family. Megaserver technology sees to that, as it or something much like it does in most MMOs these days.

Incremental change is insidious. The world alters around us and we barely notice. As I think about it now, though, I would hesitate to say it's all been change for the better.

Like Telwyn, if I step off the treadmill and begin afresh I find myself missing all the benefits that having established, integrated teams of characters brings. It makes it a lot harder to stick at it, when I begin in a new game or even on a new character. That feeling almost everyone must have, when they can't keep from noticing how much time they're spending doing things their other characters, whether in the same game or another, could do so much faster and more easily, it wears at my resolve.

And yet, when I start over, almost every time, I feel light, released, free. Everything that was old is new again. Life is simple on the up. All those dopamine hits the MMO leveling process was designed to provide come raining down just like they used to and it feels good.

That's the way I once played most of the time. Even when I had two level 60s, then two level 65s, when 60 then 65 was the cap, when my friends list bristled with names willing to go dungeoning at the drop of a tell, I spent time playing on other servers, among strangers, unknown and at the bottom of the curve.

I really don't do enough of that any more. Every time I do, mostly in unfamiliar games I'm trying on for size or on special purpose servers in MMOs I know, I find myself drawn in, pulled under, breaking the surface tension of the best-in-slot, meta, fractional upgrade path, sinking into the deep comfort that we call immersion.

You can forget what these games are for, sometimes. You float so long at the top of the tide you misremember all that lies beneath, the vast undertow, the waters that are never still. There's a lot more to MMOs than hitting cap and settling for the end game. I used to know that but I forgot, somehow.

It's never too late to start over. Let's go round again.

Traits And Megaservers Reconsidered : GW2

What with The Tourney, Boss Blitz and Bazaar of the Four Winds, the project to find out what leveling up feels like now we have Megaservers and a new trait system fell somewhat into abeyance these last couple of weeks. Before that, my Charr Guardian cruised through Ascalon in short order, completing Plains of Ashford, Diessa Plateau, Filed of Ruin and Blazeridge Steppes before finally topping out in the upper fifties while finishing one of my favorite maps, Iron Marches.

All of that wouldn't have given nearly enough experience so there were some side trips to The Shiverpeaks, where she completed Wayfarer Foothills, Snowden Peaks and Lornar's Pass. More experience trickled in from a few forays into the Borderlands and the odd jolly to visit a World Boss here and there, now and then. Currently she's level 66 and trudging through Fireheart Rise, which, while it has grown on me a lot over the years, still wouldn't make any list I might compile of Places In Tyria You Must See Before You Die.

The whole project has been very instructive. It certainly hasn't turned out as I imagined it might, let alone how I feared. It's not really possible for an experienced player of an MMO to put himself, emotionally, psychologically or pragmatically, in the position of someone who just installed the game for the first time that day but even taking that into account it seems that the hefty changes brought by The Feature Pack have made leveling in GW2 no harder, slower or more tedious than it ever was.

On my travels I have once or twice, no more than that, heard people express the opinion that they were feeling the lack of Traits at lower levels. It's certainly not a topic of conversation that comes up often among the endless rehashing of builds and torrent of "how do I...?" questions that buzz around the ever-busy open chat channels of the Megaserver Maps. At no point so far have I felt either underpowered or restricted in options because of the paucity of trait points. Indeed, it was only as I was writing this and popped into the game to check how many traits my Guardian had that I realized I haven't even spent the last two she received.

Part of the reasoning for doling out Traits so slowly was supposedly to prevent new players from becoming confused and overwhelmed by choice. Even as someone who has never considered Choice to be a Universal Good I was skeptical about that argument. I very much doubt there would have been many players under the original system who threw up their hands in despair when faced with half a dozen options in half a dozen trait lines. That sort of thing tends to go with the territory when you play any kind of RPG, doesn't it?

Just because the old system probably wasn't broken doesn't mean it couldn't be improved, though, and somewhat to my surprise I think the new version is better, at least in some ways. It certainly makes me think much more carefully about which trait to choose and pay much more attention to what they all do than I used to, that's for sure. When you have to decide whether to spend money or do a specific task to open each individual trait it definitely focuses the mind and I've found the experience a lot more entertaining than I expected, in no way the frustrating time or money sink that people (including me) had speculated it might be.

There may be "nice grawl" but there's no such thing as "nice Flame Legion"

It's not all rainbows and roses, though. There are definitely ways it could be and needs to be tightened up. The main drawback remains the rate that traits are unlocked during normal gameplay. It barely happens at all. ANet seem to be aware of this. A recent patch made a good few changes to the detail, reducing over-reliance on Map Completion as a mechanic and increasing the emphasis on killing specific monsters or completing specific events.

It's a start but it doesn't go nearly far enough. After 66 levels, done almost entirely by completing level-appropriate content in the open world, my Guardian has unlocked precisely six traits out of a possible sixty-five (and she bought one of those at the Trainer). I don't think that a system that results in a character having around 90% of her traits still locked when she hits max level can be considered well-tuned.

This is the one I bought. Essential.

The other goal of the exercise was to see how the world felt under the jackboot of the Megaserver. There was a lot of strong feeling about this change when it happened and I was among those who felt strongly. Like most changes it turned out to be less of everything than expected - less of a boon for those that welcomed it and less of a curse for those that dreaded it.

Maps are consistently busier as was intended but maps that don't have a specific, popular mega-event are only busier by comparison to the wastelands they used to be. You certainly won't be trampled by the horde in Iron Marches or Fireheart Rise. Field of Ruin, remarkably, felt even quieter than I remembered it. My concern that the ambiance of the deep wilderness would be lost seems unfounded.

Whatever algorithm they're using to match players with friends/guilds/worlds has arguably improved slightly but my feeling is that there's still some inconsistency baked in that no one quite understands. There was quite an argument in Map chat over it yesterday with some people claiming it worked well for them while others expressed what has been my own experience, that it's at best hit or miss. I generally still have to right-click Mrs Bhagpuss's portrait to get to the same Megaserver Map about fifty percent of the time even when we are grouped. Given that the algorithm isn't managing reliably or consistently to place us together even though we are in the same Guild, on each other's Friends lists, share the same Home World and Language Group and are in the same frickin' Party...well it's not impressing me much.

The Great Jungle Wurm is under there somewhere. And so's my Guardian.

The effect on community has been interesting. I do still see a good few familiar Yak's Bend names around outside WvW and it has an interesting emotional resonance, rather like spotting someone you know in the crowd at a gig. I wonder how much that relies on me having known those names already from the pre-Megaserver days. Would a new player starting now ever even see anyone, outside their guild or WvW, often enough to build up that "know him by sight" kind of relationship? I suspect they might because there are now players from other servers that I vaguely recognize because they turn up at World Bosses at the same times I do.

Unlike the Trait revamp, about which very little now seems to be said, you can still hear people complaining about the Megaserver every day. There's often someone bemoaning its very existence in map chat, cursing its foibles and flaws or wishing for the return of at least one non-Megaserver Map (the consensus would probably be for Lion's Arch). Voices also speak strongly in defense, praising both the convenience and the liveliness it brings to events big and small. I would have expected people to have gotten used to it by now but it seems that it'll take a while longer before we forget how things used to be when we were all off in our own little worlds.

Overall I'd give the Trait Revamp 7/10 and Megaservers 5/10. Neither is as bad an idea as it first might have appeared but both could do with another pass or several with that famous ArenaNet polishing cloth.

Megaserver - The Verdict : GW2

An interesting thing happened on Yak's Bend yesterday. The King Over The Water came back. Or maybe it was Arthur, returning at our time of greatest need (except that was last week, so if so he's late...).

Yak's Bend did far better in WvW's Season One than most people expected, even most people on Yak's Bend. It was a team effort, of course, but much of the credit went to a handful of commanders, one of whom, already popular and well-known, pretty much wrote his own legend during those weeks. He may not have been Space Famous but he was as World Famous as you can be on a GW2 World.

After the party came the months-long hangover. A lot of people drifted away. A couple of big guilds upped camp and moved worlds. Our superstar commander hung around for a while then just vanished. It seemed no-one knew where he'd gone or if he'd be back, not even his guild.

Gone he was but very much not forgotten. As Season Two drew nearer there was much speculation. Surely he'd return? Every day in WvW people would be asking about him. I asked about him. No-one knew anything. The Tourney began and there was no sign of him. Weeks passed. We won. We lost. Other commanders stepped up. The war machine rolled on. Still, now and again, his name would be invoked.

Then, with no fanfare or warning, yesterday there he was. I got home from work and I'd hardly got my coat off before Mrs Bhagpuss said "Guess who's back!". He was my second guess, after our missing guildmate. Apparently word had spread so fast and wide that people were logging into GW2 from work just to say "welcome back". When I got on and went to WvW his name was all over map and team.

He wasn't online right then but even without him other commanders were leading while acknowledging tactics they were using as ones they'd borrowed from him. When he did appear later in the evening, while we were cataing Northern Shiverpeaks' inner garrison, I felt sufficiently moved to welcome him back personally even though he has no idea who I am.

In GW2, since the coming of the Megaserver, this is something that could only happen in WvW. Why? Because under the Megaserver the rest of Tyria has become the place where not only does no-one know your name, no-one knows anybody's name.

Ravious gave his impressions of the megaserver earlier this week. Broadly he seems in favor although his wife very much is not. Jeromai offers a much more critical view and it's his analysis with which I find myself in sympathy. I have tried to be open-minded and positive about this huge change and there are some good things that can be said about it, but the more I see, the less I find to like.

As I've been playing this week I've been making a list of Megaserver pros and cons:

Pro

• Cities bustle and buzz the way cities should

• I've seen more roleplaying in cities in a week than in the previous year and a half

• More events run in general, infrequently-seen events run more often and more group events can be completed 

• Very unpopular maps with no desirable large events now feel moderately well-attended

Con

• Load times for most maps are much longer. For busy maps they measure in minutes not seconds.

• Map chat has degenerated appallingly. Maybe we were lucky on Yak's Bend but open channel conversation used to be mostly polite, intelligent and respectful. Now it's an earsore that needs to be switched off after a few seconds in most maps.

• Wilderness areas feel like crowded city parks.The attractive xp bonuses for hunting and exploring in out-of-the-way places has become elusive in the extreme.

• All major events with desirable rewards are massively over-attended. Any previously required tactics or gameplay no longer exist. Every "fight" is an 80-strong zerg and lasts seconds. Scaling cannot compete. The only factor slowing these events down is massive lag. I was getting 3FPS at Jormag last night, for example. Mrs Bhagpuss, whose computer has begun to complain if there are more than 50 other players on screen, can't attend some of the big events any more without suffering screen freezes. 

• Genuine lower levels and even some downleveled 80s struggle to get credit for most stages of a large event because they either can't do enough damage or the stages finish so fast.

•  According to most reports, although I haven't attended one to see for myself, the more complex events like Tequatl and Three Headed Wurm, always hard, are now barely possible at all.

•  Community  as a concept and communities as entities have been destroyed. Jeromai's post linked above covers this extremely well. The overall effect has been as if the earliest version of WoW's Dungeon Finder had been applied to an entire MMO. Everyone is a stranger, all sense of responsibility or fear of consequence has been removed.

So, a lot more Cons than Pros. Even so, some of the positives are worthwhile and the worst of the negatives could be mitigated if most of what ArenaNet had claimed about how the Megaserver works had turned out to be true. It didn't.


"The megaserver system is a weighted load balancer for players. It aggregates data about you, like your party, guild, language, home world, and the map copy where people you like to play with can be found. Using this data, it ranks all possible versions of a given map by attributing a score to each. You’re placed in the map with the highest score, which is the one with which you have the most affinity." Source

That's the high-falutin' claim and it's nonsense. Either it's just PR guff or whatever algorithms they're using simply don't work. In my experience so far, many hours on many maps at many different times of day, not only does the system not place me with people I recognize from my home world, it can't even place me in the same map as someone I'm grouped with if we cross from one map to another. It just doesn't work.

I question whether there really is a "Megaserver" at all in any meaningful sense. This seems to me more like a clever smoke-and-mirrors rebranding of the existing Overflow technology. We're all just being pushed onto overflow servers far more frequently than before and the experience is just what you'd expect.



Using "Megaserver" to describe this effect is highly misleading. It's a term that brings to mind something like the single shard universe of EVE Online. I'm personally a big advocate of individual servers for MMOs but if we are moving to a future where all players must share a single common game-space then it has to be done the way EVE does it, with meaningful repercussions and consequences and with everyone genuinely in the same space. It has to be done in such a way that someone like the Commander I began this post by talking about would become more Space Famous as a result, not more anonymous. 

The upshot is that, post-megaserver, GW2 is a chaotic mess.

If you're pottering around on your own leveling up it's arguably better than it was, although I'm doing exactly that and my argument would be that even then it's at best a neutral change. Most events were always soloable and most events are more fun from a narrative and role-playing perspective when soloed. Other people around very definitely make them easier but they don't often make them more entertaining. 

If you love to run in a huge zerg, waypointing from event to event to autoattack something you can't clearly see, at single-figure fps rates, for thirty seconds before clicking "Loot All" and moving on to rinse and repeat, all the while chortling at sexual innuendo and scatological puns then this is probably the best update GW2 has ever had.

If you're anyone other than a leveller who hates to solo or a dedicated zerger with an adolescent sense of humor, however, there's not much good to say about any of it. My only hope is that the old ANet iterative process (if they still have that going on) might eventually come to shape the "Megaserver" into something resembling what we were promised. Some hope.

This Is No Time To Stop And Smell The Flowers : GW2

Ascalon is my favorite region of Tyria. Plains of Ashford and Diessa Plateau were the maps where I began my long love-affair with GW2 all the way back in beta and their power to charm hasn't faded though the crowds that used to fill them have. Over the long drift down from launch I've become used to roaming the burnished fields, brittle and golden in the eternal Ascalonian summer's end, alone.

Well, those days are over. The Megaserver's here and with it the crowds are back. Diessa even has some kind of Champ Train running - Nageling Giant, Spider, Seperatist Agitator, Wurm. I'm learning the names if not the rotation. The reports of the Death of the Champ Train turned out to be greatly exaggerated, by the way. Rumor has it most zones have one now.

There was a line for the Breached Wall vista, one of the hardest vistas in the game. I had to stop twice and wait for some Norns to play through because there wasn't room to make a couple of the more difficult jumps. The hard skill point at the end of the underwater tunnel at the West of Blackblade Lake wasn't very hard at all with a constant flow of people making sure the Veteran mage who guards it rarely got to cast his devastating AEs.

Vet's dead, baby. Vet's dead.

It's not quite like it was at launch. MMOs only ever have that extreme, hysterical pitch when everyone levels together in the first few frenzied weeks or in the bubble that forms after the release of specific level-based content like a new race or an expansion with a raised level cap. Instead it's more the steady hum of like-minded players all choosing to be in a particular place for specific reasons of their own.

A lot of people are clearly bent on map completion. Map chat rings with questions about specific PoIs and vistas and how to get to them. There are also a heartening number of genuine new players, asking typical new-player questions like "does anyone need a 5-slot bag?" (answer: no, no-one in the entire world, not even if it is purple") and "what's Meatoberfest"? (answer: it's a Charr thing. You wouldn't understand. Maybe if you're a Norn...)

Warm beer, burnt meat, explosives - I think I was at that party in 1982

Against my normal run of play I, too, was Doing Map Completion. Partly because I want to try and gauge how the new changes play with what I take to be the normative new-player playstyle, which would be to finish a map before moving to the next, and partly because I might as well get in practice because Map Completion is one of the prime requirements for obtaining Traits through gameplay.

I have two things to say about Map Completion:

• The level ranges given on the maps in no way reflect the level required to complete them

•  Not only is Map Completion not exploring, it is the very antithesis of exploring

GW2 was never designed to allow a player to level steadily and sequentially through adjacent, level-appropriate maps. This was a major issue for many players at launch but players have learned or the culture has changed and you rarely hear complaints about it any more. Far from it. People seem much happier to level at the fastest conceivable pace by any means that comes to hand (crafting, Champ trains, Living Story, WvW) then come back and finish off the bits they missed (aka nearly everything) at a comfortable Level 80 with all the mis-scaled downlevel advantage that brings.

Who are you calling chicken?

At launch I was the one in map chat patiently (or not) explaining to some guy that GW2 wasn't "that sort of MMO", that you didn't have to finish a map before moving on, that it didn't matter that you had finished your racial starter map at level 10 but the map said it was supposed to go 15, that it was fine to go to another racial starting city and do their starter map too, that you could get xp doing almost anything - crafting, gathering, helping Blood Legion NPCs in full plate armor to stand up after a dandelion seed floating by on the breeze had knocked them unconscious. ..  That was then. Now I am that guy.

Truth be told, as a Charr I always had a problem with the whole set-up. It's bad enough that your Personal Story takes a dozen episodes teaching you the supreme importance of loyalty to your Warband and the Charr military-industrial complex, then cuts you loose from both as some kind of half-assed secret agent. The Personal Story is utter twaddle but at least it has some kind of narrative to cling on to, to explain why you're doing everything but what you imagine your character might actually want to do.

Yes, that's bad, but It's worse still if you decide to ignore it all and just run around doing whatever you like. So what am I now? A Gladium? A renegade? How come they don't arrest me for desertion the moment I set foot in Black Citadel? It's not like they don't know who I am - everyone I speak to calls me by my name and recaps my back-story.

You just ate meat from a guy who lives in a cave full of giant spiders. What did you think would happen?

So its hard enough staying in character just exploring Ascalon. I can just about rationalize it as some kind of rite of passage to discover my Charr heritage and I guess, at a push, I could stretch it to cover Getting To Know The Enemy in Kryta or Cultural Exchange in the Shiverpeaks but the further you stretch it the thinner it gets.

Which makes it a problem that so far I'm completing each map in about half to two-thirds of the supposed intended level range. And come to think of it, why does that happen, exactly? Because leveling in GW2 is about as difficult as eating a jam donut, that's why! And always has been.

I "finished" the level 15-25 Map Diessa Plateau last night by dinging 20 on Map Completion.

Well that's an hour of my life I'll never get back

I'd started it several hours earlier at exactly Level 15, wearing a complete set of Fine quality crafted armor that I'd made for myself at the forge in Black Citadel. I had 11 Fine quality crafted Weapons I'd made, one of every type a Guardian can use. Every piece had appropriate Runes and Sigils that I'd bought from Our Benevolent Benefactor Evon Gnashblade (if only they'd listened to him...) through the Black Lion Trading Post. I'd made food and sharpening stones. I'd spent well over an hour prepping.

First Heart out the gate took me about 2-3 minutes and the grateful vendor  offered me a major upgrade for my entire armor set. It went on like that from there. I literally didn't get more than two or three minutes' wear out of some items before the upgrade arrived. Moreover, within half an hour I was turning down the upgrades on offer for the content I was completing because I couldn't equip it for three or even five levels.

Clearly whoever designed the Heart flagged "Level 23" expected that the players completing it would be...level 23 or higher. That's why you need to be that level to wear the armor it rewards. I was soloing those at level 17 at a pleasantly satisfying challenge level. If other people happened by and joined in, as they often did, the challenge level dropped to somewhere between trivial and gimme now!

It would be tempting to blame this on the difficulty pass ANet gave the whole sub-80 world to compensate for the later arrival of Traits. That may have something to do with it but I wrote this after Beta Weekend Two, in which I observed "I moved to the level 15 - 25 areas when I dinged 13 and roamed around leveling up on mobs between 2 and four levels higher than me for most of Sunday." It might have gotten even easier but it was always easy.

Gotta get all that human blood off this armor somehow

Okay, some of it does come down to elder characters. A first character would be able to open all the Karma vendors, who in Diessa are stuffed to bursting with really good stuff - armor, weapons, jewellery, kits, many, many recipes - but wouldn't necessary have enough Karma to buy everything the way I did with 4.5m karma in the bank. It hardly matters, though, because having all that kit only makes things go extremely fast instead of just very fast.

Is this a bad thing? No, not as such. If this was my first character I very definitely would not have been pushing ahead at such a pace because I'd have been exploring. Yesterday I was doing Map Completion so I didn't explore at all. It sounds contradictory but it's really not.

Exploring is looking around you, paying attention to your surroundings, seeing something interesting or puzzling and going to investigate. It's spotting somewhere you think you just might be able to get to and taking a hour finding out you can't, but not minding because of the half a dozen fascinating things you found, trying.

Map Completion, conversely, is opening your map, checking where the next PoI or vista or waypoint is, running there using speed buffs, dodge rolls, stability or whatever you have that means you don't have to stop or engage with anything along the way, getting the UI flash that tells you you've ticked the box then barreling on to the next. All the time I was doing mine, other people were doing theirs, zipping past me, looping round and running back. No-one stopped for anything. I was about the only one who even bothered to watch the Camera Obscura at the vistas.

Vet's dead, baby...oh, you already heard that one?

Cut to the chase: did I have fun? Hell, yes. Thinking it through I come to the only conclusion I seem able to reach when GW2 comes under analysis: it is what it is. I loved Diessa Plateau in beta, when I was almost literally the only one there and I played it as though I was soloing in early Everquest. I loved it just after launch when there seemed to be hundreds on the map and nearly all of them Charr or Norn. I've loved it ever since, soloing it, duoing it, farming, exploring or just visiting favorite spots (the Cowtapult, the Sniper Rifles, the Meatoberfest fireworks, so many to choose from).

The Megaserver gives yet another face to Diessa, as does racing through it to complete the map. GW2 was built with an infrastructure where fun, and even the more elusive satisfaction, seem riveted on as firmly as the panels on the walkways of Black Citadel itself. It's gameplay that's very hard to break (although God knows sometimes it seems like ANet are doing their best to try) and I'm still not seeing anything in the recent revamp that looks like it could come close to breaking it for a new player. 

So, what comes next? At 25 there's an odd hiatus in the Charr leveling path. There is no Ascalonian map that covers 25-30 and the 30-40 map, Fields of Ruin has no safe entry point from lower levels, as I found out the hard way so I'd have to go via Divinity's Reach, which my Guardian doesn't want to do. I might do Map Completion in Wayfarers, something I'm not sure I've ever done despite having spent an inordinate amount of time there, or I might go to Lornar's Pass to evaluate the megaserver impact some more.

Whatever I choose fun is guaranteed.

Burning In : GW2

Project Megaserver moves on apace. After the initial announcement (Level 1-15 maps) and the subsequent, fuzzier revision (lower population maps) we now have some actual hard information. This thread lists the maps using the new Asuran technology so far.

Here's the first batch:

• The Grove
• Heart of the Mist
• Black Citadel
• Timberline Falls
• Southsun Cove
• Rata Sum
• Straits of Devastation
• Fields of Ruin
• Brisban Wildlands
• Hoelbrak
• Iron Marches
• Blazeridge Steppes
• Dredgehaunt Cliffs

 Assuming that they did indeed go with the least-populated maps, that's quite an interesting list. All the racial starting cities except Divinity's Reach plus most of the mid-level wilderness maps, suggesting a dearth of interest or activity outside of starting areas, max-level maps and the human heartlands. Just about exactly what you'd expect, given that most of the maps on that list were already sparsely populated three months after launch. And of course no-one in their right mind goes to Southsun if they can avoid it.

The first serving went down well enough that we got seconds very quickly:

• Lion’s Arch
• Lornar’s Pass
• Kessex Hills
• Diessa Plateau
• Metrica Province

It's perhaps surprising that Diessa and Lornar's weren't included on the first pass, but I guess proximity to the alway-busy Wayfarer Foothills, Lion's Arch and now Gendarran Fields have helped keep the numbers up. Having Durmand Priory based there can't have hurt Lornar's either. Seeing Lion's Arch on the list is sad. It really does seem to have lost focus after the Terrible Events. I was skeptical whether Vigil Keep would work as a stand-in hang-out but load times for Gendarran Fields would seem to prove me dead wrong on that one.

See? I told you Diessa wasn't all brown!

Kessex Hills doesn't seem to have benefited much from the makeover it got from the Toxic Alliance. It was always a scrappy map and adding reeking fumes and tough, annoying mobs and events was hardly likely to improve matters.

Metrica, on the other hand, always seemed quite a happening place but then I generally only go there when the Fire Elemental's up, which I guess isn't a representative sample. It's curious that it's the only starter zone to go Mega so far. It's not like you don't see a plethora of Asura skittling about everywhere. I'd have thought Plains of Ashford would be less-used.


Enough theorizing. Time for experiment. Late last night, just coming into NA prime time, I took a jog from Wayfarers Foothills into Diessa Plateau to see if I could see any difference. Diessa has always been one of my favorite maps. I wrote about it during beta, although reading it back now it does suggest my initial reaction was less affectionate than it became later on. I've certainly spent a lot of time there on and off ever since so I must be quite fond of the place.

Who says you have to stand well back to fling a fireball?

Diessa was never bustling. The eternal Meatoberfest celebrations in Butcher's Block, right up against the Wayfarers border, always attracted a few visitors but even when the game was relatively new you could cross the map without bumping into much more than the occasional young Charr discovering his heritage. Your chances of getting enough people to down the Champion Giant in Nageling or open the mini-dungeon at Incendio Templum were poor indeed.

Not any more it seems. Within half an hour I'd done three Hearts (with their much-improved completion UI as noted by Syp), several Meatoberfest events, killed the Nageling Giant and even finished the really annoying Dredge event in Bloodcliff Quarry that always used to fail with too few people. In everything I was accompanied by a whole bunch of friends-I-hadn't-met-yet. Didn't see a single name I recognized from Yak's Bend.

Not that I felt out of place. The whole time I was there a Mesmer was porting all-comers to the very difficult vista and skill point at the Breached Wall and map chat was buzzing with cheerful, excited chatter. It was all very jolly if a little bit uncomfortable, a bit like the last day of term when your year tutor lets you bring in games. I wouldn't go as far as to say it was like launch week all over again but it certainly did make the whole map feel alive in a way it hasn't for a very long time.

Rock Solid Work, Name Deleted.
(Not actual name although there must be someone called that)

Today I popped down to Dredgehaunt Cliffs, a great map with some complex event chains that can be very challenging with low numbers, to see if the same magic was working there. There were people around, I can say that much. Not a huge number but enough that every event I tried found me fighting alongside two or three other players. People were constantly calling events and Champions and linking waypoints. It felt a bit less frenetic than Diessa. I liked it.

So, on the basis of those two snapshots and with the weight one should always allocate to anecdotal evidence, my conclusion is that it would seem the Megaserver is doing what it was intended to do. I'm not about to declare it "awesome" like Heartless but my first impressions are definitely positive, more so than I expected.

It's going to take some getting used to, though, and the benefits may be arguable in certain situations. I logged my engineer in earlier. He happened to be in Metrica right next to the Thaumanova Reactor and by chance it was only ten minutes before the Fire Elemental's new two-hourly slot. Crowds were gathering.

Stop shoving at the back!

There were so many people that the pre-events spawned Elites and Champions and I still couldn't get a shot off fast enough to get credit on anything as we walked the Clean 5000 around. The five-minute whirl in the reactor room was purely surreal. There were twenty or thirty of us scudding about trying to shoot things while as many or more lined the walls like the crowd at an arena. Actually, not "like". They were the crowd at an arena.

By the time the Elemental appeared I would estimate there must have been at least sixty players crammed in the room. The timer for the event runs fifteen minutes but I doubt the  "fight" lasted thirty seconds. Overnight FE has changed from a very, very challenging encounter for a few determined individuals to a trivial, challenge-free loot drop for a zerg.

With Megaserver populations that's going to happen to every event with a fixed timer and loot worth having. It risks putting us back almost exactly where we were a year ago when, even after all the difficulty passes, most World Bosses still melted in seconds when a huge zerg arrived. Except this time, with Megaserver technology, a huge zerg will always arrive.

Spectator Sport

I'm not saying that's a bad thing or a good thing but it's certainly a thing. Short of upping the standard World Boss difficulty to at least Karka Queen level, if not Teq/GJW, it's hard to see how it can be prevented. Always assuming someone wanted to prevent it. Honestly, I've done all these bosses so many ways now - easy, hard, small group, zerg, even solo - I really don't care any more. Most of them are mostly fun most ways. I'll just take them however they come.

After FE died, though, it should be noted that there were quite a lot of complaining comments in map chat. Some people couldn't get there before he died, some couldn't do enough damage to get credit, some just thought it was a lot less fun than it had been with a lot fewer people, some wanted to do it on their own servers and not some unnamed overflow, as they saw it. When I left five minutes later the post-match analysis was still going on.

Oh well. Never going to please everyone. At least it works. That alone is more than I was expecting. Looking forward, nervously, to seeing the new tech rolled out to those few maps I actually spend time in. Whichever those are. There must be some other than Wayfarers and WvW...