Hanging Around

When ArenaNet brought back the Marionette event from Scarlet's War, it came in two flavors: Public and Private. The Private version, which can be triggered by anyone capable of finding a full squad of fifty people willing to do it, is a permanent addition to the game but the Public event was only slotted into the calendar for a single week, something that always seemed strange.

While I was cutting the strings I heard quite a few people express a wish and a hope that the Public version might be allowed to hang around a week or two longer, maybe even be added to the roster of regularly returning events. Some (and I was one of them) even suggested it would make a good addition to the World Boss circuit, making it available several times a day in perpetuity.

When Tuesday rolled around, though, the Marionette was locked up in her private playground as promised. I checked after the update to be sure and not only had the notification of the public version disappeared from the corner of the screen but when the hour rolled around there was only one option at the Scrying Pool: go private or go home.

It was with considerable surprise, then, that I read this news item on MassivelyOP a few minutes ago. The very good news is that there will, after all, be a permanent place in the world for the eighty-player public event. 

There will be some "tweaks", the gist of which seems to be that you'll need a critical mass of players before the event will start. That should prevent situations like the hilarious one I enjoyed a few days ago, when I logged my character back in after having logged her out after the public event the day before, only to find myself the only person in the lane.

Figuring I'd fluked an appearance just as the rest of them had gone inside, I sprinted through the barrier, which happened to be green. I found myself on a platform with... Taimi. 

I'd forgotten that little wrinkle from the original run seven years ago, when the event ran in the genuine, non-instanced version of Lornar's Pass and it was entirely possible to find yourself one of a handful of people who'd turned up. The NPCs, Braham, Rox, Taimi and I foget who else, would try to fill in for the missing players. It was always a token gesture at best.

Taimi, sadly, wasn't much help. She mostly shouted encouragement. She was in Scruffy, her golem, so she could have tanked the boss for me. It was the one that has to be hit from behind so that would have worked out nicely, what with me being pure DPS.

 

Unfortunately, since she didn't, the boss was permanently aggroed on me, making it tough to get behind him. I did manage to stay alive for the full two and a half minutes and I got him to about 75% health, which I count as a moral victory.

Of course, it wouldn't have mattered if I'd been able to one-shot the creature because there were four other platforms with no-one on them at all. I'm still not sure how the barrier turned green in the first place. 

That, I'm guessing, is exactly the sort of thing ANet would rather avoid if at all possible. Their reasons given for bringing the public event back are interesting. Apparently attendance at the event has increased steadily, with more people doing it at the end than when it began. That's a rare thing with special events in GW2. 

Success rates have also been climbing, which doesn't surprise me. For all ANet's laboring the point about this being "a demanding fight" in which "individual players have a huge impact on the outcome of the event" and it requiring "significant coordination and collaboration – much more so than most of the other world events" it honestly is not Asuran Rocket Science. It takes a couple of runs and a quick read through some brief notes to get the hang of it. Compared to Triple Trouble it's a doddle.

If they were concerned the difficulty might put people off, it never made any sense to can the Public event, anyway. It's the Squad version that's genuinely challenging. 

I did the Public version half a dozen times during the week it was here and every time was a success. I did it twice in the squad version and both times it failed. That's not much of a sample, I admit, but plenty of people commented in map chat about how much easier the public version was. It's because you can bring eighty people. Those extra thirty make all the difference.

Whether it will be easy to get eighty people to do it when it's here all the time is another matter. If you can get the fifty to do the squad, though, you really might as well just flag it on LFG and try for the rest. I'm pretty sure you'd get them. Everyone will expect a full map to succeed.

However it works out, I'm happy there'll at least be the possibility of a permanent public Marionette show. The squad version seems too purposeful and serious for what was always a loud, brash, frequently chaotic party.

Now can we look at getting the final fight with Scarlet in her airship over Lion's Arch back, please? That was an instance for a set number of players. It would be perfectly suited for a re-run or, better yet, another permanent slot in the schedule.

A Vision Sent From The Past

Yesterday's official announcement of the already-leaked Guild Wars 2 update, Visions of the Past: Steel and Fire, threw me for something of a loop. What exactly is it?

I notice there's no specific mention of the Living Story/World or of the Icebrood Saga. This doesn't appear to be the next instalment of... anything. It's more a ragbag collection of odd ends.

If it has any theme or structure it would seem to be about looking backwards while glancing ahead. Part of the update focuses on fleshing out one of the least appealing players in the ongoing storyline, the uncharismatic cypher that is Ryland Steelcatcher. He suffers from being the offspring of two far more interesting characters, Rytlock Brimstone and Crecia Stoneglow and he certainly could do with some help if he's to ever going to stand alone.

Someone at ArenaNet must have faith in him, though, because Ryland is the peg on which they've chosen to hang public awareness and acceptance of the new Visions concept. It's a mechanic that will be all too wearyingly familiar to veteran players of other MMORPGs, where having your character stuffed into a cosplay version of some familiar NPC has long been a fallback position for developers with more interest in promoting their own creations than facilitating ours.

I do sometimes get the impression that a significant proportion of the ever-diminishing subset of GW2 players who still care about the plot don't have much experience of or interest in other MMORPGs. For them, this may come as a welcome new experience.

For the rest of us, I suspect it will just turrn out to be another of the usual "learn five new skills while we set you on fire" keymashing farragos we've suffered through too many times already in Living Story instances, only this time we'll all be dressed as pantomime cats, but hey, who knows, maybe ANet will find some way to make it work.I reserve the right to be grudgingly impressed, should the occasion arise.

The rest of the update looks potentially more enjoyable, although I stress "potentially". Given the game presumably relies almost entirely on cash shop sales to surrvive, let alone prosper, ANet's unwillingness to monetize what would undoubtedly become a major revenue stream in fully customizeable housing remains a source of puzzlement. Instead, they prefer to lurk in the dismal shadow of home makeover shows by offering us upgradeable NPC bases.

This time we get to fit out the Eye Of The North, an instance that originally served as a pre-launch incentive but which now acts as a lair for the friendly (?) dragon, Aurene. I haven't managed to summon up the enthusiasm to click my portal stone and find out just how the new version dovetails with the previous Hall of Monuments. Maybe that will change with the March update. Or more likely it won't if the last upgradeable lair is anything to go by. I haven't visited the Sunspear cave, the name of which I've completely forgotten, since the week it appeared.

Then there's a "Public Mission", which I think is a new sub-category of "things to keep people logging in". The brief description reads "Meet Ryland Steelcatcher’s companions and accompany them on a high-stakes mission to battle the Ancient Forgeman." As yourself, I am guessing, rather than zipped into yet another cat suit or while play-acting as Ryland himself.

Since "your job is to blow stuff to smithereens with a cutting-edge charr tank", however, it's entirely possible you won't need to be bothered with a character model at all, let alone your own class abilities, which will presumably be replaced by a big red button marked "Fire". Well, we can hope.

The only thing that puzzles me about this is what makes it "Public". Will the five charr in Ryland's warband be accompanied by a full armored division as a squad of fifty players, all driving charr tanks, crush all before them in their headlong charge for loot and glory? Or is it some kind of ten-person Strike mission? In which case, what's "public" about that?

Dunno. And, frankly, don't care. As of this writing I have yet to even try a Strike mission. Mrs Bhagpuss gave up on the Icebrood Saga after the Prelude. We both still log in every day but it wouldn't make much difference if nothing new was ever added again because everything we do has been in the game for many, many years.

Some of it since Living Story Season One, in fact, to offer an inelegant segue into the final, most intriguing element of Visions of the Past, the return of "four story missions from the first season of Living World for the first time ever!" This was the part I found both the most welcome and the most confusing.

Although I had some reservations about it at the time, a quick dip into the archives here confirms that mostly I enjoyed the first season as it happened. My affection for it has grown over the years, partly through the inevitable nostalgia of the passing of time but mostly because of how much less I enjoyed each subsequent season, which made the first look better and better all the time.

The thing I mainly liked about Season One, though, was the chaotic surge of the massive-scale open world events. I loved the manic waypointing, the hysteria in General Chat, the rampaging zergs, the wild, howling desperate frenzy of it all. It seemed then and seems now to exemplify the first two letters in the acronym of the genre: Massively Multiple.

I'd almost forgotten there were instances as well - and I don't believe there ever were any "Missions", that being a term added to the game in latter years. Whatever you want to call them, someone's found four to bring back for a very belated encore.

The puff reads "Get to know Rox and Braham, face Scarlet’s toxic forces, and remember how far Canach’s come in his time with you." That rings some bells. I recall the one where we first meet Rox in the North Nolan Nursery and one involving Braham in Cragstead. Both of those have been in the game as visitable maps ever since so I guess now we'll be able to re-run the original conversations and combats as well.

Cannach's Lair has, I think, been inaccessible since Season One. It involved bombs and traps, I remember that much. I even wrote a guide for it, which could come in useful. I wonder if I'll get any fresh hits when the update goes live?

As for "face Scarlet's toxic forces", that could mean anything. We fought them for the best part of two years, on and off. I bet it means The Toxic Tower, though. I was very glad to see the back of that in 2013. I have no wish ever to see it again although curiosity will probably drag me in for one last look.

If Anet are going to carry on down this line, what I'd really like to see brought back are the big ticket events from later in the Scarlet storyline. The three that would definitely get me logging in for nostalgic fun and genuine entertainment would be Battle For Lion's Arch, Marionette and the final showdown with Scarlet herself in her mothership.

The Scarlet finale was instanced to begin with so you'd imagine that wouldn't be hard to revive. Lion's Arch was a full map replacement but I don't see why it couldn't be revisited as a full map instance. Marionette, at the time the best event the game had seen and still among the best even now, took place in the open world but could quite easily be turned into an instance, you'd think, seeing Scarlet staged it in what amounts to an arena-sized enclosed space.

It is, at least, an intriguing development. I look forward to seeing where, if anywhere, it goes from here. It also occurs to me that this could be the closest Anet get to having their share of the increasingly popular, mainstream and profitable Progression and Classic Server pie, currently being gobbled down by the likes of Daybreak, Blizzard, Jagex and Funcom.

It never does to understimate the public's hunger for a juicy slice of their own past.

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.

Call That An Invasion? : GW2

I love a good zone invasion, me. The first one I ever saw must have been way back in the year 2000. I was minding my own business in Qeynos Hills, scalping the odd gnoll pup, putting rabid bears out of their misery and generally trying to avoid unwanted attention from local eco-vigilantes Holly Windstalker and Cros Treewind, when suddenly undead began to rise from the ground all around me.

Giant skeletons, as tall as the half-timbered Qeynosian cottages, cackling like loons, chased terrified level fives back into the tunnel to Surefall Grove. Swiftly, word spread. The spires and rings began to hum as wizards and druids ported in parties of adventurers ready, eager and willing to send the undead hordes back to their unquiet graves. It was stunning, overwhelming, memorable, magical.

Over the years I was lucky enough to see many more uprisings and invasions all across Norrath, from werewolves in the Commonlands to dark elves in Firiona Vie. It only took the merest hint of a rumor to set me scrambling towards danger, throwing myself into the thick of things, my only goal not to die too much because back then dying hurt.


One of the most attractive features of Rift when it arrived was the way it institutionalized invasions. Seen at their absolute best in the beta weekends but still robust for as long as a few weeks after launch, the elemental armies that spewed forth from the cracks in Telaria's skies commanded the roads and overran the camps, creating a sense of perpetual anarchy that worked well for me.

Sadly, too few players felt the same way. Paying customers objected strenuously to the denial of essential in-the-field services and the inconvenient interruption of their questing. War's all very well but not when there are hand-ins to be handed in and trash to be sold.

Still, the complaints Trion had to field back then were as nothing compared to the criticisms Anet receives every time they try to rally favor for a mass incursion. Look no further than the Great Karka Debacle to see the way that land has always lain.

There was one brief moment when it looked as though the wind might have changed. When Scarlet first sent her hybrid armies out across Tyria players welcomed them with open arms and fireballs. Experience and loot rained down and we scooped it up by the bagful. The joy was unrestrained for, oh, almost a whole evening.

Then factions developed. Some were still working on achievements for the events while others who'd finished them wanted to farm. The forces opposing each invasion splintered into competing alliances that bickered fractiously as they pursued their incompatible goals.

ANet responded by removing most of the indirect incentives. The mobs kept their drops but the champions lost their bags. In later iterations on the invasion theme the directive process was refined further, particularly with the addition of Elite mobs, as tough as champs but with no loot table at all. And now we have The Mordrem Invasion, in which the dead hand of central control tightens its grasp to strangle all the life out of the entire event.

The set-up is promising. Mordremoth, the great jungle dragon, star of the second season of the Living Story and of the game's first expansion, Heart of Thorns, has sent his limitless minions to spread fear and chaos across Tyria. Well, across three somewhat out-of-the-way maps at least, where they won't really inconvenience anyone all that much.

Brisbane Wildlands, Diessa Plateau and unlucky old Kessex Hills are the venues for the current batch of pre-expansion shenanigans, a limited engagement lasting just four days. The stage looked set for a wild romp across open country with fifty or a hundred of your new best friends. It's a shame that's not how things went on the opening night.

In what looks dangerously like yet another attempt to troll their own playerbase the doors opened yesterday to a fumbling, unrehearsed mess of an event. An amateurish performance riddled with bugs and wrought with what appear to be terrible shortcomings in design.

That the event didn't work properly should have surprised no-one. New events in GW2 almost never do.Two or three fixer-upper patches is par for the course. Sometimes it takes half a dozen. Even so, when launching your prestige, premiere curtain-raiser for an expansion you're hoping to persuade people to shell out anything up to a hundred dollars for, you would think some measure of quality control would be advisable, if only for reasons of staying in business.

Long-suffering community rep Gaile Grey was firefighting on the forums within minutes. I doubt anyone envies her that job. She did her best as she always does but there was little she could do to quell the growing resentment and disgust as players found that not only did the event not perform any of the most basic functions expected (no loot, no experience, no karma, nothing but wasted time and expense) but that even if it had been working perfectly they would need to do nothing but invasions non-stop, save for sleeping just a bare few hours a day, from the beginning of the event to the end if they hoped to buy the top items on the event currency vendor.

The mood on the forums was (still is) incandescent.  In game there were more people prepared to go with the flow but even there patience was wearing very thin by the time I logged out for an early night. Personally, I enjoyed the invasions for the chaotic zerg fun but they really do seem rushed, thin and unconvincing compared to what Scarlet provided. Mordremoth seems like a feebleminded foe on this showing.

As for the missing rewards and the outcry over the expected grind, it seems ArenaNet are reaping the whirlwind of the Achiever-oriented audience they've so diligently courted these last three years. If you constantly wind people up to perform according to the rewards on offer then you have to expect problems when theose rewards don't match the effort let alone, much worse, when they don't materialize at all.

We have a couple more days of this event. Maybe they'll haul it around yet. I kind of doubt it though. Whether it's the only one scheduled before the expansion arrives in almost six weeks I couldn't say. It's certainly not whetting many appetites for more of the same, though, that's for sure.

If You Don't Get The Roots... : GW2

In Guild Wars 2, just over a week from now, Season Two of The Living Story will begin. It's been a long old while since the end of Season One and I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot more people weren't planning on dropping by to see what's new than ever would have seemed likely back in the dark days of 2013.

For a while, back at the start, when the opening dog-and-pony show was stuttering around the low Shiverpeaks and the back end of Ascalon, it all seemed mightily underwhelming. (Oddly, those early skirmishes seem to have been airbrushed out of the revisionist Recap, along with an awful lot else that no-one cares to remember any more). Then, as the achievement mill span up to operating speed and the two-week grinder began to grip, the traffic in complaints began to go the other way as stressed and fractious achievers struggled to keep up with the relentless pace, while non-achievers tutted and shook their heads at the sheer futility of it all.

Somewhere along the way Scarlet Briar introduced herself to near-universal derision and satori was achieved. The perfect meld of content no-one wanted, delivered via mechanics no-one enjoyed, to tell a story no-one cared to hear about a character no-one liked.

And then (was it slowly or was it suddenly?) things began to change. By the time the first story arc thundered to a close in the early months of 2014 the mood had shifted. Naysayers remained but their narrative no longer carried the day. Doubts were being given the benefit. There were mutterings of interest from some corners, grudging anticipation from others. After all, if you put a dragon on the mantlepiece in Act One, surely it has to fly before the final curtain and a dragon pays for a lot.

The long hiatus between seasons (what has it been? Two months? Three?), which seemed such a risk, turns out to have been well-judged. Long enough for exhaustion to slump into ennui, for frustration to fade to boredom. It wasn't so bad after all, was it? Something new to do every couple of weeks, that was alright, wasn't it? Don't you miss that? Even that annoying sylvari with her bottomless bag of tricks and her infuriating giggle, she did have something, didn't she?

The pump's well-primed. Now here comes the first gush of information, sparkling with a rainbow spray of "we hear you". Permanent content. Replayable content. Challenging content. Content at a pace you can control. And, above all, content that comes with an irresistible New Dragon smell.

So far, so sure-footed. And then there was this.

It may look like nothing more than an IGN squib but in fact it's the drop from this official Season Two Trailer on the GW2 website. That link goes nowhere else. So we must assume, must we not, that whatever that link takes us to is sanctioned and authorized, else why puff it up as a promo reveal?

So, if that's canon, what are we to make of the first half of the opening sentence of the final paragraph?

"While Scarlet may be out of the picture for now..."

Never believed she was dead. Not for a moment. Roll on the first of July.

Aftermath : GW2

The fires are out. The fighting is done. It's a victory of sorts. Lion's Arch still stands, barely.

Lionguards stand sentry in the shattered shell of the vault. Guarding the money. They have their orders. And their priorities.

The Trading Post awaits the return of the King Over The Water. Or the Charr Over The Fields, should we say.

Vast fragments of Scarlet's shattered Breachmaker lie everywhere, embedded in the rocks, jutting from the water.

Deep beneath the sea the great drill lies still, haloed with flickering auras as stuttering arcs of energy spit from the tip. What these lights portend is not yet known.

Across the city makeshift memorials appear.

To the victors.

To the Missing.

To the Dead.

Some of the messages don't bear reading twice.

Now it's over (is it over?) the mood of the city turns defiant.

These once were pirates. And may be again.

In the camps sentiment is hardening.

There will be consequences. There are always consequences.

Something is stirring.

Something huge and terrible and old.

It's time to come together. No time to fly apart.

Here. See. The real, true heroes of Lion's Arch. If they can do it so can we. Stand strong, Tyrians. Stand together. Darker days are coming. They always do.

Enquiring Minds Must Know (Caution - Spoilers - This Means You!) : GW2

So we'd scotched Scarlet's Knights one more time and in we all went. Hung around for a while waiting for her to notice. Whittled away at the over-sized hologram, split it into three. Kept on chipping til the place was nothing but holo-fragments. Cleaned those up, chased Scarlet out. It gave me time to think about what was coming next.

Behind that door, when she's down and all those alarms go off, when the place starts shaking, that warning message pops and the whole crew runs back up the ramp, even Braham with his "broken" leg, and before you know what you're doing you're back in the Arch? Now that's not how I'd normally do things.

I like to go through a villain's writing desk just on a point of general principle. Check out the bookcase, maybe even look under the pillows. You never know what you might find. Scarlet's Lair, I must've spent an hour. Well, half an hour.

That was running through my mind all while we were fighting and rolling about and now here I was, going in again, so I thought I'd take the chance, do it my way this time. So we danced  the dance again but after all the yelling and spiking, when the rest of them all ran off, I went the other way. Into the room with all the machines.

Same flashing. Same buzzing. Same lines of gibberish scrolling away. And something new.

No, that's not a Charr of the Ash Legion. Well spotted.
Or then again, maybe it is. Ash Legion, masters of disguise, after all...

 

Three panels that didn't do much of anything before, now you could touch them. The control board for the Marionette, a diagram of the Drill and the Leylines and the last, a map of those damn Energy Probes. I couldn't make much sense of any of 'em. It positively demanded an Engineer's eye.

Now, I'm no engineer. More the outdoor type, me, tell you the truth of it.  Ash Legion, sure, but the scouting end of things, not so big on all the Secret Plans part. But there's an Engineer I know owes me a favor so I called him and in he came.

He came out looking pretty shaken. Well, he did get hit by a laser going in but it wasn't that. It was what he'd found, examining those panels through his fancy Rata Sum College of Dynamics panscopic monocle.

That giant drill? It runs on magic. Well, I could have told him that. But it comes with a dead-man's throttle set in reverse. It won't stop, not for anything. That's how she designed it, he said. What was she drilling for, anyway? Now that's the question, isn't it?

No surprise to anyone that tapping the flow from the ley lines would give someone more power than they knew what to do with. Not that Scarlet ever seemed to run short of ideas. The surprise is, she wasn't tapping it, he said. There's no pump, nothing. All the drill does is break the flow.

Break the Flow, Wake the Foe. Didn't used to be a saying. Is now.

I can't claim it was all my own idea. There was a thread on the forum called *Spoiler*:  After the final cut-scene. I hadn't read it, just the title, but it planted the seed and spurred me to go back for another look. And I wasn't smart enough to come back yet again with my Engineer until I read the first post in that thread, thinking I was safe to compare thoughts since I'd now seen it all and had nothing left to be spoiled. I know, what a noob!

It's such a fine example of what I was praising yesterday. An entirely undirected fragment of narrative, an important one, too, waiting just out of sight to be discovered. First you have to be curious enough to wonder what happens if you don't do what the game tells you to do. Then you have to be reckless enough to risk staying in a building on fire to find out. If you do that you make a discovery but only if you're playing a class with the requisite background and training do you get, fully, to understand and interpret what you've found. And even then you still end up with more questions than answers.

That's how it should be done. No clues, no pointers, no hints or nudges. Just you and the world and your eyes and ears and imagination. Someone in the thread congratulated ANet for planting a nice Easter Egg for Engineers. I congratulate them for understanding at least a few of the possibilities of the medium within which they work.

Oh, and one other thing. Scarlet in that death pose? She doesn't look defeated. She looks ecstatic.

Don't have nightmares.

Expect Better : GW2

MMOland, the one place where you always get a second chance to make a first impression. And a third. As many as you want, really...  

GW2's "Battle For Lion's Arch" update dropped four days ago and it's been bouncing ever since. Every day is Patch Day as ArenaNet scramble to get the wheels back on Scarlet's tumbril for the Living Story Season One Grand Finale. Jeromai has a very detailed guide to the core events and Ravious takes a considered look at what works and what doesn't.

If there's a single take-away it has to be that these events simply need better testing. Or maybe just testing... A rolling bi-weekly schedule is clearly and evidently incompatible with current resources. There may be multiple teams working separate development cycles for individual content drops but however many teams there are and however long each is being given to prepare it's plainly not enough.

The patience, the stoicism even, of GW2 players is striking. The reaction to game-breaking bugs and show-stopping design failures tends to be a verbal shrug and a flip comment: "What did you expect? This is GW2". There's a devastating gulf between what players now expect from ANet, based on what they've been given this first year-and-a-half, and what they thought they'd be getting down those five long years of rhetoric, "Iteration, Iteration, Iteration" and "It'll be done when it's done".

Anyone fancy a game of 5-a-side?

It says a huge amount for how invested players are in the game that they not only put up with these repeated and predictable failures to provide content that works first time round but come back, over and over again, for more. It also says plenty about how strong the foundation that underpins these rickety, makeshift sideshows must be that it keeps everyone from open revolt.

The opening three days of the current update risked pushing the patience of every player close to the edge and some duly slipped over. While tempers can sometimes, understandably, get a little frayed when a large-scale event isn't going well, this is perhaps the first time I've had to wait through twenty or thirty minutes of increasingly vicious and intolerant argument before an event has even started. For a whole evening, starting every hour, on the hour, that gets wearing.

It isn't that the mechanics of the events, as first received, were too challenging. They were neither difficult to understand, nor to learn, nor to execute. It's not even that the events that appeared on Tuesday were particularly poorly-designed. It's that they just didn't work.

Scarlet's Knights either dropped barrow-loads of loot, which ANet didn't like, or none at all, which players liked even less. Moreover, some players got the barrow-loads for the same event where other players got the none at all and no-one could really figure out why. Even when the Knights were downed, which wasn't as often as it should have been in the opinion of many, and people managed to get in to the airship to fight Scarlet, the signature battle could also stall, bugging into an unwinnable state. And then there was Six Minutes To Knightfall.

Six Minutes To Knightfall is an achievement that requires you to "Defeat all three assault knights within six minutes after the event starts". The semantic inexactitude of that description itself led to some argument as players debated whether it meant "down all three knights in the first six minutes of the event" or "down all three knights in the same six-minute window at any point during the event". Then there was the question of whether an individual player had to down all three knights in the same event or whether downing a different knight inside six minutes in three separate events would count.

The debate raged in map chat, on the forums and especially on Reddit. It seemed every player looking to get the achievement had a theory and map chat rang with the competing demands, pleas and threats of Commanders, would-be community leaders and flat-out crazed conspiracy theorists, all wanting to try out their own particular arcane plan of action. Meanwhile, players who had already done the Three Knights event several times and seen it fail just wanted to get in the damn airship and forget about the blasted achievement...

It all got very fraught indeed and wasn't a lot of fun for anyone and to add meta-insult to injured feelings, many claimed it made no difference what anyone did because the Knightfall achievement was bugged anyway. Some people supposedly got it when they killed their very first Knight while others didn't get it when they had followed the exact same sequence that had worked for someone else. Or so they claimed. Who could possibly know the truth of it?

Bit late to be recruiting now, don't you think?

With all this rumbling away in the background, the bulk of the playerbase took comfort in the familiar and found that during trying times the old ways often work best. Successful Knight runs eschewed fancy tactics in favor of The Zerg, focusing the force of the entire map population on each knight in turn, a tactic that seemed as good as any and better than most. Even if it didn't give any loot at least it opened the doors to somewhere that did.

So, once all the theories had been tested and proved worthless, that's how things might have settled, had ANet not had other ideas. Friday brought a patch that dictated terms. You will not mount a map-wide mega-zerg. You will split into three acceptable zergs of fifty players or fewer. You will co-operate and address this event appropriately. Then, if you're good and do it the way you're supposed to, we will give you loot. At the end. When you've demonstrated you can behave yourselves. And not before.

It felt a little like teacher coming back into the classroom and restoring order on finding the senior pupils he'd left in charge for five minutes weren't up to the task. Not angry. Just disappointed. It felt a lot more like a fuming DM waving the rulebook at a bunch of D&D players who'd just found a way to brute-force a clever encounter he'd spent hours designing. Either way, it didn't feel much like the way an MMO with a metacritic score of 90 ought to feel.

Green on Red.

That aside, the event is now more fun, and more reliable. Well, it was yesterday. Haven't done it yet this morning and there was another patch overnight. Anything could have happened. If it had been like this from the beginning how happy we'd all have been. Instead we feel like we've been schooled for making the best of a bad situation that was none of our doing in the first place. That sentiment was very evident in map chat last night and a sour taste will linger.

It's not really an issue of content or design. Those are factors you either like or you don't. It's a matter of competency and of respect. On balance I like The Living Story. While it has huge problems, particularly in pacing, as a means of imparting plot and narrative to an MMO it does have merit. Unfortunately the two-week roll-out is too ambitious to support it, particularly whenever an update includes a large-scale Event and it's the playerbase that cops the fallout from ANet's over-reaching ambition every time.

There's a thread on the forum in which two players succinctly sum up the extreme positions existing within the current playerbase:

Full Thread Here

I wholeheartedly agree with Darkobra. This isn't a beta. Nor is it a public Test server. This is the live game. We all understand there will be some bugs. We all know there will be unexpected outcomes. We all expect some post-update tweaking. This is none of that. This is riveters still working on the hull when the ship's already far out to sea.

Moreover, it was never the players who demanded, or even requested, this accelerated pace. If there's ever been a consensus it's that we want more solid additions to the game, added at a rate we can manage. Over the year players have adjusted to the breakneck schedule and developers have found ways to make temporary content hang around a while longer but what's been achieved is more of a grudging acceptance than a gleeful assimilation.

Fortunately there's something of a lull on the way. The next update, in ten days' time, is a coda, trailed as modest, where we all get to take a deep breath and reflect. Almost immediately after that WvW Season 2 (now renamed The Tourney and running under what looks to be an improved ruleset) begins. That should keep everyone busy for a while until Living Story Season Two arrives at some yet-unspecified later date.

Curiosity counts for much and GW2's aggressive update schedule, combined with zero-limit barriers to re-entry, has worked well enough in keeping players on-board until now, but player patience won't carry buggy content indefinitely. Soon ESO will be upon us with WildStar not far behind. Supposedly competition sharpens. Let's hope so. Some sharpening is sorely needed. 

Build Or Bust? : GW2

Just a few more days to go before we find out what Scarlet Briar's been planning this last year, although, when you work it out, it's been even longer than that. The Living Story blew in with a whimper January before last, when not a one of us had ever heard of the over-achieving, under-socialized Sylvari who was destined to become, not entirely for the reasons her creators intended, Tyria's Public Enemy #1.

Even now, with the final denouement just around the corner, ANet is playing its hand very close to its chest. The teaser trail tells us next-to-nothing other than that whoever made it probably mains a Charr. The official website announcement is tight-lipped almost to the point of rudeness. Speculation on the official forums has largely run out of steam, the few remaining commenters seeming to agree that everything points to Mordremoth the Jungle Dragon.

One interesting development is that Lion's Arch is now flagged as a Dungeon. I hadn't noticed this until last night, when one of those little pop-ups appeared to let me know I'd completed my monthly requirement for Dungeon Participation. Whether this means anything we shall have to wait and see but it could presage LA's conversion into an open-air dungeon bossed by whatever rabbit Scarlet pulls out of the hat on Tuesday.


I've always liked the concept of open-air dungeons. Everquest had several right from the start with some of them, like The Estate of Unrest and Castle Mistmoore, standing right at the heart of the canon when it comes to dungeoneering. The idea worked very well there and a permanent "dungeon" that's effectively an entire outdoor map arguably plays directly to the strengths of GW2 even more than it did to those of EQ.

Our Leader: Always With Us In Spirit

I haven't had much time or affection for the dungeons or dungeon-like content introduced through the Living Story until now, or at least not until The Marionette appeared. That event, a kind of lane-defence/arena, open world/instance hybrid, ran through two consecutive updates and is possibly my favorite Living Story content so far. Even though my attention was distracted by the shiny, new Landmark alpha I still managed to do the puppet at least once most days and often a lot more than that. I would guess that in the month it was around I did it well over fifty times.

I liked just about everything about it. I liked that it happened every other hour, which seemed exactly the right pace to keep it accessible while allowing plenty of time to do other things. I liked that, when you arrived in Lornar's Pass, you could exercise a degree of choice over just what you wanted to do while still needing to adapt to changing circumstances. You could pick your Lane to get the Warder of your choice, for example, but if the Lane before you failed you'd get theirs again, instead of the one you'd planned for.There were many little wrinkles along those lines that made each attempt feel fresh.

If Evon Gnashblade was in charge this would all have been recycled by now.

The mechanics of the fights seemed to me to be excellent. They all took a while to learn but once grasped were within my capabilities provided I concentrated. Above all, though, the reason I enjoyed the Marionette so much and did the event so often was because of the way outcomes were nested.

Having five separate platforms, each of which needed to succeed at each of the five stages for the whole event to succeed, made for elegant and suspenseful gameplay, suspense that was ratcheted up further by some clever and thoughtful management of the information flow. Inside the arena each team of five could see the other four teams; outside in the Lanes no-one could see any of them. As each platform finished the victorious players would cluster at the edges of their platforms, peering across the barriers to follow the progress of the battles still in play, yearning but unable to help.

As the timer ticked down anxious lane-defenders outside would call for progress reports, hoping the news was better than the silence made it seem. Someone always took it upon themselves to commentate or at least relay the current score. Quite often that someone was me.

If only they'd listened to him!

Another element of the design that pleased me was the random selection of the teams. Other MMOs that feature automated party-building usually need to take into account the requirements of the game for certain classes to be present in a particular ratio; in GW2, at least in theory, any five players should be able to do group content together regardless of class. Despite that, if you give players control they still veer towards something that looks like a traditional group, asking for particular classes or rejecting others, tuning for even  small advantage over particular challenges or opponents.

At the Marionette there was none of that. You got who you got and you got on with it. Oh, the frustration and exhilaration of personal and collective responsibility! How did you perform this time? How did your team perform? How did your Lane perform? Even at the busiest periods how did your Overflow perform? And of course if it all went horribly wrong, as it often did, you could slink off into the snow and come back to try and do better in a couple of hours.

She's a Necro. She doesn't cut anyone slack.

The event became a micro-MMO in and of itself, with its own regular participants and  leaders, strategies and culture, something it had in common with many of GW2's more reliably-scheduled "dynamic" events. It's an aspect of the game as game, rather than as virtual world, that I very much enjoy and ANet seem slowly to be gaining some insight on where the sweet spots are.

Hard though I may have gone against the current Escape From Lion's Arch event as a contribution to the evolution of Tyria as a virtual world, as content in a game I'm pretty pleased with it. Supposedly it's meant to initiate a larger-scale iteration of the kind of player dynamics we saw with the Marionette. I think it has a few more tunings to go before it develops anything like that level of elegance but it's very much another step in the right direction.

Did Scarlet actually tell you pirates to secure the Inns first?

Again the whole thing relies on nested activities and synergies and again the information flow is restricted. A successful attempt to rescue 1200 citizens requires organization but not so much organization that it can't arise organically from the impending sense that success is possible. The presence of a counter ticking up, a timer ticking down and the periodic delivery of a reward at 100, 300, 600 citizens and climbing provide ample information and incentive for players to judge the likelihood or otherwise of the target being met, an assessment that can be subject to sudden and thrilling change as the miasma thickens and what seemed out of reach now draws tantalizingly near.

When Tuesday's update comes we're to be tasked with The Battle For Lion's Arch. Doubtless it's a battle whose outcome has already been decided, but whether that outcome is a city to rebuild or a dungeon to tame I imagine we'll not be done with Lion's Arch for a good long time to come. I'm sanguine either way.

I very much doubt we'll be done with Scarlet Briar for good and all, either and, surprisingly, I'm good with that, too. Now that's something I really didn't expect.