A Six-Footed Friend : GW2

This afternoon I completed the meta-achievement for the new Roller Beetle races in Guild Wars 2. It's not particularly difficult. You have to tick off ten achievements from a list  of seventeen. That would appear to give a wide margin for error, but not all of them count.

The ones that matter are getting either Silver or Gold in a time trial on each of the five tracks and completing fifteen laps of all five as well. Dulfy has a guide but you really don't need one. I didn't look at it until after I'd finished.

The reward is a nifty scarf that blows out behind you in true WW1 fighter pilot style. It's a shoulder-slot item with three dye channels. Although you have to choose just an armor weight - Light, Medium or Heavy - when you get it, whichever one you choose unlocks all three skins.

There is an upmarket "gold" version you can get if you can manage all five tracks in the very tight "gold" time limit. If they nerf a couple of them I might give it a try but as it stands there's no possible chance I'll be able to do Brisban Wildlands and I doubt I'd get Snowden Drifts or Mount Maelstrom either.

In any case, looking at the pictures of the two scarves on Dulfy, I can't see the difference. Well, I can: one is yellow and the other is blue. The caption, however, says the blue one is the Golden version so either Dulfy is colorblind, the artists at ANet are having a little joke or someone dyed the thing before they took the screenshot.

I think that, for an event of this kind, it's remarkably well done. The meta only requiring Silver puts it within the reach of most players while the ability to rent a beetle for just one silver per hour opens the races up to everyone, regardless of whether they have the Path of Fire expansion or not.

The tokens - Racing Medallions, to give them their proper name - the vendor takes come fairly quickly. Completing the meta and doing a few extra races along the way has netted me 289 so far and I haven't been doing the dailies, which would add quite a few more. 

The dailies are only around for the duration of the Sweepstake, which means they're with us for a month. Given that you get medallions for normal racing and that the Bronze, Silver and Gold time trial rewards refresh every day at reset, anyone who really cares should be able to buy anything they fancy on the vendor so long as they're patient.

The event has had one interesting and unexpected side-effect for me. As I say all too often, I don't much like GW2's mounts and although I enjoyed getting the Roller Beetle I had written it off completely as means of transport. It seemed both ridiculous and impractical.

Having spent a lot of time with mine, I do now feel somewhat differently about it. Once you get to grips with the controls it is, counter-intuitively, one of the steadier rides. It's also highly useful for crossing flat areas fast and there are quite a lot of flat areas in Tyria.

The beetle itself is also oddly appealing when you take time to study it closely. It looks rather like a little old man carrying a heavy load. It does have six legs but it stands upright on two of them, waves two about like arms and the other two form some kind of art deco portico out front.

The saddle your character sits on looks like a cross between a carnival ride and one of WildStar's hoverboards. It's entirely unconnected to the mount itself. You hang there in space at the back, looking pretty darned cool.

There are also resting animations that add a sense of ownership and indeed affection to the relationship between rider and mount. The beetle often does an endearing little shuffle from side to side, stamping its feet and "singing". Less frequently, your character reaches forward to pat the beetle firmly on the shell.

All in all this has been rather an impressive addition to the game. I'd take it over just about any episode of the Living Story, post Season One. I'm not at all surprised to see that the achievements for it appear in the Side Stories category. Yet again the supposed back-up team proves to have a much better idea of what constitutes genuine entertainment than the leads.

From here it's all downhill to Wintersday, I guess. As far as I can tell the dates haven't been anounced yet but I'm expecting it to start next Tuesday and run into the New Year. I wonder if we'll get a new race for that as well?

Go-Go-Go-Go, Go Rocket Roll-Roll-Roll-Roll: GW2

When ArenaNet added the sixth mount, the Roller Beetle, to Guild Wars 2's increasingly bizarre stable, I described it as like riding "a souped-up, ride-on mower". I also praised the collection required to add it to your account as "enjoyable, well-paced and satisfying".

I imagined the reason the thing was in the game at all was mostly to add some short-term bridging content between major releases. I thought it would hang around with the rest of  the Side Story stuff, providing background content for newer players, when they trickle in. It also had the benefits of being both a nostalgic nod to the original Guild Wars and handy peg on which to hang yet more Gem Store skin sales.

What I didn't imagine, even in my most feverish dreams, was that the ridiculous creature would come to be the centerpiece of one of the game's bigest marketing pushes in a long while. Today's patch added Roller Beetle Race Courses to six maps, together with a slew of Achievements and in-game rewards, supported by a month-long sweepstake featuring prizes worth thousands of dollars.

As I've mentioned before, I love races. As I've also mentioned, I hate GW2's mounts. Paradox! Conundrum! Impasse!

Well, not really. My major objection to mounts is the damper they put on Mrs Bhagpuss's gameplay. She can't use them at all. I don't like them but I can deal with them when I have to. If it's a choice between mounting up and racing or standing glumly on the sidelines watching, I'll get my saddle.

In the course of a couple of hours I've tried the races in Diessa Plateau, Snowden Drifts, Gendarran Fields and Mount Maelstrom, as well as the training run in Kessex Hills. Just Brisban Wildlands to go. They vary enormously in length and difficulty, the two factors not necessarily being connected.

The main feature is competitive racing, on a schedule I have yet to work out. I've done three of those. The first timed out before I finished because I started late. I still got a reward, which was unexpected. I managed to finish the other two within the time allowed but about fifty people got there ahead of me.

I suspect it's going to have to be a slow day, say midweek, around 3am Pacific, with a major event going on somewhere in the game, before I place for points. First day of Wintersday or a Living Story episode might be a plan.

As well as actual races, every course has a time trial you can start at will and repeat as often as you like, although you only get rewarded for the first time you hit the benchmark times. They use the familiar Race/Adventure UI and offer Bronze, Silver and Gold rewards. As yet, the six time trials are not even close in terms of challenge. Whether the easy ones will be toughened up or, more likely, the harder ones toned down we'll find out soon enough but so far I've racked up two Silvers and two Golds.

The Golds came in the training run, which is as simple as you'd expect, and in Gendarran Fields, a long course that I found very straightforward. I got Gold on my second try.

The first Silver came from Diessa, which was also the first time trial I tried. It's another longish course; a little harder.  I got Bronze on my second run out but it took three or four more goes to get Silver. I didn't attempt Gold but it looked possible.

The second was in Snowden, which is vicious. It took me more than a dozen attempts just to get Bronze and I almost left it at that. It's a very short course but the hairpin turns are ferociously hard to handle on the inertia-driven beetle. I found myself missing gates on every run, sometimes launching myself into space and landing so far away I couldn't even find the track.

Because it's so short, there's no time to correct mistakes and you can't afford to take it slowly. It was the busiest track by far and map chat was filled with cursing and complaints the whole time I was there. I did eventually manage to scrape a Silver but I wouldn't even contemplate going for Gold. I would bet that the Gold target time, currently 32 seconds, gets pushed back to 35 seconds in a hot-fix soon. I'll wait for that and even then I'm not sure I'll do it.

Mount Maelstrom is both very long and very tough. I have yet to get Bronze on a time trial although I have successfully completed the three lap race within the time limit. I've heard that Brisban is harder still. I can't say I'm looking forward to finding out.

Given that this is optional content - it's included under Side Stories, after all - you might imagine people who don't enjoy it would just skip it. Most won't. They'll do it and hate it because it has Achievements attached and a significant number of Achievement Points to go with them. Also titles and a Racing Scarf. This sort of thing matters.

Even for those who aren't AP junkies, there's a vendor selling Endless Tonics including Fancy Cats and Dogs as well as other desirable bits and pieces. GW2 players live for this kind of thing. The prices are on the steep side - 350 Racing Medallions each for the tonics, for example. I have 89 medallions for my efforts so far, the bulk of which came from completing Achievements. Once those are all done it's down to the repeatables and the competitive racing.

At the risk of repeating myself, I like racing. I can imagine running enough races to get 350 tokens - once. I may well need to do it again for Mrs Bhagpuss, if there's something she wants. The races are permanent content, so there's no rush and if they were foot races, like Sanctum Sprint, I could easily see myself whiling away many hours on a weekend, doing laps and racking up the rewards.

The Roller Beetle isn't helping, though. It's annoying enough to make more than a few runs feel like hard work. I wonder if it checks what mount you're using? If you just want to finish, the Griffin or the Raptor would be a lot easier on those tight turns.

I suspect this is going to be one of the very many additions to GW2 that I quickly forget exists at all. There's a long list of those and it includes plenty of things I really liked when they were introduced, like the Cadalbolg Collections, for example.

I'll try to keep at it at least for the next month. I'll have a go at doing a race or two on every account. I could do with a new car. Or a new PC. Or $8000.

Let's be honest: I'd be happy enough if I won a new mousepad.

Roll Your Own: GW2

After all that moaning yesterday, naturally I spent much of today on the new map, Domain of Kourna. What's more, having roundly disparaged the new Roller Beetle mount, what else would I do but decide to go get one for myself?

I don't want the mount but I do like a good scavenger hunt, especially when I know exactly where to go and to get the beetle you have to do not one, not two but three collections. The in-game directions aren't bad but Dulfy has the full spec, with pictures.

I was hoping to get the lot done in time to take a screenshot or two of my cat-hatted druid clinging on for dear life to the saddle of his new, nonsensical ride. It turned out to be more time-consuming than I expected, not least because I also got sidetracked a few times by events. In the end I only managed the first two sets before the ticking clock told me I had time to finish or write about it but not both.

The first collection is very straightforward. All you have to do is find nine "Secret Caches" scattered around the new map. I barely needed to refer to Dulfy's diagrams. They are mostly easy to spot from a good distance away, particularly from the air, should you cruise past on a griffin, as I did.

That took maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Or it would have if I hadn't stopped to help one Asuran "scientist" who wanted me to dance with some Choya and another who had some half-baked device for tracking mutated rats he needed testing.

Those felt quite like the kind of events GW2 built its original reputation on - daft, inconsequential, amusing. If you avoid the metas there are often a few little amuse-bouche like that scattered around.

Speaking of the meta, I did some of that while I was working on the second collection. Lognodo in the comments to yesterday's post said the new map meta felt incomplete and I agree it certainly seemed on the short  side for a meta. More like a short chain.

It'd be a lot more secret without the glaring yellow text.

The three collections are thematically coherent. The first has you finding medicines and drugs - some legal, some not so much - to fix the ailing Petey (a beetle). The second sees you collecting parts to make a saddle to ride him.

I don't really want to think about how the saddle attaches to the beetle but if that makes no sense at least all the bits that go to make it seem logical. Bits of golems, kit liberated from the Inquest, power sources from the energy-rich anomalies...

It also means a good deal of traveling, most of it in a crowd. There were so many people at Golem Mk II that my frame rate dropped to a slide show, something that hasn't happened to me at a World Boss event for years. As for the Anomaly, those events have been deserted for what seems like forever but in Gendarran Fields this afternoon there were three Commander tags and something like fifty people.

I was expecting this to be a problem but the only problem was getting there before it died.

One thing that GW2 manages better than most other MMOs is keeping elderly maps alive. It would be so easy to keep all new content in maps attached to the current expansion (and for commercial reasons most new content does require access to Path of Fire) but ANet routinely thread some of that content back through the older maps as well.

Oddly, it wasn't the older events that posed a problem. They were heaving. The one thing that slowed me down was finding anyone doing a Bounty in the new map. I hung around by the Bounty Board for the best part of an hour, on and off. I checked LFG regularly. Nothing.

I tried taking a bounty and starting it to see if people would join in but the one I chose was up on a mesa and no-one passed by. I was seriously considering popping my Commander tag and starting my own LFG squad but I wasn't keen to exhibit my complete ignorance of the mobs and their tactics, never having even seen one in action.

By contrast, a very poor turnout for the bounty. I was just happy to get it done.

In the end I went to World vs World to sell and clear my bags and when I came back there was a small squad doing the Bounty Daily. I flapped over to them on my griff and got there just in time for the kill.

With all the various parts for the saddle stuffed in my packs all I had to do was check in with Blish and Gorrick. Much to Gorrick's amusement, Petey the Beetle was having none of it. Now I have to run all over Tyria scraping up scraps to make a beetle banquet to bribe the blasted bug.

One of those delicacies comes from the Toxic Spider Queen in Kessex Hills, a vicious Champion mob left over from the Scarlet era. People have giving that thing a wide birth for years. That's absolutely going to need a good turnout.

Another is a new mob, the Alpha Beetle, deep in The Silverwastes. Dulfy warns "...be vigilant as the beetle has very little HP and dies quickly" but that was before the latest patch-to-the-patch "Updated the “Kill the alpha beetle” event to be a champion group event".

Even the sky is uninspiring.

All fine and dandy right now, when people are falling over themselves to grab the shiny, new mount, but perhaps not so much in a few months time for the late starters. Oh well, it's been tweaked once, it can be tweaked again. Not sure when I'll get around to finishing up the final part but I'll be sure not to leave it too long, just in case.

As for the new map itself, I can't say I was very taken with it. It's a scrubby tract of desert with a lot of grey rock. There are some striking orange sands and a few lush, green oases but overall it's not the kind of place I can imagine wanting to spend more time in than I had to.

I'll be very glad when we're done with the desert altogether. Ironically, I wanted to go in the direction of Crystal Desert after Heart of Thorns but I've had more than enough of sand and rock now.

I hope when we're done doing whatever it is we're going to do to Kralkatorrik we head off to the Far Shiverpeaks to sort out Jormag. Or, after the recent revamp of underwater water weapons, maybe we could go hunting for Steve the Sea Dragon. I could go for a subsea expansion.

Just please don't let's go underground into the magma tunnels looking for Primordus. I've seen enough lava to last a lifetime.