That's When My Patience Went Away : GW2

Following my return to work I had the shell of a plan prepared for what I wanted to write about today. I was thinking along the lines of a meditation on the different entertainment needs brought on by enforced leisure and enforced labor, how one requires stimulation and the other just the opposite.

It was all percolating quite nicely. And then I saw this. 

The headline Massively:OP went with was

"Guild Wars 2 delays End of Dragons to 2022, brings Colin Johanson and Josh Davis back."

That's enough to put the fear into anyone. Reading through the official press release, it gets worse. Much worse:

"Alliances When?

This year."

That about puts the cap on it for me. Along with the rest of the handful of people still playing World vs World, I'd allowed myself to get comfortable. I thought this insane idea had died of neglect long ago and we could all just carry on as if the whole ludicrous farrago had never been suggested. Sadly, it seems I was mistaken.

If that wasn't sufficiently disheartening, there's this:

"In the past, development priorities shifted away from WvW, and unfortunately both World Restructuring and our players suffered as a result. Our new leadership team views WvW as a cornerstone mode of Guild Wars 2, and it will be a focus of ours going forward."

It's that sickening moment, when the door opens to your nice, quiet office on the ninth floor, where no-one ever goes and most people don't even know anyone works, and in come three suits from corporate with a checklist and an appraising look. Sometimes benign neglect is the best you can hope for.

In this case, it's not just simple fear of the unknown. There's the plain fact that every single iteration on WvW since 2012 that pretended towards anything more than a basic bug fix has been at best a downgrade and frequently a disaster. Every. Single. One.

Desert borderlands even killed EBG.

 

Naturally, the plan comes with promises and safeguards. Most of the section in the press release relating to Alliances is made up of apologies for previous errors and promises not to repeat them. All of which we heard last time and the time before that and the time before that again.

There's a touching naivete in the promise of a collaborative process based around a beta:

"World Restructuring features will be released in a multiphase beta. What this means is that we’ll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release. ... Once we’ve worked with you to lock down the design and implementation, we’ll polish it up and take it out of beta."

It sounds reassuring until you realize the despised revision that removed all of the alpine battlegrounds and replaced them with their desert counterparts was the result of a similar collaborative beta, albeit a closed one.  That was the update that drove maybe half of all WvW players to stop playing, most of them for good. Several badly-received revamps led to open rebellion that was only quelled by a public poll on what should be done, a poll that resulted in a humiliating defeat for ANet and the removal of all of the new content to which they'd tied their banner. So that went well.

I'm less disturbed about this than I might be. Two or three years ago Alliances seemed like a terrifyingly bad idea but that was when the game mode still retained a vestige of the camaraderie it once had. There's none of that any more. All that remains is some knockabout fun, something very similar to an oversized, hot-join, never-ending game of capture the flag in which no-one really cares where the flag is or who's got it. It's hard to see how Alliances can make it actively worse but I have faith that if there's a way, ArenaNet will find it.

We had fun, once.

 

Going back to MassivelyOP's headline, there are more bad things. First and worst is the postponement of the third expansion, End of Dragons. This is embarrassing. Guild Wars 2 has had two expansions to date, Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire. The first took three years to arrive, the second pegged that back to two. So far, so good. Not great, really very not great, but at least heading in the right direction.

When (I guess I should say "if") it launches, EoD will have been four and a half years in the making. The original game only took six months longer than that to build from scratch. At this point I'm certain the better plan would have been to start on GW3 right after the second expansion. If you're going to take the time you might as well make the damn game.

The given reason is, of course, quality. It's always quality. 

"...we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha...We appreciate your patience as we take the time to give the expansion the attention it deserves"

Seriously, screw your "creative vision". And screw the self-congratulatory tone. Just get a damn expansion out in something close to the timescale every other major manages. 

The problem doesn't just lie with the development team, unfortunately. There's a glib, knowing wink in that "we appreciate your patience".  You can start a conversation about expansions in game any time you like and half the people talking will be saying they don't want one at all or they don't want one yet. It's not patience, it's apathy and antagonism. A lot of GW2 players will be cheering today because they won't have to suffer another expansion until next year.

I am not one of those players. The game is stale. It's been stale for much of its ten year run. The only time it freshens up is when we get a new expansion and so far that's been twice. And I only liked one of those.

Straight up, if there was a good alternative to GW2 I would be done with it now. I was done with it after Path of Fire. I keep logging in because it's there and it's familiar and it's easy and because it's the game Mrs Bhagpuss plays but mostly I'm still playing GW2 because not one of the alternatives I'm waiting on has made it to market yet. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, who only plays GW2 and, unlike me, rarely goes back to older mmorpgs she once enjoyed after she moves on to new ones, has been asking more and more often when the next good game is likely to appear. I can only hope it's soon but sadly I know it won't be before the delayed End of Dragons expansion so I guess we will indeed end up being "patient". But only because we have literally no choice.

So much for the expansion. How about those two guys coming back, eh? 

Heart of Thorns introduces a hitherto unknown problem to the game: too much loot.

 

This one's a bit more nuanced. From a company's point of view, can it ever be a good thing to have to announce you re-hired people you said goodbye to years ago? I guess it depends on why they left in the first place but at best it is, by definition, a backward-looking move. 

Colin Johanson was a very controversial figure in much of his time at GW2. He was the figurehead of a direction of which a vocal majority of players strongly disapproved. Whether it was true or not, he was labelled as the guy who wanted to make GW2 harder for casuals. 

He was the showrunner for Heart of Thorns, the expansion many players found daunting and difficult. The sales of the expansion were reportedly underwhelming and the aftermath confused and chaotic. Johansen posted an emotional and upbeat farewell when he left but my summary of his tenure, written at the time, was less than complimentary:

"Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw."

Given the history, it's hard to see why his return should be greeted like the prodigal son. Or indeed, like Scott Hartsman riding in on his white charger to save EverQuest II, a comparison I am absolutely certain Colin wouldn't want anyone to make.(I imagine he'd prefer us to cast him as Yoshi P riding to the rescue of his own personal FFXIV, but then what dev wouldn't?).

I never had carried much affection for Colin Johanson's style or approach. Nevertheless, I do have to admit that the direction the game took under his tenure, up to and including the release of the first expansion, made it by some margin my favorite era. 

I liked Heart of Thorns. I liked it a lot. It would quite possibly make the list of my top ten favorite expansions for any game. I've played through it start to finish twice and partially several more. I still go there most weeks and goof around just because I enjoy being there.

The adventure begins!

Conversely I dislike, maybe even detest, the second expansion, Path of Fire, which attempted to be all the things HoT was not: accessible, steeped in Guild Wars lore, commercial. I found PoF smug, irritating and, by far the worst of all video game crimes, stultifyingly dull. I forced myself to complete the main storyline on one character. Never, never again.

That does give me some hope for Colin Johanson's return. He did once do stuff I really liked and, let's be brutally honest, he can hardly make things worse. Except, of course, he can. It's amazing how often that happens. Still, we can hope. 

That just leaves the return of Josh Davis, about whom I have to say "Who?". I vaguely remember his name. I have no idea who he is or what he did. The only GW2 writer I remember is that one who got canned for fighting with players on social media and I don't even remember what their name was.

The writing in GW2 has been all over the place for years. It has some standout moments and a vast amount of ho-hum filler. Storylines blow up then blow away like dust on the wind. Who was Mr E.? Anyone know? Anyone care? How's Zojja doing? Is she dead or alive? Is Taimi still ill or did her incurable condition cure itself? Marjorie and Kasmeer, are they still a thing? 

Gliding. 100% more fun than mounts. Official!

 

It's soap opera and melodrama. Most people probably just click through it to get to the fights anyway. I'm sure Josh Davis coming back means something to someone but not to me.

And there we must leave them, Colin and Josh, setting out their desks, going down the hall to have their photographs taken for their security passes. We'll have to judge them by their works, I guess, although precedent suggests we'll be lucky if we have the least clue who's actually responsible for what.

I'll spend my summer dreading the onset of the Alliance beta although at least it's going to give me something to rant write about . I'd far rather have had an unpolished expansion in August than a supposedly tarted up version of the same six months later but no-one's asking my opinion because the people who actually matter have already decided what my reaction's going to be: I'm going to be patient. I've been thanked for it so it must have happened.

Ashes of Creation and Pantheon need to get a bloody shift on. There's an open door here waiting to be pushed. At this stage I'd even take Camelot Unchained as a stepping-stone to something I actually want. I know Mrs. Bhagpuss will try it. I wonder if she'd give New World a look... she does have that new mouse now...

The Rain, The Park And Other Things

It rained all day today. It's still raining now. I spent hours in World vs World, mostly defending our one and only T3 Keep or retaking the rest of our stuff after we lost it, which was about every five minutes. 

This week's event must have been wildly successful if the marker of success is how much time I've spent playing, when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I killed close to a thousand players, ranked up more times than I can remember and made it into the final set of skirmish rewards, Diamond, for the first time in years.

Activity was about as manic as I've seen it. For most of the day no side in our match owned more than one upgraded keep. Almost everything was paper. There were players running around all over the place. Crystal Desert were on a mission to overtake us and go up to Tier Three at the weekly reset later tonight. They had close to a full squad runing all day, even at the times when there are normally none of them to be seen.

Just keep telling yourself that.

Despite all that action and chaos and effort, I didn't see a queue on any map, not even once. I've barely seen one all week and even the couple of times I did it was only one or two people. Measured by that metric, things were actually busier a few weeks ago, when there was no event of any kind.

This is Tier Four we're talking about, of course. Maybe the matches above us had deeper queues and more of them. Then again, much of the time when I check, Yaks Bend is listed as "Full" and you can't get any more populated than that. You'd think, right?

It doesn't work that way. No-one knows how it does work, exactly, but we do know it's not a head-count. It's an algorithm or I imagine it is. Everything's an algorithm nowadays. All ArenaNet will admit to is that they calculate how busy Worlds are by reference to a number of factors including but not limited to how many people log in to WvW, how long they stay and what kind of things they do while they're there.

By that measure, earlier this week about two-thirds of the servers were flagged "Full". Today it was just over half. It changes all the time but if there's a pattern to it I don't know what it is. 

I do know that when people wanted to move to a server that was always "Full" they would sometimes stay up until three or four in the morning in the hope they could catch it in one of the brief windows when it dropped to "Very High". Back in the days when people used the forums for more than just arguing and badmouthing developers, you'd sometimes get public-service posts letting everyone know some server or other had opened for transfers, which, naturally, meant that server would be "Full" again at the next update.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had a brief discussion abut it in guild chat as we were running to defend something or other this morning. I was venting my irritation at people who don't care about the match result and Mrs. Bhagpuss was explaining to me why I could go boil my head. She takes the very widely held view that server pride died when ANet changed the rules on transfers and moving to the winning team every six to eight weeks became the meta. 

I can't really argue with that. Server pride doesn't make much sense when there's a whole playstyle devoted specifically to switching servers. Even harder to take it seriously when you factor in the link system, where you don't even know which server it is you're on half the time. 

Just keep telling yourself that.

Even so, a competition is a competition and a match is a match. You don't get a prize or a title for after a pick-up game in the park but I would contend that you do still care who wins. Yes, when you all come back the next day and pick teams again you're probably going to end up playing alongside the kid you were trying to kick in the shins the day before but each pick-up match is a discrete event and each one matters or else none of them do.

That is the problem in a nutshell for a lot of people. None of them do. So why do they bother? Same million reasons anyone does anything in mmorpgs. Loot, gear, achievements, bragging rights, social pressure, fun, boredom... When GW2 began, ArenaNet wanted WvW to be the endgame. They included the maps in world completion and tied a bunch of stuff in the Mists to other features of the game. 

You can guess how that went down with PvE players. Once the dedicated WvW crowd that arrived expecting DAOC 2.0 had left in a huff, ANet moved quickly to pacify the people they had left. The problem was, they had a set of maps, rules and mechanics designed neither for pure PvP players nor monster-bashers. We've been living with a series of passive-aggressive compromises ever since.

Just keep telling yourself that.

All the many, many redesigns have failed. The last one, the supposed mega-revamp that would do away with Worlds entirely and heave everyone into some kind of ludicrously over-complicated parody of high-school, with everything built on popularity and cliques, thankfully appears to have died of lack of interest. What might replace it remains unspoken. 

My guess would be nothing. There's a conspiracy theory, so widely accepted now it might as well be confirmed fact, that ANet make major bank on transfer fees. Another of their dirty little secrets is how the links are decided every other month. Some of the decisions seem so nihilistic that monetary gain appears the only rational explanation.

Whether it's true or not that they couldn't do without the income generated by thousands of people paying to change the name of their team every few weeks, I suspect another well-founded theory will be proven to be correct. There's no-one left at ANet who cares enough about WvW to try to make it less disfunctional. 

Okay, maybe don't keep telling yourself that. And definitely don't tell anyone else.

There was a moment of moderate shock recently when one of the former WvW devs returned to work on it again. That was seen by some as a sign that life might be about to be breathed back into the corpse. It seems a bit of a stretch. It's not like much changed the last time he was in charge. Or, rather, things did change. Just, well, nothing that mattered...

The moment of truth will be when we get to hear the full feature list for End of Dragons. Back when Heart of Thorns was in development it included the biggest shake-up WvW has ever had. That was an unmitigated disaster. Path of Fire didn't even mention WvW let alone change anything there. PoF is generally reckoned to have been a popular, successful expansion. A lot of people still detest HoT. Draw your own conclusions.

As far as I see it, WvW is in maintenance mode now. It's there. It works. If you want to play it you can. People do. Still, even now, quite a lot of them. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it for five or six hours today. It was fun.

Maybe that could be the WvW slogan: "Raining out? Bored? Can't think of anything better to do? Come play WvW"!

There are worse ways to spend a wet friday in May.

Let's Submerge: GW2

I almost didn't bother doing "Finding Sabaha", Guild Wars 2's recently-introduced Skimmer Mastery Achievement. It's a mount quest and I've made no secret of how I feel about mounts in GW2. I wish they'd never been invented. What's more, it doesn't even get you a new mount, like the Roller Beetle or the Warclaw or the Skyscale, just a new ability for one of the old ones.

The original five mounts were always horribly unbalanced. Only one, the saurian Raptor, had any general utility. It was apparently intended as the basic go-faster model, with a useful horizontal leap to cross chasms, many of which had been helpfully provided by the art department throughout the Path of Fire expansion for that very purpose.

The Raptor's reign as mount of choice was short-lived, usually about as long as it took someone to finish the lengthy Griffon quest. The catbird was one of the slower mounts but it made up for lack of speed with its ability to hedge-hop like a wounded chicken, an inelegant lurch which still made it more practical for crossing terrain with an active z-axis than any of the others.

Only when faced with a sheer cliff face or a jumping puzzle the devs forgot to ring-fence would anyone employ the squirrel-rabbit known as the Springer. Operating as a jet-propelled pogo stick, the Springer was meant to be dragged out of the bag only when a swift vertical ascent was required and as swiftly replaced. Spring-heeled boots would have been a far prefereable option.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a Portuguese Man o' War.

As for the Jackal, it seems to have no purpose whatsoever, other than to complete certain small pieces of content written especially to demonstrate its capabilities. You rarely see anyone use it, although if people have a flashy-enough skin they might occasionally get it out and sit on it somewhere public, in the hope passers-by might be impressed. And they may well be - until they realize the creature under the glamor is just a stupid jackal.

That leaves the Skimmer. As the only mount that can operate on water, it does have some utility. It saves you having to swim, at least. Unfortunately, swimming in GW2 is exceptionally easy, so since the Skimmer corners like a drunk hippopotamus and has a top speed that makes you feel you're heading into a force ten gale, that's not as much of an attraction as it could have been.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about the Skimmer is that despite clearly being an amphibian it appears to be alergic to water. The clue is in the name. It skitters across the surface like a skipped stone. You can use it to get to where you think the underwater content might be but if you want participate you have to dismount and dive.

"Less scary largos" is like "less poisonous cyanide", isn't it?

Well not any more. As a little treat for the eighth anniversary, ANet added a quest (Yes, a quest. Do we really have to keep up the pretence?). It opens a new mount mastery, one which allows your skimmer to break surface tension and dive.

That did sound like it could conceivably be useful but I was wary of what the so-called "achievement" might entail. I read the ludicrous farrago of pre-requisites for the Skyscale again the other day and that was a hard "nope".  If it was going to be something like that then forget it.

Then again, I actually enjoyed both the Griffin and Roller Beetle quests. If it was something along those lines it might even be an entertaining way to pass a session or two.

The first problem was where to start. I'd have expected some kind of in-game prompt but I hadn't seen one, so I googled it. The wiki wasn't telling me anything but I found what looked to be a decent alternative to the much-missed Dulfy.

It's a website called Guildjen , run by "Jen... a female gamer from Argentina". It looks very new - the oldest posts come from the beginning of June - but it already has a lot of solid, useful content and most importantly it's bang up to date. Let's hope Jen sticks around. We could certainly use another Dulfy.

Trust me. It's a thigh-slapper.

Using Jen's walkthrough probably cut the time it took me to complete the quest in half. Maybe more. I finished it in under an hour. It isn't anything like the crazy collections ANet like to create for big ticket items like Legendaries or the aforementioned Skyscale, thankfully, but it does involve a lot of map-hopping and plenty of visits to obscure NPCs who aren't marked on the map.

Jen's guide not only has all all the steps listed, with precise and accurate details of exactly where you need to go and what you need to do when you get there, it also has all the waypoints, named and with their short codes ready to cut and past into the chat line. You don't even need to open your map.

Should you want to do the quest without spoilers, here's a short summary in bullet-points:

• Be on a character who's completed the Path of Fire storyline.
• Go to any major city.
• Read the note that appears in your mail.
• Follow the clues and go from map to map talking to various NPCs.
• Complete a couple of map events.
• Kill a couple of mobs.
• Get silver in a timed Adventure.
• And that's it.

Short, easy, fun. The best part was the writing, which is very decent. I genuinely laughed out loud at one point. Also I got to talk to a Largos who didn't try to kill me, which was a first.

At the end of all that, you still don't have a skimmer that can submerge, of course. You have a new Mastery track that adds that ability. It costs eight PoF mastery points so if you have those you're all set. I had two so I have some more work to do.

I'd all but forgotten Masteries were a thing.

Not sure if I can be bothered. Unless the new mastery also doubles or preferably trebles the Skimmer's speed, I can't see the point. If the time trial's any indication, the thing's as excruciatingly slow beneath the surface as above. I'd rather swim.

My only slight concern is that ArenaNet could be softening us all up for some major underwater content to come. They did that whole underwater combat revamp a while back and now this. And lest we forget in all the Cantha hype, one of the remaining Elder Dragons is Bubbles, the as-yet officially nameless Sea Dragon. 

Maybe End of Dragons is going to take place underwater. Some of it, at least. In which case, maybe we'll need submersible skimmers. Suppose I better go get some more PoF masteries, then.

Bleh.

Beginning Of The End : GW2

We know what it's called:

 We know what it looks like (er, kinda...)

We know when we're getting it.

The only thing we don't know is - will it be any good?

By my count, so far ArenaNet are two for three.

The original Guild Wars 2: excellent.

The first expansion, Heart of Thorns: also excellent.

The second expansion, Path of Fire: very bad.

This is a personal opinion. A lot of current and former GW2 players, almost certainly most of them, would disagree with all of those assessments.

It's easy to forget now but GW2 was not that well-received after launch. The game claimed to break the MMORPG mould and for many it succeeded all too well.

Droves of confused and disatisfied MMO tourists tried the open world levelling game, couldn't understand it, didn't like it and left.

Veterans of Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer and other fans of large-scale, faction-based PvP tried World vs World, didn't like it and left.

Small group players tried the chaotic, trinityless dungeons, didn't like them and left.

PvE zergers who made it through the levels to Orr, found their supposed endgame an unfinished, buggy mess. They tried it, didn't like it and left.

PvP players were embarassed by Anet's determination to make GW2 into an in esport. Whether they stayed or left, who knows? No-one was watching.

The game muddled along for a couple of years, stumbling from crisis to crisis. The Karka debacle, the Ascended gear scandal, the Scarlett fiasco. Content cadence flipped and flopped as ANet struggled to come up with a flow that worked. And failed.

Through all this, there would never be an expansion, we were told.

Then there was an expansion.

Heart of Thorns was tough, uncompromising and difficult. It put the challenge back into a game that had gone soft. It sorted the casuals from the hardcore.

So some said.

Heart of Thorns destroyed solo play, drove casuals to despair and nearly killed the franchise.

So said others.

It seemed pretty easy to me. It was a lot of fun, solo or in zergs. I played it all the way through, twice, and then parts of it a few more times, for fun.

Still, it was widely seen as a mistake. Pandering to the hardcore, Anet had abandoned the core. GW2 had been touted as a game for everyone and somehow now it wasn't.

Also, WvW almost closed down. The Desert Borderland revamp, not strictly part of HoT but added alongside it. was almost universally hated. Players shunned them and eventually Anet first re-revamped then largely removed the entire thing. Even so, the game mode never fully recovered. Most likely it never will.

A couple more years passed and Path of Fire arrived. Second expansion, not the same as the first.

PoF was where I fell off the bus. Until then I'd rolled with all the punches and generally had a good time. PoF was not a good time for me.

I disliked it from the get-go and over the  years I've come to loathe it. I never go there if I can avoid it. I played the story through, once, with gritted teeth. Never again.

That was PvE. PvP I didn't follow. No-one ever seems happy with PvP, though.

WvW fell deeper into despond. PoF elite specs and mounts fractioned the playerbase. Populations dwindled. Servers "linked", which meant merged.

And yet, Path of Fire seems widely admired. It's generally considered a significant improvement over Heart of Thorns. Why? Beats the hell out of me.

And so we look ahead to the third expansion. You'd think, given the trajectory, I'd be pessimistic. The first one, that I liked, failed, relatively speaking. The second one, that I hated, succeeded, relatively speaking.

And if PoF was bad for me, the live content that came after was even worse. The nadir of the game so far.

Only, things have changed. At ANet, things are always changing. Somehow they turn stasis into churn, constantly thrashing yet never seeming to move forward.

A lot of people have left the company since Path of Fire. Not co-incidentally, I'm sure, a year ago, things began to turn. From the start of the Icebrood Saga there seemed to be a new attitude. Someone seemed to want things to be fun again.

And they have been. Mostly. Even when they haven't been fun for me I could see how they would be, if I was still as invested in the game as I once was.

So, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm hoping that End of Dragons navigates a path between pandering to the hardcore and pacifying the casuals. Evidence suggests that can happen.

Also, expansions need Must-Have Features and the features have to be something that can be monetized. HoT had gliding. PoF had mounts. I loved the first, loathed the second.

What will it be next? Could it be housing? I doubt it. I'll be happy just so it's something that gets ANet off of mounts for a while. God, I hate mounts in this game.

As for the story, well, End of Dragons. You'd think that says it all. And it would be neat. That would make a ten-year arc, near enough,  the supposed expected lifetime of the game. I know we don't talk about Guild Wars 3 but this is looking suspiciously like the end of an era.

And now, of course, we wait. Heart of thorns had a long build up. This is going to be longer still. Maybe. Depends just when in 2021 the train arrives.

I'm sure plenty of people are speculating already. I'll pass on that. I don't care enough about the story or the game any more to spend energy guessing. It'll be here when it gets here and that'll be soon enough.

It's nice to know it's coming, at least.

Making Plans

As I mentioned the other day, it was only when I went to make some Ascension spells with my EverQuest II sage that I realized he'd never started, far less finished, the signature tradeskill questline from 2018's Chaos Descending expansion. As I was wheeling him around the various elemental planes to grub up the hundreds of ores, roots, logs and pelts the series of combines required, I found myself wondering what else I'd forgotten to do over the last few years.

In theory, this is where having a blog should come in handy. I ought to be able to flip back through the posts and pick out the plans I made but never carried out. Only a blog doesn't really work that way. Or mine doesn't.

Yes, I have tags or "Labels" as Blogger calls them, but I apply them in a chaotic fashion. I do sometimes go to my tags to find posts I want to link but it takes me a lot longer than it should, even when I know what I'm looking for. And chances are, if I wrote about something I was thinking of doing in the body of a post, there'd be no tag for it, anyway.

Titles are even more useless, thanks to my predeliction for self-amusing obscurantism. I can't tellwhat most of my posts are about from the titles. If looking at them reminds me of anything it's only what song I strip-mined and often not even that.

Of course, I could just pick a date, say three years ago, and start reading. I'd guess I might get through a month of posts before that wore thin. I do love to re-read my own stuff but scanning for unfinished plans sounds an awful lot like work.

So I thought I might just jot down a few things off the top of my head, just to put them out there, in the hope I might come back to the list now and again and see if I can't tick something off. Fat chance, I know, but still...

A List Of Things Undone

Ascended Specialized Class Weapons - Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns

I finished several of these and enjoyed myself quite a lot. I have a few more in various states of incompletion. From what I recall, it's mostly running around maps collecting things. I can do that.

Calaldbog - GW2

I made one of these! I remember saying some very positive things about the experience. I also remember saying I was going to do at least one more. I never did.

Ranger Pets - GW2 - Path of Fire

By the time I got to the end of the storyline in Path of Fire I was heartily sick of everything about it: the narrative, the zones, the mobs, the whole expansion. I've made a concerted effort never to go back since. I have two rangers on my PoF-enabled account. One of them has most of the pets, the other only has a couple. It should just be a case of checking the locations and going there? How hard can that be?

Princess - GW2 - Seriously, how long have I been meaning to do this on my second account?
Five years? It only takes about an hour!

Advanced Logistics Mastery - GW2 - This one's a bit harder but it's so useful. I keep reading it up, realizing how much work it will be and going to do something less intimidating instead. Just knuckle down and do it!

Housing - EverQuest - I used to have a house but I let it lapse. Or possibly collapse. Now I'm logging in every day again, I ought to have somewhere to live. It's embarassing, camping out in the Guild Lobby like one of those people who ends up living in an airport.

More Housing - EQII - Where do I even begin? Why buy prestige homes if you're never even going to visit them, let alone decorate? And it's fun. This is something that's a positive pleasure to do, so why keep putting it off?

Leveling my Fury - EQII - She's been level 89 for months. Either use a token and get her to 110 the easy way or get on with leveling her old school.

Blood of Luclin Mercenaries - EQII - I literally have a whole guild bank vault full of them (ok, not literally, but nearly). Just go get them already! For everyone! Then throw the spares away!

That should do to be going on with. Any more and I'll scare myself.

I might as well throw in the games I meant to keep playing but somehow didn't, as well. Not the ones I dropped for a reason, just the ones where one week I was logging in and the next I wasn't:

Neverwinter Online - I was making some real progress and having fun.
Star Wars: The Old Republic - More than a year since I last logged in.
DCUO - Definitely going back for Wonderverse in August but why wait 'til then?
Elder Scrolls Online - I was enjoying my last run there more than I expected. No idea why I stopped.
AdventureQuest 3D - See ESO.

Try playing a few of those again, why don't you?

And you could finish Divinity: Original Sin 2 while you're about it.

Okay, now I'm talking to myself in the second person, which should probably be a hint this has gone about far enough. All I have to do is pick a project and get started. 

It's that simple, right?

Ain't No Mountain High Enough : GW2

As I may have mentioned a few times in passing, I am not a fan of the mounts that were added to GW2 as a major feature of last year's Path of Fire expansion. My issues with them, which are manifold, include the way they were introduced, what they look like, how they work and how they have been merchandised. There isn't much I do like about them.

Despite the company line for many a year holding that mounts neither fit the game nor were necessary, I wasn't one of those who felt aggrieved when I heard that ArenaNet had chosen to add them. I like mounts in MMORPGs. As well as their obvious utility, I think they add color and flavor for the individual characters that ride them as well as providing a visual spectacle for everyone else. They also represent an additional form of content for players who enjoy collecting things.

There are drawbacks. Although most MMOs begin with relatively straightforward mounts that fit the milieu and the lore of the world - horses, camels, perhaps wolves or large lizards - it's never long before surrealism and hyperbole set in. The sight of a dozen players clustered around the banker, mounted on everything from smoke-belching motorcycles to thirty-meter long fire-breathing dragons can be somewhat immersion-breaking, not to say antisocial.

Even entirely lore-appropriate mounts can be intensely irritating. One of the reasons I moved from a Live server to Test in EQ2 was the introduction of flying carpets with the Kingdom of Sky expansion. They were so annoying - not only visually but in the way everyone insited on talking about them all the time in general chat - that I felt it was worth moving to a far less-populated environment just to get away from them.

Then there's the way mounts affect gameplay. Those carpets didn't actually fly - they just drifted along a foot above the ground - but eventually all MMOs face the decision on whether to introduce genuine flying mounts. The argument against them is that they trivialize content. The argument in favor is that they make content easier to access.

I lean very much towards the latter. I love flying mounts. My experience in every MMORPG I've played that has them is that they open up the world, make my time there more enjoyable and encourage me to play more than I otherwise would have done.

Developers, even though they are the people who added the ability to fly in the first place, often have much more ambivalent feelings about it. Sometimes they try to hedge their bets by gating the right to a flying mount behind lengthy questlines or a high monetary cost but inevitably the time comes when almost everyone can fly.

At that point the choice is either to design content around the fact or risk a player revolt by taking the option away. Blizzard tried that and things were ugly for a while before the current, grudging compromise was established.

The GW2 devs have tried to avoid the flying problem by offering mounts that almost-but-not-quite fly. The Griffin can stay aloft for a good while - if you find a high place to start from and work the keyboard effectively. Most of the time it doesn't do that. It bunny-hops in way that's both jarring and embarrassing.

Even though they have, so far, avoided the issues that arise from giving players the unfettered power of flight, the combination of powered gliding on a Griffin, vertical ascent on a Springer and the ability to treat water as though it were solid on a Skimmer has rendered much of the original content of the game, if not obsolete, then at least avoidable. With the right mount you can go over, around or through just about anything in Tyria these days.

I don't use my mounts very often. I enjoyed getting the Griffin but it's fiddly and unsatisfying as a regualr ride. I pop it out if I need to keep up with a zerg when running dynamic events in PvE, but that in itself is something I very rarely do these days. Indeed, the reason I don't is because to do so now you pretty much have to be mounted or you get left behind. Rather than mount up I've opted to bow out of that content altogether.

One of the few things I do occasionally enjoy doing with my mounts is scrambling up mountains to see how high I can get. I took my Springer and Griffin out in Timberline Falls a week or two ago, when I happened to be down there hunting Krait, and I was amazed just how high I was able to get.

The sad thing is, there isn't all that much to see in Core Tyria when you get that high. Unlike Heart of Thorns or Path of Fire, which were designed as three-dimensional spaces from the get-go, the original maps were built with the expectation that they'd be seen on foot. All you get when you climb a mountain there is a lot of flat, featureless rock and a view that looks like a schematic.

GW2's implementation of mounts seems to me to have benchmarked against just about all the worst aspects of the feature. With particular irony the designers have contrived at "realism" while simultaneously embracing the wildest fantasies of fashion.

The base offer is exceptionally small at just five animals. They are all somewhat bland, supposedly consistent with the game's look and lore, but "skins" are available (at a cost), which provide a seemingly never-ending stream of carnival costumes. The result is an eye-gouging display, seemingly unrestricted not just by lore or realism but by any sense of taste or aesthetic judgment.

The fatuous adherence to an imagined authenticity reaches its nadir with the momentum added to the mounts' movement. Unlike the slick, smooth, satisfying travel possible in just about every other MMO I've ever played, GW2 mounts insist on lurching and skewing like drunken teenagers in a stolen car. Leaving aside the propensity this has to cause motion sickness, it baffles me that anyone could find the experience in any way enjoyable, let alone convincing.

People do, though. My dislike of GW2's mounts is very much a minority view. It has, nevertheless, contributed in no small part to the reduced amount of time I spend playing GW2 these days and to my diminished interest in the game over the last six months or so.

When I do play, I mainly restrict myself to those areas of the game where mounts are either less relevant (Core Tyria, Heart of Thorns) or banned altogether (WvW). I barely ever visit the Path of Fire of maps. As I anticipated, my interest in that expansion, which was never strong, ended the moment I completed the main storyline and finished the Griffin quest.

If I never go back to those maps it will suit me very well. The Heart of Thorns maps, by comparison, I still thoroughly enjoy and frequently visit, to explore or hang out there just for the fun of it.

Had Path of Fire been designed without mounts in mind, with maps intended to be seen on foot and from the air while gliding, I most likely would be exploring them happily even now. Unfortunately, not only are those maps dead to me but they have likely killed off most of my interest in whatever comes after them. Once introduced, mounted travel is in an MMO for ever.

All I can really hope is that, when the next expansion is announced, it will have a new sales driver that ANet want to prioritize. If so, mounts will take a back seat as the designers attempt to direct cash flow into whatever new idea they've come up with and perhaps that might be something more to my taste.

Incoming!

As I write this, I've just finished the fifth of the six Palawa Joko Invasions I needed to complete the full set of maps for the Zone Defense achievement in GW2's new Current Events update. That. mind you, is on my third account. I've already done it on accounts one and two and when I finish it on number three I'm going to log in my fourth, the F2P one I haven't used since last September, and do six more.

This weekend both Mrs Bhagpuss and I barely missed an invasion. Every hour, on the half-hour, there we were, waiting in the crowd in Metrica Province or Wayfarer Foothills or Caledon Forest as predicted by the Phasic Distortion Reader, a handy device which we both now have on all three accounts.

The Reader costs two gold to make and involves a fair bit of running around plus a full day's wait if you aren't an Engineer, an Asura or a Charr in  the Iron Legion. All it does is tell you in game what you can see on Dulfy any time you care to look. It's fluff in other words.

And yet we dig it out of our bags at the top of the hour and announce its findings to each other in Guild chat and thank each other for the information. We used it to encourage our one other regular guild member, who only plays on Sundays, to come and join the fun, which he did, although he probably had no idea what was going on.

In between invasions there were times when I did little more than clear my bags and hang around waiting for the next one. It's not as though I even want the rewards. The Achi gives three kegs of Karma, which totals 22,500. I have nearly 15 million karma on my main account. Even my third account has nearly seven and a half million.

The dropped loot is quite nice but it's the same loot you can get 24/7 in Path of Fire maps. Only I would never go there to get it. I don't go to Path of Fire maps any more. Well, for the vista daily or the plant-picking daily, occasionally, if there's nothing better. Otherwise, never.

PoF is all but dead to me already, as I predicted it would be. I saw the story once and hope never to see it again. I got the mounts and didn't like them, although I am gradually getting used to using the Griffin for general travel.

I haven't even finished a single one of the Ascended collects even though I want the weapons. Occasionally I think about it, then I imagine going through those tedious maps again and I decide to leave it for when I'm in the mood, which so far I never have been.

Whether the PoF maps are, in general, well-used these days I have no idea because I'm not there even to gather anecdotal evidence. I know the ludicrously overgenerous meta in the first LS4 map was being heavily exploited, just as Auric Basin was before the nerf , but that has everything to do with a broken game mechanic and nothing to do with whether anyone is actually enjoying the content. I did it once and haven't been back.

All I can say is that the Joko invasions, which look like they must have taken a very small team a very short time to create, are drawing big crowds and those crowds seem very happy. I know I am.

What the invasions remind me of more than anything is Rift in its early days, when it was good. As I think about it, a very great deal of the MMO content I've enjoyed most - certainly the content I've found the most addictive or compelling - in the last seven years or so has followed a very consistent and rather simple pattern: a bunch of mobs descend out of a portal and try to kill us and take our stuff and we band together to try to stop them.

As well as rifts, Rift had invasions. I liked those even more because they came at me instead of waiting for me to come at them. WoW had the Legion invasions which kind of did both. I really enjoyed those. I played more WoW while they were on than at any time since my six month stint years ago. I even subbed for a couple of months just to do them.

GW2 had the Karka invasion and then the wonderful Scarlet Invasions plus a few more along the way. Even World vs World, the part that appeals to me, follows the format. The enemy zerg arrives unexpectedly and starts sieging our keep, the call goes out and we rush to defend.

It seems to me that this could - should - be the PvE answer to PUBG. Content that's easy and quick to make but also infinitely replayable. Because it's PvE and it's in an MMORPG it probably has to have loot attached. Loot or achievements or titles. Preferably all three.

It's also best, I think, if there's something at stake. Something practical. In WvW you don't want to lose your structures, particularly if they've been upgraded and have banks and waypoints. In Rift beta and possibly for a month or two after launch if you failed to stop an invasion the baddies would kill your questgivers and take over your quest hubs for a while. I liked that but it got removed so presumably most people didn't.

Still, I don't think it should be beyond the wit of professional game developers to hit a balance between incentive and annoyance that falls on the side of motivation rather than frustration. The payoff would be a game that people wanted to keep playing because it was fun to keep playing - as seems to be the case with PUBG and its clones.

Gevlon posted today about the terrible fit "story" makes for an MMORPG and while I don't often agree with the goblin on much I do think he has a point here. Lore, for sure. MMORPGs thrive on lore. It gives context, creates a world. Story, though? Story gets in the way. It can work if it plods along behind or off to one side but put it at the front and get it to pull and the whole cart veers sideways. Sometimes it tips over.

No-one really knows what Joko is playing at with these invasions. There's no story to them and no-one cares. The action tells its own story. Invasions are exciting and dynamic but above all they are inclusive. They require no explanation beyond "Stop them!" and no organization beyond "Get here, now!". They're drop in and drop out if you want them to be or stay all day if you have the time and the inclination. They have a rhythm and a pace that allows for time to breathe between battles and yet they feel relentless, inexorable.

In beta, Rift looked like it might be the first MMORPG built around invasions. For a while, even after the post-launch nerfs, it was. If I had a wish for a new MMORPG it would be just that - all Invasions, all the time. I think someone could make a lot of money doing that right.

Failing that I'll take a Rift Classic server, please. I really miss those Sunday afternoons in Stillmoor.

I Know My Way Down The Side Streets Now : GW2

I wasn't all that impressed with GW2's Living World Season Three and after Path of Fire's somewhat perfunctory narrative I'm not building my hopes up for Season Four either. The best thing I can say about the current central storyline is that at least the fighting's not as painful as it used to be.

That doesn't mean that I'm not invested in the storyline or the characters. It's a soap opera. I know it's rubbish but I still want to know what happens next.

I don't really care all that much about the ultimate fate of Tyria, but I do want to know if Jory and Kas are going to continue on their downward spiral towards some kind of abusive, dysfunctional personal hell. I want to find out whether Braham's ever going to grow up and, more than anything, I want to know whether Zoja's going to recover.

Forget Gods and Dragons. This is my GW2. I know those people. I've spent five years with them. I mourn and miss the ones who've gone. Well, some.

I miss Scarlet. When she appeared as a Memory in The Domain of the Lost it was like unexpectedly meeting an old friend. One you'd thought had died.

I miss her enough to imagine things. Enough to imagine that maybe she might not be dead after all. It's not such a stretch. As I expounded at length a while back, no-one ever really dies in Tyria. Why should Scarlet be the exception?

My fantasy didn't come from nothing. Not this time. There's something mysterious afoot.

For some while now GW2's best storytelling has been happening in the shadows, on the sidelines, left of center, off of the strip. The apologetically labelled "Side Stories" have given us more to chew on than the main course, at least if you're feasting on speculation and puzzlement. I still don't know what my Krait Oil's good for but I'm hanging on to it.

It was disappointing not to find one of the single line throwaway hints buried in the last Update Notes but it transpires that there are some stories too obscure even for that. It was by sheer chance, as I was idly flipping through the forums, that I came across this.

Naturally I dropped everything to investigate. First I went to Godlost Swamp and ran around. Didn't find anything new although I did have a number of post-ironic conversations with various god-botherers who don't seem to have updated their theology since launch day.

Tapping out in the swamp I waypointed to Lornar's Pass and flew my griffon down to Reaver's Gate. I had more luck there. The corpse was cold (and bald) but the trail was still warm.

I went through the dead priest's pockets and found a journal. Isn't there always a journal? In the interests of science and to scratch that itch I opened it.

A red lady, speaking in dreams, seeking allies...could that be...? Well, doesn't it fit the pattern? Wasn't she always about the alliances?

I knelt to Grenth's statue, which still seems able to dispense buffs even though Grenth himself has taken the last train to the coast. With some prompting from the forums I took several screenshots in which you can faintly see the shapes of New Krytan text but what it means or whether it's new I have no idea.

The forums also told me that what I wanted in Godslost I could only find when the Shadow Behemoth makes his two-hourly showing. He was near due so I ported back there and waited. And it might have been a long wait if I hadn't gone and done the pres myself - no-one else was bothering.

When he did arrive he brought with him several "Mysterious Skeletons". They weren't attackable. They just stood there, surrounded by black fuzz like fungus on a log. They are indisputably new but their inscrutability gives nothing away.

The Behemoth eventually fell. I was ready for what came next but had I not been pre-warned I doubt I'd have spotted it. A small, orange-red "Mysterious Spirit" spawned and shot off across the swamp. I gave chase, wildly snapping my camera in its general direction until it came to a halt beside another dead body.

There's a necromancer who lives in a hut nearby so I went to ask him if he knew anything. He did, a little. More necromancy. Something about a call. It didn't help much.

For now that seems to be all there is but you can feel it in the wind. Something's coming.

I just hope it's Her.

What's The Point? EQ2, GW2, WoW

I sat down at the PC this morning not sure what I was going to do. I have the week off work (yes, I do get a lot of vacation time, thank you very much) but I have no particular plans other than to enjoy myself.

The night before, I'd logged off  about two-thirds of the way towards the total number of Hero Points I need to complete Mirage, the Path of Fire elite specialization for the Mesmer. Contrary to my previously expressed doubts I'm finding PoF somewhat more sticky than expected. Partly this is because, after a full month's break, by far the longest she's ever taken from the game, Mrs Bhagpuss is playing again and we've been duoing on and off in the new maps.

I think it was Aywren who mentioned somewhere (I'd link it if I could find it) that the PoF open world content is a lot easier to handle in a duo or a group. I'm not at all convinced of that. It seems to be just as relentless with two - and "relentless" is definitely the word I most associate with this expansion.  I firmly believe PoF to be the most "hardcore" open world content ANet has released since the original Southsun - far more "hardcore" than anything I experienced in Heart of Thorns.

At one point in Desert Highlands, up around the plateau where the giants roam, we had the most intense fifteen-minute running battle I can ever remember outside of an instance in GW2. It all kicked off when Mrs Bhagpuss spotted a necklace near a nest of skelks and made a beeline to grab it.

Skelks were thick along the ramp up to their nests and much thicker still at the top. There were many veterans and the respawn rate was ferocious. Skelks have the annoying ability to stealth and teleport so it was impossible to tell which were respawns and which were just the ones already in play, flicking in and out of existence.

Tyrian Giants are proper big.

Added to that we had aggroed a Giant on the way up and he was hurling boulders at us. I'm sure there were other kinds of creatures mixed in as well but it was so hectic it was hard to tell. It also didn't stop or even slow down.

After a quarter of an hour of non-stop combat I called a retreat and we withdrew. At no point did it ever look as though we were going to get ahead of the game. We could still be there fighting skelks now.

This, I find, is entirely typical of the whole expansion. Bringing more people just seems to increase the number of mobs. Not that there aren't plenty to begin with. I soloed a Hero Point in Crystal Oasis last night, the one where you fight a Djinn of the Air. When I started it was just him and me. When I finished it was him (dead) me (2% health) a Veteran Hydra, a Veteran Sand Shark and a pack of hyenas. Probably some sand eels in there too - there usually are.

The big difference between fights like that in PoF and similar all-pile-ons in HoT is that you do feel you can win in the desert. I did win. It was flippin' hard going, there was a lot of dodging, I stealthed and reset a couple of times and once I kited the Djinn so far he leashed, but I always felt I could do it.

What people mostly didn't like about Heart of Thorns Hero Points was that some of them were intended not to be soloable. Putting a Champion instead of Veteran at a Hero Point will tend to give that impression.

That dam' HP's gotta be around here somewhere...

The PoF Hero Points are all soloable by intent but you still hear people asking for help with them in map chat because they're bloody hard. Whether you prefer the on-demand, manic chaos of PoF to the much more straightforward but by appointment only predictability of HoT seems to me to be largely a matter of taste. I'm fine with either.

The upshot of all that is that I very well might have sat down this morning ready to carry on where I left off. Only I didn't. First, I ummed and aahed over whether to re-sub to WoW. Had I read Stroeb's post on his belated Legion experience first, I almost certainly would have subbed up right away.

As it was, I didn't read that until after I'd finished adding a level to my Shadowknight on EQ2's Fallen Gate progression server. I ended up there because, while I was trying to make up my mind, I went to check if any new pre-expansion content had been patched into EQ2. It hadn't but I saw it was a double XP week for Prog servers.

So I logged in and did that. It's all so...random. I'm not in control of my own actions! Do I need an SK on a Progression Server? Do I need to to level him up? Does it make any frickin' difference if he's Level 30 or Level 31?

Mount skins? We don't need no stinkin' mount skins!

No, but it's fun and that's pretty much all you need to know about it. Syp was wondering why he grinds levels through the Dungeon Finder in WoW when he could be out there questing and seeing the world (again). I don't know. Don't look at me! I don't know why I do any thing in these games...other than it's what I feel like doing it when I do it.

My SK woke up in Butcherblock so that's where he leveled today. It's a really great leveling zone. I've done it many times, both end to end - every quest - and piecemeal as required. With full vitality, 100% server bonus and the 10% from boost from the Clockwork Calamity illusion (which is, surprisingly, usable on all servers) it still took me nearly two hours to do the whole of level 30.

It felt just about right. I'd hate to do it with no vitality and baseline xp though.

I hadn't seen a single other player in Butcherblock all morning. Out of curiosity I typed /who to see if I was alone in the zone. I was. Not unusual in a lower-level zone during the middle of the night by American clocks.

Both EQ games have a handy function few other MMOs offer: you can type /who and it will tell you the name of every character in the zone you happen to be in right now. Or you can type /who all and it will tell you the name of every character currently logged onto the server.

Claws off, birdie! That's my egg.

I guessed everyone must be wherever the level cap has gone. I've lost track of which expansions are active on Stormhold right now. I typed /who all, expecting the usual truncated list of 100 names, which is where the function caps, making it useless for guesstimating the current popularity of the game or your server.

Well, usually it's useless for that. Not so much when the result that's returned is four names. There were four people online on Stormhold.

I'd like to say it was at that point that I remembered the server is due to be closed and all remaining characters transferred to Ant. Bayle. I really should have twigged it when I logged in and the game gave me a free transfer token. I think I even mentioned it in a post a while back...

Embarrassing to admit but I only remembered it when I was halfway through writing this.

All of which makes the two hours I just spent even more completely pointless than I already thought. Except that I really enjoyed myself and I'd happily do it again. Maybe I'll go for Level 32 later today.

That's why, once again, I don't think Gevlon has it exactly right. Or, this time, Syp, whom he cites, either. Sometimes the sheer fun of doing something is all it takes to make something worth doing. When it comes to entertainment, maybe always.