I Want My Stuff

Super-short post. For real. 

There's so much going on right now, stories I'd usually try to cover (...wait, do I think I'm a reporter now?) are getting a pass and that's even if I remember they're happening. If it hadn't been for Shintar's mini-post on Neverwinter's burn-it-all-down revamp I'd have missed it altogether.

There's a FAQ that covers the big changes that came in the snappily-named M21 update. There's a new class: Bard. A whole bunch of zones got canned... sorry, vaulted. Level cap is now 20. There's a new new player experience. Yes, it's one of those deals. Everyone's doing them.

Looking at character select, where Perfect World (or maybe Cryptic) handily note the last day you logged in, I see it's been just over a year since I last played Neverwinter. I would have guessed less. 

Also, who came up with those character names, eh? Me, presumably. What was I thinking of? Magmia is a name I often use but Feldspar? And Lenara Greymark sounds like I took it from a book because I sure as heck wouldn't have come up with it myself. Oh, well. I  guess they'll have to do.

Let's be honest for once. I was motivated to log in because Shintar said she got "dozens of new rewards" for content she'd already completed. I'll patch for free stuff any time.

The patch didn't take long. I guess it's quicker when you're making the game smaller. For some reason the game wanted me to re-calibrate my monitor which, if you knew my monitor, you would know was never going to happen. I lied and told it I had so it would let me in.

 

A large pop-up window appeared. I waited for the shower of free stuff. There wasn't one. Then the window disappeared. I hadn't pressed anything or I didn't think I had. It was hard to be sure. There were a lot of people yelling in chat and something seemed to be exploding close by. I think I might have pressed the "Claim Valuables" button but the window may have closed before I could see what was in there.

I opened my inventory to see if the stuff had gone straight in. Maybe it had, but before I got to find out I noticed a couple of things flashing in the HUD so I clicked on those. Seems that being max level now meant I needed to spend a bunch of points on stats. Twenty-two of them, covering a range of levels from three upwards.

I got halfway through spending them, mostly on Wisdom and Constitution, when I realised I was on my
Warlock not my Cleric. Luckily you get one free respec. I used it because chances are low I'll ever need it more. It's not like I play this game often enough for it to matter.

I respent the points properly and then the game wanted me to pick a Paragon class or some such. Ironically, it turns out there's a healing role for Warlocks so I could have stuck with the wisdom and saved the respec. Since I hadn't I picked the DPS role instead.

That completely replaced all the icons on my hotbars with new abilities, none of which I recognised or understood. I waited a bit longer to see if any free stuff was coming. It wasn't, so I thought I'd just see if much had changed from how things played for me a year ago.

Short answer? They hadn't. With no idea what I was doing I just followed the sparkly trail for the quest I'd been doing last time. I'd been level 30 then. Maybe 31. Not 32 because I still had an unopened pack of goodies marked "To be opened on your 32nd birthday". Not literally but, yes, that.

I did the whole quest - crossed a couple of open maps, went down a tunnel, across another open area, into a dungeon. Lots of kobolds tried to stop me so I killed them all and got an achievement for killing kobolds.

The only thing that happened the whole time that seemed different was that every time I picked up some gold a kobold had dropped it was the exact same amount, which just happened to be the exact sum total of all the money I had. That seemed unlikely. Also, I never got any of it. Might be a bug, might be a currency cap for free players. No idea. Annoying though, either way.

Hmm. Now I think of it, I wonder if the kobolds were stealing all my money during the fight and I was just taking it back! No, that couldn't be it. Could it?

Eventually I found the woman I'd been looking for, right at the back of the dungeon. She congratulated me on killing everything and said she could get out on her own. I left her to get on with it and followed the sparkly trail back to the camp where I'd started. 

I spoke to the guy who'd sent me and he gave me a ring. It was a sidegrade. He gave me another quest. Another person gave me a quest. I could see the rewards I'd get for doing them and they were huge upgrades. I have no idea whether that's because of the update or because my gear was so bad to begin with.

I looked through my bags for the ring and I noticed a ton of stuff that might be free stuff you get for being de-re-up-down-levelled to twenty. Since I didn't know what I'd had in there when I started, I couldn't be sure but anyway, based on the extreme lack of challenge I'd faced doing the quest, it didn't seem like it mattered. I was clearly fine as I was.

And that's where I stopped. Not because I wasn't having fun. I was having fun. I almost always have fun when I play Neverwinter. It's kind of a knockabout fun game, at least the way I play it. I just don't have time for that particular fun right now, not when I'm having so many other kinds of fun thrown at me from all directions.

I do want to know exactly what's changed and how it affects new players. I am interested. Unfortunately, I don't believe I'm the one whose going to be able to tell that story. Even if I had the time I don't have the understanding. I strongly suspect that from my perspective nothing much will seem to have changed even if plenty has. 

I'll just be doing quests I've never done in places I've never seen, using abilities I'm not familiar with and getting stuff I don't recognize. Same as it ever was. I can at least say I didn't immediately think things had gotten any worse!

If anyone wants to know any more than that, they'd better ask someone else. Maybe Shintar knows!

The Art Of Starting Over

Tipa has a couple of extremely detailed and immensely valuable posts up on the increasingly over-the-radar DCUO. The first is a preview of the game's upcoming soft reboot House of Legends. The official press release is incorporated in this Development Update but Tipa's post breaks everything down without the (rather hilarious) !! Warning: Game Content Changing !! tone of the original.

One of the big reveals from the EG7 acquisition of Daybreak's portfolio of games was just how strong and successful DCUO has been and continues to be. Anyone who's played the game over the past few years can't but have noticed how very busy it feels, all the time. I play on the US servers and I logged in half an hour ago, at somewhere between midnight and three a.m. stateside, to a server flagged "High" population.

This is a successful game but in many ways I feel that's a success achieved despite rather than because of some of its core features. I've been playing largely in the most casual way possible since beta and yet I barely understand anything about how even something as basic as character progression works. 

Vast tracts of the game can seem opaque and confusing. As with all mmorpgs, DCUO suffers from a surfeit of jargon but it's always been its huge strength that a casual player can just muddle along and have fun, even while not understanding pretty much of anything. In its way it's far more pick-up-and-play than most other mmorpgs I can think of. 

You can make a character then right away go patrol the city streets, running up skyscrapers or flying high above them, looking for villains to punch. That's the super-hero fantasy, right there. In some ways the game doesn't need much more. 

But it has more. it has deep drifts of content, surprises and stories, crises and call-outs, bosses and battles and epic adventures, most of which have been locked away behind arcane access requirements, the majority of which will be going away with the upcoming update. I'm not going to detail what all those changes are: go read Tipa's post if you want the full deets but you can think of it as DCUO's "One Tamriel" if you like.

The key takeaway here is that there's never been a better time to try the game, or to return if you've drifted away. Timing could be better, of course, with New World coming and half a dozen other mmorpg releases either fresh off the assembly line or just about to hit the racks. DCUO is a quick win, though. It's free to play, available on a wide range of platforms and very easy to pick up for short, satisfying sessions.

I plan on fitting it into my increasingly overloaded schedule, somehow. Frankly, exactly how I can't quite figure just yet but I'll get there. I'm motivated to return as much by Tipa's second great post as by the revamp itself. The post focuses on starting a new character and in it Tipa clarifies more about how the character progression mechanics work than I've been able to glean from years of playing and wiki-reading.

 

This is incredibly useful information. I’ve been playing DCUO since beta but even though I sometimes stop and read the wiki for clarification there are vast tracts of the game I simply don’t understand, even at the very lowest levels.

For example, I gave up even trying to understand how the currencies work many years ago. I spent so long just trying to find vendors in the cavernous mazes of the main hubs that even if I found them I would be too exhausted to make sense of what they were selling. The news that there will be simplified, compact versions of these in the future is one of the most welcome aspects of House of Legends as far as I'm concerned.

I have always had similar issues with the progression system. I didn’t know until I read Tipa's post that there even were things called “Feat Points”. I can’t recall ever seeing them although it’s entirely possible I’ve been getting and spending them without knowing what they are. I have bags filled with stuff I don't understand, after all and I understand even less when I read the tool-tips.

Even the simple stuff phases me. I have only recently learned to use the teleport system reliably and that, I think, is because they changed something to make it easier for idiots. I can never keep straight what the various missions mean (solo and duo are clear but the others I mix up all the time). I have never really been clear on what the difference is between regular and Episode content. Tipa's post makes more sense of all of that than anything else I’ve read.

 

The thing is, ever since housing was added to the game in the form of Lairs, I have really just treated DCUO as a construction kit, not a game, let alone a super-hero game. I check the updates to see what new housing items I can get for free, then if they look tasty I log in and do the minimum to get them. Once I've placed them in my Lair I'm done until the next time.

That's really wasting a great game. A game I've never really played with any kind of intensity or focus. 

I’ve only ever leveled one character to thirty. She dinged a few weeks after the game launched. Back then the thirty levels did constitute some kind of regular gameplay, perhaps as much so as Guild Wars 2's eighty. It took about the same time to get them, anyway. 

These days levels are barely even an afterthought. They're not the tip of the iceberg. More like the thin layer of snow on top. And yet I still haven't got there with the character I made several years ago on the account I now use to play the game.

I have a couple of free, Level 30 boosted characters that I never play. My "main" is still in the 20s (27 in fact) several years after I created her. There doesn’t seem to be a /played function so I’m not sure how many hours I’ve put into her but it has to be more than enough to have leveled her several times over, had she actually spent that time doing things that give xp.

Using the information in Tipa's post I'm going to get those last three levels and then wait for House of Legends to drop, when I plan on starting a brand-new character, possibly a villain. I tried a villain years ago but didn't like it much. Maybe now the streams have crossed I'll like it better.

Tipa's post will be invaluable then. I hope she finds the time and inclination to write a few more.

Pass The Cheese, Please

UltrViolet is wondering why he's not feeling the same buzz around WoW's upcoming expansion as everyone else. (Alright, not everyone). In reply, Jeromai, another WoW refusenik, describes his own unconvincing introduction to the West's biggest-ever MMORPG:

"I’ve tried WoW, and it’s not for me either. The furthest I’ve gotten is soloing an undead hunter to 60 or so during the Cataclysm era. I’ve blanked out on most of the story/quests. I got speedrun by a friend through a dungeon via him outleveling it and gifted stuff (a faster way to kill my interest in the mode I cannot imagine, to realize that someone can solo cheese their way through something via incrementing numbers rather than through skill, ie. that gifted gear will be valueless in a few levels, so why bother to even group through it properly?)"

I did get a bit further than that my first time through, although not much. I think I topped out in the early 70s, back in mid-WotLK, when the level cap was 80. It took me six months to get that far.

I was playing WoW as my main MMO at that time and from memory I would probably have put in around 25-30 hours most weeks, which suggests leveling must have been a much slower process than it is today. Of course, I did play a lot of other characters and I recall doing an inordinate amount of PvP in Battlegrounds, which maybe didn't give leveling xp. I can't recall.

At the time I knew no-one who was playing WoW, except Mrs Bhagpuss, who started at the same time I did. I knew of people who played but I wasn't blogging then so I didn't even have that shared experience to draw on. Consequently I didn't have the problem of over-zealous friends trying to give me an unwanted leg-up.

It is something I've run into in other MMOs. It's something I've done myself. When you know and love a game and you see someone not quite getting it there can be a huge temptation to jump in and carry some of the weight, just to get them over the hump. Or maybe you think the real game begins at the end and everything that comes before is just an annoyance, to be disposed of as fast as possible. Or perhaps you just get a kick out of playing the all-knowing, all-powerful superhero. There are as many reasons to jump in and lead the way as there are players to be led.

Always keep an eye on the horizon.

Sometimes it works but often it has the effect Jeromai describes. Instead of connecting someone with the game it alienates them from it. Even so, it always puzzles me when someone comes to the conclusion that because a higher-level, better geared, more experienced player can trivialize lower-level content that content is by definition trivial.

This seems to me on a par with believing that because you can read the precis of the plot of a mystery novel on Wikipedia there's no point or purpose in reading the book. Yes, you could turn to the last page, solve the mystery and be done in a moment. You wouldn't, though.

If you did, you'd not have read the book. You would have no feeling for the language, no understanding of the characters, no sense of the author's purpose. You'd have gained nothing, learned nothing and felt nothing. Oh, you'd know who did it. There's that.

Anyone who reads mystery novels  - any novel, really - knows they could turn to the end to see how it all turns out but they don't. Knowing doesn't void the experience of doing. The content is the content. This is similar to but different from the journey being its own reward.

MMOS are all about the content. A traditional MMORPG is a portmanteau and a palimpsest. The leveling game hasn't been the be-all and end-all for a very long time. Story, plot, narrative, they form only a small part of what there is to do. You don't have to focus on any one aspect and you don't have to buy in to all the expectations. You can pick and choose.

Even with that freedom of choice, in all MMORPGs with vertical progression, which is almost all of them, you have to accept impermanence. Yes, your Best-in-Slot weapon will be time-expired the day the new expansion drops. Yes, the Tier 1 armor set that took a month of grinding will serve as the bare minimum for your next month as you grind for T2. So what?

That's the process. If it seems hollow then congratulations, you've seen through the trick. Magic happens because you choose to believe in magic not because magic's real.

If we keep the lights low enough no-one will see the wires.

Some people like to know how magic tricks are done. For them, understanding the mechanics make the whole thing more fascinating, not less. For most, though, once a trick's explained, it's dead. Explain enough tricks and all of magic dies.

Which is why you need to be careful and cautious when showing someone around the back of the set. If you reveal all the trapdoors and uncover all the mirrors there's nothing much left but dusty boards and flat canvas. At least let the newbie see the trick done properly, once.

I love cheesing dungeons. I love outleveling content and sueprheroing through it. I love soloing bosses meant to challenge two dozen mighty heroes of yester-year. I love doing it because I did it the hard way the first time and now it's payback. Or because I never could, then, and now I can.

Blizzard clearly understand that mindset. They are building it into the structure of their benchmark MMO. You can go back and cheese WoW's dungeons and Blizzard will make sure you get all the drops you would have gotten with friends, at level, back in the day.

You did do those dungeons with friends, at level, back in the day, didn't you?

Even when I played WoW a decade ago, when my highest level characters were in the fifties or sixties, I went back and soloed The Deadmines for fun. Because I could. Because it was profitable and because it was satisfying. It might only have been a few weeks since I struggled through those caves, dying often, but already it was history. My history.

In EQ, there was a genuine, visceral thrill in going back, years later, to romp around the Gates of Discord zones. They'd terrified me at launch and broken my guild along with many others. I had, quite literally, my most terrifying times in MMOs ever there. Now I owned them. It was glorious.

It also works when you level up to see content that you couldn't even get to first time around. In EverQuest some of the most fun I ever had was in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss, clearing the Planes in the Planes of Power expansion . We were half a decade behind the curve and twenty levels over par but who was counting? We came late to Castle Mistmoore in EQ2 as well, but by the time we were able to duo it it was a fun riot.

How many pairs of pants does the average character get through in 120 levels anyway?

The thing about all of these experiences is that they were aspirational. In every case I was doing something I'd always wanted to do but never could until then. That aspiration needed space to grow and time. Doing those dungeons, those zones, that content, attritionally or awkwardly, slowly, painfully or arduously, at level, built that desire. So did being locked out, left out, denied. Or trying and failing.

It's all a mind game. You know none of it matters yet it does. It matters because you make it matter. Yes, that again. It's the trick that works until it doesn't.

It's also a trick that comes easily to me. I can believe two contradictory things at the same time. Always could. Understanding that something both matters and doesn't matter is second nature.

I have a lot more trouble with the other part of Jeromai's assessment, that things would be different (better) if there was skill involved. Treating the intellectual, emotional, psychological and physical cost of acquiring high-level skill in a specific video game, let alone a specific encounter, as an appropriate use of my finite personal resources is a step too far for my suspension of disbelief.

It's around that point where pragmatism pitches in. If I find myself up against a skill wall in a video game my response generally isn't to git gud. It's to get out. If it's going to take that much effort there's plenty of work around the house that needs doing. Or if we're talking skills, maybe I could learn to speak another language or to play a musical instrument...

Which is not to denigrate the efforts of those who worship skill in video games or the satisfaction they get from their successes. Everything is worth precisely what it's worth - to you. I don't deny the value, I just can't share it. Instead, when people start discussing the need for "skill", I find myself questioning my sense of belonging, just like UltrViolet.

It's all about finding your tribe. And my tribe likes cheese.

Bleedthrough : GW2

A couple of weeks ago, while I was hanging around in Krennak's Homestead, an NPC dive in Wayfarer Hills that I like to use as a surrogate home when I'm in the area, I was startled to hear a conversation strike up behind me. The Norn family that live there, none of whom I'd ever paid  much attention before, began to run through some kind of comedy routine.

It was a pretty funny little skit and quite a long one, too. I laughed out loud a couple of times but my amusement was heavily outweighed by my confusion and surprise. I mean, I doubt I'd be exaggerating much if I said I'd spent a dozen hours in that hut over the life of the game. I camp there almost every time after I've done The Frozen maw and I frequently afk there to web browse or write a blog post.

Since I have the sound of the game set to continue playing while I'm tabbed out, I can absolutely guarantee that, had the Norn Family piped up, I'd have heard them. I never had until then.

Since then I've heard them exchange the same banter so often I could almost recite it by heart. It starts up every time I enter the lodge and replays often if I stay there. It's gone from amusing to annoying to "I really have to find somewhere else to afk".

It would seem very strange for ANet to have paid writers and voice actors to add this kind of flavor to
such old content so my best guess was that it had long been bugged until something in some patch nudged it working. That explanation didn't entirely convince me but it was the best I could manage.

Anyway, I soon stopped wondering about it as the dialog became part of the soundscape of the game. Then today I happened to be in Plains of Ashford when something happened that surprised me even more.

I'd logged in my Free to Play account to take the screenshots for my Elite Spec Beta post (because reasons) and since I had it logged in I thought I'd check whether F2P accounts are allowed to claim the free promo item currently in the Black Lion Store (yes, they are).

After that I thought I'd just do the Dailies and one of them was Plains of Ashford Events. My F2P ranger is a Charr and I used to love doing my dailies in Ashford so much I once wrote a guide on the subject (albeit the long-lost and much-missed "Kill Variety" kind), so that was too tempting to ignore.

First I went to the cave under the waterfall to spawn the Rampaging Skale. As I was standing there waiting, I thought I faintly heard a sound I'd almost forgotten: Drottot Lashtail demanding devourer eggs.

Drottot is a Charr given the unenviable task of teaching cubs how to catch and raise devourers for the Legions. His charges are sassy, the work is tedious and as far as I knew he'd given up trying about three years ago. Not his choice: he was retired as part of the New Player Experience patch that, among other things, strove to do away with many non-standard events that supposedly sent delicate new players into a tail-spin.

This particular event required you to activate some small devices that look and sound like old-fashioned gramophones in order to distract female devourers so you could break into their nests and steal their eggs. It was fiddly enough that a three-year old child might have taken five or ten seconds to grasp the mechanics so it had to go.

Well, it's back! I did it this morning. It was joyous. So good, in fact, that I did it twice. With other people. Still busy in Ashford on daily day I'm happy to confirm.

Of course, now I'm beginning to doubt my own memory. I can't find any sign that I, or anyone else, ever wrote about the event going away, much less anyone commenting on it coming back. If it wasn't for that absolutely, definitely, for certain sure new to me after five years, dialog in Wayfarer Foothills I'd think I was losing it (whatever "it" is and always assuming I ever had it in the first place).

Oh, and there's this, which does prove things get changed under the hood now and again without ANet coming out and making a big fuss about it.  I note that was also a belated acknowledgement of mistakes made in the New Player Experience.

Co-incidence? I think not.