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?

Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair: GW2

Yesterday MassivelyOP  dropped the bombshell that we'd all been dreading. The next chapter of GW2's Living Story might be slightly delayed! Oh, Noes! How will we cope? Is there counselling available?

I was unable to stop myself from commenting on the thread (which has mushroomed in just a little less than twenty-four hours to an astonishing six comments) that I'd personally be happy to see ANet drop the Living Story altogether. I would, too.

I've been playing GW2 for six years, give or take. I have three accounts and I play each of them, every day. I long ago stopped caring whether we get any new content. I'm quite happy with the content we've got. I do my dailies, I run around in WvW and if I'm in the mood I pick away at odds and ends I haven't done yet - which is pretty much everything.

Can I help you? Spit it out, man, time is money!

I have thousands and thousands of hours played. I have nearly twenty characters. I've never done Map Completion or finished the Personal Story on any of them. I've never crafted (or bought) a Legendary Weapon. There are dozens - maybe hundreds - of Achievements I don't have and Collections I haven't finished. Or, for that matter, started.

As I've mentioned before, I strongly prefer the uncelebrated efforts of the team that produces the Side Stories and Current Events to the heavily-publicized, usually disappointing, Living Story chapters. Their work is on a scale I can understand and appreciate and the results seem much better integrated, much less disruptive, more "of the world".

I'm not sure who was responsible for Sitting In Chairs. It might have been the Current Events people or maybe it was just part of the regular housekeeping all MMOs undergo. The ability to park your posterior reached Tyria a month or two back. I did register it at the time. I knew there was a collection or an achievement or something. It wasn't until yesterday that I finally got around to looking at it properly.

Whoever hung that painting needs to find another line of work.

That was when I found out the reward was a title - Armchair Commander. Titles are one of the few things that can motivate me to do something I otherwise wouldn't in an MMO. I really wanted that title. Otherwise I don't imagine I'd have had the patience to traipse around forty-two locations, looking at upholstery.

I only had to mention the title to Mrs Bhagpuss, who also hadn't paid it any attention until then, and she was off looking for chairs too. It was going to be a race but somehow she managed to get motion-sickness from all the sudden sitting down and standing up and had to retire to bed, so I finished mine first. (She did later recover to get all forty-two safely by taking it slow and steady. Who knew sitting could be so dangerous?).

As I criss-crossed Tyria in search of seats as yet unsat in, following Dulfy's detailed but not entitrely necessary guide (most of the seats are actually in clusters next to each other), I marvelled once more at how perfectly suited GW2 is to offer full-function player housing and how peculiar it is that instead the developers choose to give us nothing but extremely impersonal Personal Instances. I'm still betting on Housing as a major feature for XPack #3. Possibly underwater.

Locked room mystery solved: they got in through the skylight.

Finding all forty-two chairs took a couple of hours and very enjoyable hours they were. It would have been a lot less if it hadn't been for that one chair in Rata Sum that needs either a glider or a mount to reach. I had to get a Mesmer out for that one to port in one of Mrs Bhagpuss's characters. It did make me wonder why they picked such an obscure location but maybe it's a unique design. Or someone just thought it would be funny.

Like the Othmir holiday I praised yesterday, this is exactly the kind of content I want. Some things to find and a nice present for finding them. GW2 has a fair bit of that kind thing but it's often well-hidden.

Whenever I make the effort and do one of the little scavenger hunts, collections or round-robin visits, I feel surprisingly satisfied - pleased with myself, even. I can't say I ever feel like that at the end of a Living Story episode - more like exhausted, enervated or annoyed.

My Krewe doeshn't unnershtan' me, Joe...

I can say with confidence that I've had more pleasure doing the Krait daily that came with the underwater revamp than I got from any of the recent LS material. I kill ten Krait on each account every day, take my Rusted Key and go looking for a Sunken Chest that works (there's some weird timer on the spawn now). It's fun.

I've fallen out of the habit of doing the Joko Invasions, now reduced to Remnants, but I really enjoyed those for a good while, just like I enjoyed the Bandits before them, and the Ley Energy and all that stuff before that. And it's all still there, too. I hear people every day, calling out Bandit Champions and Legendaries in map chat or trying to co-ordinate a response when The Awakened portal in.

This is what an MMORPG needs, at least it does to my way of thinking. This and more of this and more of this again. This is the true "living story". The quarterly content drop is just a distraction.

No need to fret about those "quality standards", Mike. You go ahead and take all the time you need. We're fine as we are.

I think I'll go for a bit of a sit down.