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.

Did That Thing Just Move? : GW2

Sometimes I catch myself wondering why I still spend 80% and more of my gaming time playing GW2. Especially when there are so many other MMORPGs I want to play.

Surely after almost four years, counting from Beta Weekend One, there can't be anything new to see or do? Not in the Old Lands of the original game, the place we now know as Core or Pact Tyria, anyway.

Well, stuff and nonsense to that. In the first week of this New Year, while standing around rummaging through my bags on various Tyrian street corners where I've rummaged many, many times before, I have been amazed to overhear several NPC conversations that were completely new to me.

Is someone adding these as we go along? Is there some secret team at ANet busily recording fresh small talk and seeding it across Queensdale and The Black Citadel? Or, more likely, are there rare and ultra-rare one-liners and exchanges that fire only when certain events play out to an unusual end?

Speaking of events, I'm still finding new ones even in maps I've completed on multiple characters. Only a couple of days ago I discovered a hidden cave I'd never seen before, complete with trolls and a Veteran Troll with his dynamic event flag proudly flying. I bet he doesn't get much trade.

The real capper, though, happened last night as I was doing the Ascalon Vista daily in Plains of Ashford. As I was standing there, about to click, a flurry of movement in the lake below caught my attention.

It was only the frickin' Charr submarine going on manoeuvres! I have seen that submarine a hundred times if I've seen it once. I first saw it way back in beta. I've done the annoying event involving fighting separatists bound on sabotaging it at least half a dozen times. I have never, not once, until last night, seen that darn thing move!

I was so taken aback it's astonishing I had the presence of mind to snap a couple of screenshots. If I hadn't I'd doubt my own sanity. It makes me wonder how many other apparently static objects may harbor a secret motility. I'd dearly love to be there when those giant Charr war-wagons in Iron Marches roll.

So, in essence, that's why I still play GW2. Anything can happen. Okay, usually it doesn't. Usually the same thing happens. Repeatedly. But it might and that's what matters..

And, in fact, come to think about it, that applies to all MMOs. Which is one of the many reasons I enjoy them so much even after all these years.

Picking Up The Pace : GW2

When GW2 arrived back in late summer of 2012 it sought to bring a number of new concepts to the MMO table. Two in particular attempted to address shortcomings perceived to have dogged the leveling process in earlier MMOs.

First there was the supposed problem of inverse progress. In most MMOs the early levels pass in a blur, things come into focus in the mid-levels and finally everything goes into slow-motion for the final grind to cap. Level five might take ten minutes, level thirty ten hours, level 80 a week. GW2 attempted to solve this inequality with something occasionally referred to, somewhat oxymoronically, as the "flat level curve".

According to Isaiah Cartwright on the ArenaNet Blog back in 2010 (long-vanished from the official website but handily preserved here) the idea was for every level to take roughly the same amount of time. Discounting the tutorial and possibly the very first few levels, the intended time-per-level all the way to 80 was planned to come in around a couple of hours or so, as evidenced, albeit with some interrogative fudging, in this Cartwright quote: "...it takes about the same time to go through each level. It’s pretty simple; if we expect you to level up every few hours, then why shouldn’t it be that way all through the game?". 

Is ectoplasm flammable? I hope not...

The second dragon to be slain by the sword of the new paradigm was wasted sub-cap content. One reason for the years-long development cycle of triple-A MMOs is the immense amount of artist and designer hours it takes to create the topography and activity that makes up the virtual world. Games that attempt to control costs by launching with restricted leveling paths and minimal low and mid level zones risk taking a serious PR hit in terms of predicted re-playability. Rift would be an example.

The Catch-22 has long been this: you need to come out of the gate with a big, sprawling open world or MMO players won't take your game seriously. The established games that make up your competition have had years to build up portfolios of zones numbered in the dozens or even the hundreds. At the same time, you know that a few months after launch almost no-one will be using any of your expensive zones other those at the beginning and the end of the level curve.

MMO fashion has already moved on in just the couple of years since ANet thought they'd found a solution. If they were making GW2 now no doubt we'd be reading all about their marvelous procedural processes and emergent AI. Back then, though, the buzzword everyone was using was "Dynamic" and along with Dynamic Events in a Dynamic world they gave us Dynamic Level Adjustment.

I know Charr are big cats but this is ridiculous

What that meant in practice was that your character would never outgrow a map. A level 70 passing through a level 25 area would be seamlessly re-calibrated to match the level of his surroundings. If an event popped he could jump right in without either spoiling things for the natural lower-level players around or wasting his own time. He'd be challenged as though he was still 25th but he'd gain xp and karma appropriate to his actual level. All maps would therefore remain attractive to all levels forever.

That, at least, was the theory. Very quickly, however, it became apparent that most level 80s weren't interested in doing level 25 content for the fun and the challenge. They hadn't leveled all the way to the top just so they could drop back down to the bottom again and futz around there forever. They didn't need the xp, there were better ways to get the Karma and, with the possible exception of crafting mats, they had no use for the level 25 loot.

ANet attempted to make the idea more attractive by changing things so that loot dropped based on the character's actual rather than dynamic level, but even so it turned out that most players just weren't all that interested in revisiting maps they'd "done" (unless, of course, there was a hefty bribe, a nice, fat loot pinata like The Shatterer, say, or a no-effort, goof-off Champ Train).

Go fer yer guns, Black Jake!

This history was flitting through my mind on and off yesterday as I leveled my new Guardian from five to fifteen, a thoroughly absorbing, entertaining and satisfying experience but one that made me wonder, possibly for the first time, whether the Flat Leveling Curve and Dynamic Level Adjustment may not be such great ideas after all. It's a thought that surprised me because they were two of the pre-launch concepts that most attracted me to GW2 in the first place and which, I would have said until now, had served me well as a player.

In brief, what happened was this: my character developed. In the course of Easter Sunday, from early afternoon until around midnight, she acquired and learned how to use eleven types of weapon, trained in six of the eight tradeskills, made herself food, weapons and full sets of armor at level five and again at level ten, acquired and spent half a dozen skill points and gained, often at considerable risk and with considerable effort, Map Completion for Plains of Ashford.

Or you could go to WvW to bank, respond to a Map Call to Hills and end up level fifteen at 3 a.m.
That works too.

 That done, she stood back to take a look at herself. She saw a well-rounded, well-equipped adventurer; level twelve with plenty of room to improve. While I'd strongly prefer that all her weapon skills weren't finished just because opening them is a lot of fun and getting it done so fast feels a bit like eating all your Easter Egg in one go (something else I may or may not have done yesterday) but that's a minor regret. All the rest of the pleasurable process of developing and improving that character remains before me.

By implication, therefore, at 80 it will lie behind me. It will have been done. Being able to roam the world, a faux-ingenue, her orange exotics temporarily sprayed mastercraft green, her punches perforce pulled, simply cannot be as satisfying. It can be fun, yes, but fun only takes you so far.

The counter to this is to make a stream of characters, which is what I have done. But the trip to cap in GW2, even if you try to slow it down, takes no more than three or four weeks. Even leaving aside the cost of new slots, just how many characters can one person play?

Baby's First Maw

Perhaps after all it would have been preferable to have at least a modified version of the usual, unbalanced upward curve. Perhaps "completing" a map should take a few days, not a few hours, even for ANet's very specific value of "Complete". Perhaps it would be better to take a few months rather than a few weeks to climb the ladder to the roof. Perhaps by then all those maps might look fresher and more inviting to re-visit.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps I'd be complaining of the grind and the tedium and couldn't we just cut to the chase. Well, I probably wouldn't but very many would. Replayability is not an easily-solved problem for MMOs and it turns out that ANet didn't have the magic wand they thought they did, but still, GW2 makes a better go of it than many.

Whether the current fix will make the journey more compelling or more off-putting remains to be seen. At the moment I'm more open-minded about it than I expected. Fifteen levels have flown by even though I've been trying to take things slow and steady. So far I don't see any evidence of gameplay or design decisions likely to make a brand new player log off in frustration or boredom, never to return. The implementation may be iffy but it's possible the conception may yet be sound. And even if it's not I'm very happy I decided to go find out for myself.

Next up, Diessa Plateau and the Megaserver Experience:  Greatest Hits or that Difficult Second Album?

Kill Variety in Plains of Ashford: A Beginner's Guide, With Photographs: GW2

In a comment on one of Ravious's posts over at Kill Ten Rats a while back I claimed it was possible to get all thirteen kills for GW2's Kill Variety Daily in the very first starting area of Plains of Ashford. I also said I'd take screenshots to prove it. It is, and I have.

Since a couple of the creatures can't always be relied upon to be hanging around waiting for you to kill them at need you'll probably prefer to take a few steps just outside the Smokestead gate to the very beginning of the Old Duke's Estate just to save time. I have checked, though, and you can get both the Moa and Harpy kills while standing behind the gate itself, so they count!

It's also very easy to do Daily Events here and I may do a separate pictorial guide to that at some point. For Daily Healer you'll find plenty of Fishers lying down on the job at Lake Feritas and the Armory and Scrapyard events leave flattened charr NPCs strewn all over just waiting for you to soothe them back to life. Gatherer is possible, although its not the easiest place to do it. Kill Count you can do anywhere, of course, and I guess you could Dodge something here although I haven't tried. Crafting and the Laurel Vendor can be done in Black Citadel, which sort of counts, maybe, but for Aquatic and Veteran Kills I'm afraid you'll have to just hike up your robe and travel a few hundred yards into Plains of Ashford proper.

And with that, here's the guide:

1. Wurms

You'll see these ubiquitous little pests as soon as you come down the ramp from The Black Citadel.

2. Rats

In Plains of Ashford you're never more than a few feet from a rat. The Scrapyard teems with them.

3. Flame Legion

The Flame Legion aren't too bright but there sure are a lot of them. They make repeated attempts on both the Armory and the Scrapyard and hole up in caves to the North and East of the lake. Don't worry if you can't find them; they'll come find you.

4. Ghosts

Thanks to the legacy of the Foefire, nowhere in Plains of Ashford is entirely free of ghosts, although the infestation here is mild. Try along the west side of Lake Feritas or up on the ridge near the tunnel to Martyr's Wood.

5. Oozes

Lurking at the back of the Scrapyard (or wrecking yard if you prefer) you'll find plenty of these bile green gloops. Wear a rubber apron.

6. Hyenas

Don't bother him, he won't bother you. Hyenas pad quietly through the scrub in front of Black Citadel and around the lake.

7. Devourers

Devourers are the dominant predator throughout much of Ascalon. Charr have a strange relationships with these oversized scorpions, training them as warbeasts and developing an unlikely fondness for them as pets. You can scarcely go a yard here without stumbling over a lashtail. Fortunately these specimens are extremely docile.

8. Bats

There are three exits from the starting area of Plains of Ashford. The obvious and safe exit is the big metal walkway going south-east from Smokestead. The other two are both tunnels, one behind Smokestead itself and the other going from the eastern ridge through to Martyr's Woods. Both tunnels are infested with vampire bats. Be wary of them. They are probably the toughest non-veteran creatures in the area and two at a time can kill you.

9. Skritt

Now we're getting a little more obscure. I'd spent a long time in the Charr training area before I came across the Skritt. They live in a small cave behind Tela Range, where charr learn to fire cannons. Some unfathomable Skritt logic leads the little charmers to steal the cannonballs from time time triggering an event but there's no need to wait for that. Just pop one for your daily and do the skill point while you're up there if it's your first visit.

10. Flame Elementals

These flame elementals are easy to miss. They appear only when you destroy the Flame Legion braziers that line the paths up to the caves to the north of the lake. Moreover, once you have filled out Latera Painstorm's Heart you can no longer target the braziers so you're reliant on someone else to fan the flames.

11. Spiders

Remember when I said earlier that there are three ways out of the starting area? I lied. There are four. It's just that no-one in their right mind would use one of them. If you fight your way right through Facula Castrum, the north-west flame legion cave where the shaman appears for an event, you'll come to a tunnel. It goes to the extreme north of Martyr's Woods and it's full of spiders. Enjoy.

12. Tar Elementals

This is an old photo from beta. I waited for over an hour trying to get a shot of the tar elementals that spawn for an event in Lake Feritas. No luck. If they happen to be up, pop one. If not, don't fret. Plenty of other things to murder instead.

13. Moas

Like the good old Moa, for example. For these you have to step just outside the Smokestead gate, where you'll see a pack (herd? flock?) of them careening up and down in that mindless way they have.

I'm not sure why the kill variety requirement was reduced from the elegant fifteen to the rather awkward thirteen. Just in case it ever reverts, never fear! You can still finish it here, although you will have to take just a few paces out into the wider Plains.

14. Harpies

Harpies swoop in for an event that runs regularly even with no player involvement. It takes place immediately to the left of the Smokestead gate as you leave it, right where the mortars are.

15. Marmox

And no, I don't know what the plural of "Marmox" is. For some reason, this lumbering, armored rhino is level ten in an area where everything else, including you, is level six or seven. You might well decide he's not worth the trouble and go further into Ashford for grawl, wargs, bears or minotaurs, just to name a few.

If anyone knows of anything else lurking in the area that counts, please chirp up in the comments and if I can get a photo of it I'll add it in.