Get Lucky : GW2

Today's update in GW2 took me somewhat by surprise. I was expecting the much-heralded Balance changes but I thought we still had a couple of weeks to go before Lunar New Year, since the Chinese New Year on which it's modeled doesn't end until until February 15th.

Apparently Chinese and Lunar years are more than a year long. The last one started on January 28th 2017 and it's still going strong. We seem to have a bit of overlap.

As I think I've commented a few times before, holidays in Tyria can be underwhelming. There aren't all that many of them and they tend not to change very much. Lunar New Year is a slight exception in that we're at least guaranteed to get a different animal every time. This time it's the Dog's turn.

Lunar New Year might be my favorite Tyrian holiday although that phrase could go into the dictionary under "damning with faint praise". Still, it does at least manage a couple of features that I look forward to more than anything we get at Halloween or Wintersday.

For a start, there's Dragon Ball. I'm a small-time fan of instanced battleground PvP in other MMOs but GW2's standard offering takes itself far too seriously for my taste. Dragon Ball is cheerfully anarchic by comparison and I always enjoy its short visit.

Unfortunately, at my advancing age it gives me a lot of shoulder pain from the sudden changes of direction and the general tension. If I do the two-match daily on all three accounts that's about enough for me.

Then there's the financial element. Every day you can buy 16 Lucky Envelopes per account from the vendor in Divinity's Reach. They cost a gold each and you're guaranteed to get at least 88 silver of that back in every one you open. If you're lucky you can get something worth ten times as much.

There are other things in there that sell for a fair few silver too. On a good day I make 8-16g per account. On a bad day I just about break even. It's like gambling without the risk. I always enjoy it.

This year, as there was for Wintersday, there's also a race. It seems that now we have mounts ANet are determined we're going to use them. It's not particularly original but at least it is something new so I'm not complaining. Plus I really like races.

So, it seems, do a lot of other people, at least they do when they haven't got the achievements yet. There were over seventy riders in the race I did an hour ago.

It's a harder course than the Wintersday one and longer. Nevertheless, I was able to get the Mini Gourdog (don't ask) that comes with finishing in under three and a half minutes, even though on one run I was using the base model rented raptor that's your only choice if you haven't bought Path of Fire.

Speaking of minis, there's a great one for sale on the vendor for just under nine gold. It's a "horse" with a skritt rider. Tyria famously has no horses so I imagine the ANet devs responsible for holiday planning must have come out in a cold sweat when someone told them next year is The Year of the Horse. If this is the dry run for 2019 I foresee strong sales of tar and feathers in China.

There's also a new "adventure". Adventures in GW2 are one of the most inaccurately named additions to the game in five years. They came with Heart of Thorns, they were hated by almost everyone and they were conspicuously absent from Path of Fire.

I thought we'd seen the last of them but apparently I was counting my chickens to soon (and roosters were so last year). I haven't tried the new one yet but I probably will at some point. Can't say i'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, there's stuff to do that we haven't done to death yet, which is nice. Also, since you can't fight anything there, Divinity's Reach doesn't crash every five minutes like the rest of the game does right now. To no-one's surprise the vast raft of changes to skills and systems that came with today's patch have introduced some bugs that make all three modes, PvE, WvW and sPvP largely unplayable until they find out what they broke and get it fixed.

With a bit of luck that'll all be sorted out by the time I wake up tomorrow. I'll probably find out after I've bought my Lucky Envelopes and lost another few games of Dragon Ball.

Oh, wait - they fixed it while I was writing this. I guess my luck's in!

Stay lucky!

Happy Wintersday, Skritt-Kickers! : GW2

Wintersday is here again and, with the repairs to Lion's Arch progressing slowly (euphemism for "not happening"), the center of celebrations has shifted to Divinity's Reach. Jennah, Party Queen of Tyria, was never one to miss an opportunity to spend taxpayers' money on having a good time so I doubt Magnus, Kiel or whoever is supposedly in charge of the burned-out wreck that is L.A. needed to ask twice.

All the usual favorites are back for us to ignore enjoy - snowball fights, toys running amok, amateurs who couldn't carry a tune in a blanket giving it plenty on the handbells... Tixx is around somewhere with his airship doing something or other. And like that.

Apparently you can make one of these trees and put it in your Personal Instance
so its Wintersday all year long. I'll get right on that.

There are a few new wrinkles. That "amusing", autonomic, self-aware golem is back with his bucket. This time around he's trading under the name Ho-Ho-Tron which suggests he may be self-aware but he lacks any sense of self-awareness. Also I'm pretty sure he's scamming. As he herds his present-laden cow from one side of the giant hole to the other he makes some comment about doing his community service but didn't he already complete his sentence, at our expense, months ago?

I'd like to be able to claim I was the one posing the moral dilemma rather than making the Katy Perry joke but...

Authenticity aside, he's nothing if not a hard worker. Round and round he goes, surrounded by a jostling pack of players determined to grab for themselves any presents that fall off the cart. Are we any better than the demented skritt who burrow up through the flagstones to steal them? Don't ask me difficult questions when I've got my kicking boots on!

At least they seem to be feeding him well

The oddest addition has to be the new quest. Yes it is a quest. Well what is it then? It's not an event. It's not an achievement. You speak to a Grawl, he tells you to get him something, you go speak to someone who might have it and he wants something else so you go get him that. Then you go back to the Grawl and he comes up with the next thing he wants and so on. That. Is. A. Quest.

It's also ill-considered and incoherent. This Grawl has stolen some Wintersday "ornaments" from a bunch of orphans, ostensibly because he doesn't like the noise they make (I think he means the ornaments but maybe it's the orphans. He's a grawl. Who knows what he means?). All this happens in your personal instance.

Pity you can't say as much for the education.
Just look at that spelling!

Now, if you're a Human, there actually IS an orphanage in your personal instance (just go with it) so there's at least a basis for suspending disbelief. The Quest, however, has to work for all players, so this Grawl and his attendant, ornament-deprived Orphans (actually one orphan, presumably elected by the rest and delegated to speak on their behalf. And his "friend") are lurking in the Personal Instance allocated to each race in lieu of actual housing.

In the case of a Charr player, that means there's a Grawl hiding at the back of a section of The Black Citadel that's positively teeming with heavily-armed Legionaries, many of whom are off-duty and liquored up. With a human child. And a Charr cub, who gets no lines.

Best mob skill ever

How did they get there without being, at best, arrested and, more likely, spit-roasted and eaten or used for target practice? What about that cub? Is he an orphan too? Would it matter even if he was? Wouldn't he just be in a Farhar anyway? Can't ask him - he didn't get a speaking part in this little nativity play. And why in the name of the gods we Charr don't believe in are they hiding in MY house anyway? I don't even have a house! No, don't get me started...

So, things don't get off to the most credible of beginnings and it doesn't improve from there. The Grawl insists on giving clues in some of the most execrable doggerel I have ever read. Yesterday's clue did manage to point to the next part of the quest, handily situated right across the metal gangway from the instance, but today he was rambling on about a place made of flowers.

Hey, Vogons! Better up your game!

The Grove perhaps? No, luckily for me Mrs Bhagpuss already went there and tried that and was able to save me from wasting my time and my silver. In fact you just go to the same place in Black Citadel you went to yesterday. I just gave up trying to make it make sense. It carries on tomorrow (there's a day's wait between stages). Maybe all will become clear in due course. Or it won't. I'm betting on won't.

He followed me home and I'm going to keep him.

As well as new things to do there are lots of new things to get. The familiar wrapping of the presents hides a slew of interesting additions to the usual range of socks and snowflakes. Runes, sigils, tonics and finishers abound. There are already complaints about inventory space being compromised. There was even an inexplicable occurrence where I opened something (I didn't notice what - I was opening so many things just then) and received an item that auto-completed the entire new collection (which I hadn't even started). I got a Skritt mini. Result!. Oh yes - there's a new collection. Did I mention that?

All of this abundance and confusion arrived with the threatened promised revamp of the Daily and Monthly Achievement systems. I was going to do a whole post on that but honestly? I can't be bothered. There's a eleven page thread on the forums about it already, running roughly 50-50 Love It/Hate It. I don't feel either. I just feel meh.

Could you be more specific?

The people who really love it are the ones who were previously doing the dailies just to get the Laurels. Laurels now come automatically through the Monthly, for which you have to do quite literally nothing more than remember to log in. The people who hate it are the ones who enjoyed seeing the daily fill out in the background as they dd whatever they felt like doing. The first lot feel liberated; the second lot feel trapped.

The WvW seem much, much easier than the rest
but maybe that's just me

I'm one of those weirdos who does the dailies because I like doing the dailies. I did prefer the old ones, which offered a lot more choice, but I don't object to the new ones, which are extremely specific. I'll do them as long as I continue to find them amusing and then I'll stop. As for the rewards, I don't spend the sodding Laurels anyway - I have nearly two thousand of them stashed away across the two accounts. The rewards they've attached to each individual achievement are marginally more useful.

As a revamp I'll give it five. Out of ten. It was completely unnecessary from my point of view but I'm sure they have their reasons. Getting everyone to cluster in the same maps so it looks like there are more of us comes to mind...

It might have been better not to have introduced the new system at the exact same time as adding a second set of holiday dailies that do reward a Laurel, though. Not likely that was going to confuse things, was it? Also, the two days of Wintersday dailies we've had so far have been identical. Not sure if that's a co-incidence or whether we'll just get the same half-dozen for the entire season. If so, I think that could get a tad wearing.

I'm begging you, don't make me go to Queensdale any more.

We're asked to perm any five from six but since one's completing the insanely hard Wintersday Jumping Puzzle that's actually five from five as far as this household is concerned. Of the five I can do, the Snowball one is really annoying, albeit simple if Mrs Bhagpuss and I duo it, and the Bell Choir looked to be impossible until I bothered to read a walkthrough and actually pay attention. Now I can do it with my eyes closed although with my ears closed would be preferable.

The remaining three are trivial but I have to wonder along with Mrs Bhagpuss, who, upon being faced with the second, repeated set of tasks, asked "How is this meant to be fun?". I don't really have an answer for that. Fortunately there's still a lot of non-directed content left that is fun, like marching a dozen golems around Fort Aspenwood's borderland and taking all their keeps like we did this afternoon, so I'll just have to make do with that.

And we do have Wintesday in WvW too, you know. We decorate and everything.

Second Impressions : WildStar

Let's get one thing out of the way right at the start. I was wrong. WildStar is not, as I commented in response to Jeromai's thoughtful and revealing "First Impressions" post yesterday, "...one of the ugliest MMOs I’ve ever played".

I would like to withdraw that opinion entirely and offer my apologies to Carbine and their artists and designers for my rush to a hasty and inaccurate appraisal. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge that Tobold was entirely correct to point out that "the game only opens up in the third zone" and that, by implication, I probably should have waited until I got into what you might call the "game proper" before passing judgment.  In my own defense I can only offer that, if you don't want your new MMO to be judged on what players see in the Tutorial, you probably shouldn't make your Tutorial GO ON FOREVER!

Every hair of the bear reproduced.

Corrections made, apologies behind me, from the lofty heights of level nine (still a level shy of the optimum TRIL (Tobold's Recommended Impression Level) I am going to go out on a limb and say this:

I like WildStar.

I wasn't expecting to like it. I didn't especially want to like it. It just so happens I do like it. It's gaudy, goofy, and just plain daft but it has...something. Specifically, it has lots and lots of somethings from other MMOs, most of which I liked the first time round and am happy to see given another airing. It's like watching one of those movies where you can spot all the director's influences yet without feeling that you'd rather be watching those movies instead.

No longer the ugliest but definitely still the busiest.

Just to take one very obvious example: The Lopp. Having done no research whatsoever into WildStar's world and lore, my introduction to The Lopp came in-game as I ran across a bridge in the first non-tutorial zone on the Dominion side. Not for the first (or the last) time in this morning's three-hour session, what I saw there in front of my Chua Engineer provoked a fully-articulated "What the...!?" from me, sitting at home staring at the screen in confused disbelief.

In this case what I was staring at appeared to be a two-foot tall moustachioed rabbit with three-foot long ears and eyes the size of dinner plates, wearing a fez and carrying a spear. Even in the avowedly non-realistic setting of Nexus this introduction came as something of a surprise but that particular example of the species turned out to be a sartorial conservative compared to his Chieftain, who appeared to have been dressed by a five-year old girl on a Haribo high and to be rather pleased about it.

Why do you call us "Big Folk" when your ears alone are taller than I am?

The Lopp, then, don't closely resemble anything seen in a Western MMO before, or not by me, at least. Long-tailed rabbits in fancy dress that walk around on their hind legs (although come to think of it, none of them do "walk". They all stand in place and...jiggle.). Never seen anything like them at all - until they open their mouths.

I forget where I first heard the word "shiny", now such a recognizable MMO trope. It might have been among the Ratonga in EQ2 or maybe it comes from WoW or the Goblin Beast-Tribe in either of the Final Fantasies. I do know, however, that for the past two years I have associated it most closely with The Skritt, GW2's race of bipedal rats, who spend most of their time running about squeaking about "shinies", at least until enough of them gather in one place to generate the hive mind intelligence that allows them to focus on something beyond the surface sheen of objects (most likely World Domination, if you believe the Asura, although you can put that down to professional jealousy. Probably.)

A short conversation with Chieftain Aleli at the Lopp camp at Glitterfur Caravan later, however, and it's like we've slipped sidewise into Tyria. They talk in fractured English (with a cod Eastern European accent, which may be in dubious taste but at least makes a change from all the cod British accents that make The Dominion seem not so much like an Evil Empire, more The Dick van Dyke Memorial Home for "resting" character actors).

The Lopp (and yes, I do see what you did there...) exhibit less than stellar intelligence (when asked how they got to Nexus they reveal they hitched a lift with some other race because they have no "Vroom ships" of their own).

Umm...I am a Chua, in case you hadn't noticed.

Most importantly, they will do anything for other races' cast-offs, which they see as the greatest of treasures or, more accurately, you will do anything, because yes, of course, WildStar is at heart a quest-driven MMO and Glitterfur Caravan is a Quest Hub. So, kill these wolves Highland Howlers, gather these ground spawns shinies, earn faction, open up more quests, rinse/repeat.

Whether this appeals all depends on your tolerance for whimsy, repetitive actions and barely competent voice acting. No device with the capacity to measure my tolerance for at least two out of those three has yet been invented, so I was in Hog Heaven, as no-one in England has ever said, even ironically.

Moving from Quest Hub to Quest Hub is not my thing so I mostly just ran around, spoke to anyone with the traditional exclamation hat, said "I can do that!" to them all in blithe disregard of my capabilities (largely unknown) or their intentions (largely ignored). I'm already playing my Chua as a bumbling innocent, a kind of cross between Benny the Ball from Top Cat and  John Finnemore's character Arthur Shappey from the magnificent Cabin Pressure so helping people without knowing why or what for counts as roleplaying.

In the process there was a lot of fighting. Mob density isn't uncomfortably tight in WildStar but neither are agro ranges insignificant. Also, I have a Big Gun and an Artillery Bot - I'm going to go around a cow? I don't think so! And anyway, here's another surprise:


I like WildStar's combat.

It's not pretty but then why should it be? This is War!

I really wasn't expecting to say that. It looks horrible in videos and even worse in static screenshots. All those jarring "telegraphs" aka ugly red grids. Written descriptions of how it works make it sound fiddly-faddly, awkward, unimmersive and just plain annoying. It's none of those things.

Turns out the telegraphs are quite fun to play with and before long they look no less jarring than spell effects and explosions. The double-tap dodge is easy to use although I'd prefer a hot-key like the divided hemisphere GW2 provides as an alternative. Dodge is a bit of a luxury at these levels anyway. A spritely Chua can often simply scuttle to one side and get out of the box without having to dodge and that old favorite, back-pedalling with both barrels blazing, hasn't stopped being highly effective yet.

You'd never guess it to look at him but there's nothing he likes better than a kick-around.
And he didn't even want to use me as the ball!

There's much, much more I could say about WildStar even at this very early stage. Like how dense and packed the Lore appears to be, with books filled with lengthy text lying around all over the place and NPCs just falling over themselves to go into detailed, if pithy, explanations and explications. Or how complex (maybe just complicated but let's give it the benefit) the progression appears to be, clearly enough to keep a player like me occupied for a good, long time). Or how visually intriguing (if seemingly flat in places and over-busy in others) the world is, full of curious little details and quirks just begging to be examined at considerable leisure.

Over the remaining week I'd like to get to level 10 and take a look at both crafting and housing, then to level as far again on the Exile side (where I just bet every voice actor speaks with either an authentic North American or cod-Spanish accent...) to see how that grass grows. Even at this very early stage, though, I can say for certain that, were WildStar launching with a F2P model I would be playing it at launch and if it were Buy To Play I'd have pre-ordered.

Over 'ere son! On me 'ead!

For very much the reasons Jeromai outlines in his reply to my comment at his post linked above, however, there is no chance I will be buying WildStar as a subscription game. I would like to play it but I would not rather play it than the MMOs I am already playing (or not playing...) and therefore a subscription makes no sense for me at this time.

That's not to say I don't think it's worthy of a subscription: as a main MMO it almost certainly is. Meanwhile I'll play it as and when there are free trials or offers and bide my time until either the game changes payment models or I'm at a sufficiently loose MMO end that a subscription would make sense.

Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? : FFXIV:ARR

For most MMOs political correctness ends where the gameworld begins. Customer service will quite rightly be on you like a ton of bricks should they catch you expressing yourself in a way that would see you, if not in court, then at least socially ostracized in the real world, but if you want to rag on someone for an aspect of the race they've chosen to adopt as their in-game persona then go ahead, give it your best shot.

What's more the internal politics and culture of the virtual worlds, where our characters grew up and where, by reason, they should be far more at home than we are, tend not only to allow these attitudes but to shape and often actively encourage them. In the high summer of Everquest it was not unusual for a dwarven cleric, as he sat meditating to restore the mana he'd just drained keeping the ogre warrior in his party upright, to find the self-same ogre offering him some delicious Dwarf Chops as a snack. The ogre wasn't offering any undersized slices of pigmeat, either. He meant actual pieces of an actual dwarf, chopped up and roasted with spices and garnish, quite possibly by the very ogre now handing it around the group.

When you said "study at my feet" I didn't think you meant it literally

Someone in the original Everquest design team thought it would be completely fine for the playable races in the world they were imagining to consider each other not only as potential allies or enemies but as a staple source of nutrition. It wasn't just a couple of items sold by an NPC for a quick giggle, like the Dwarf Pickles you could buy in Freeport, either. The original baking skill included recipes for the meat of all player races and they were widely used, too, both practically for the stat boosts they provided and for the endless opportunities they opened up for boisterous humor in the most dubious of taste. If I had a platinum piece for every time my gnome cleric was offered a gnome kabob...

Forget the Charr/human squabble! Did no-one remember the cat/mouse thing?

Time moves on and consenting cannibalism between playable races appears to have gone out of fashion, only to be replaced by an unreconstructed 19th century approach to racial interaction. It's a pot that's been bubbling for a while but it came to a rolling boil in Guild Wars 2, where I admit to being mildly shocked during my personal story to find the great and the good among the three Orders that aspire to what passes for the moral high ground in Tyria blithely referring to potential allies in the fight against the dragons as "lesser races".

They're letting anyone in these days!

Given the level of technological and engineering expertise, not to mention the political sophistication, demonstrated by the Dredge, the devastating intellectual potential of the Skritt hive mind or the philosophical gravitas and nobility of the Kodan this seems an attitude steeped not just in arrogance but in ignorance too. Maybe the "lesser" races don't build baroque metropolises like Divinity's Reach, The Black Citadel or Rata Sum but a gift for ostentatious construction does not alone grant moral superiority.

The melting pot that is Lion's Arch makes for a much brighter indicator of more modern ways of thinking. Way back in beta I was gleeful to spot a Skritt citizen even though at the time I didn't quite know what it was that I was seeing. Most sentient races find a home in Lion's Arch, trading, laboring, making diplomatic representations. There's no lesser race representative on the Captain's Council now but one day, who knows?

And so to Eorzea with its moral and political infrastructure so very strongly reminiscent of Tyria's, its Grand Companies matching the Orders, its Scions of the Seventh Dawn mirroring the Pact and the overweening threat of the Garlean Empire creating the same need for unity as the Elder Dragons: here we also find a categorical divide between the superior, playable races and the inferior, non-playable beast tribes. At first the attitudes exhibited by NPCs and by implication expected of player-characters feel just as unpalatable, but as the narrative unfolds and, particularly, as side-quests deepen understanding of the milieu and the ambivalence of the settled races comes into focus, there does seem to be, if not justification then at least an explanation that rings true.

So you say...

Behind every beast race lowers a Primal, a kind of minor deity or force of nature. The very presence of the Primals is said to threaten the existence of Eorzea, largely because of the need for the beast tribes to expend vast amounts of aetheric crystals to summon their patron Primal. Not to mention that, when summoned, these immensely powerful entities tend to be highly inimical to all but their sponsored race, posing a direct threat to life, limb and liberty for anyone unlucky enough to be in the area at the time.

Got any fork handles?

Yet even with good reason to shun or fear them, many beast tribes are not just tolerated but welcomed in Eorzea's cities and towns. Goblins and Qiqirn especially seem well-integrated, respected according to their actions and personalities rather than judged purely on their race or appearance. It's a pure joy to trade with Qiqirn in their junkyards or sit in the dust as a Goblin master craftsman teaches you the basics of Materia.

For me, at least, the diversity of its races and the complexities of their interactions are one of the great pillars upon which the whole edifice of a high-fantasy virtual world rests. A wide variety of playable races is an obvious indicator when it comes to choosing one MMO over another in today's overcrowded field, but in many ways it's how the the unplayed, unplayable races are presented and developed that can end up mattering more.

To Be A Charr : GW2

In a comment over at KIASA, Spinks said "GW2 is fun but (dare I say) not very compelling". That hasn't been my experience, not exactly, but I have found that my first compulsion hasn't so much been to play the game as to document it. I've taken hundreds of screenshots, made copious notes, taken videos and written blogs.There was a point when I was beginning to wonder whether I was playing a game or doing a research project.

Thankfully, that moment has passed. This weekend, for the first time since beta, I felt that I wanted to play the game more than I wanted to write about it and even as I type this I'm aware that I would rather be playing. That's a good thing.

Finding His Voice

The tipping point has been the coalescing of the character of my Charr ranger. I loved the Charr as a race from the moment I first created one in beta and 99% of my entire time in GW2 has been spent as a cat but it's taken a while for that general adoration to refine into a specific affection for the singular Charr that represents my viewpoint out onto Tyria.

No MMO really falls into place for me until I reach an affinity with character. The world can be beautiful, the gameplay fluid and thrilling, the storyline fascinating; none of that will hold me for long if a character I'm playing fails to take on a life of his or her own. I don't roleplay but I do character-play and developing an innate understanding of what the character I'm directing would want and, especially, how he would express himself, is the paramount factor in whether I find myself immersed in a virtual world or just playing a game.

Name one.

Since I'm not a gamer and not much interested in games or gaming, playing a game won't hold my attention for long. Longevity in an MMO requires that at least one character finds a voice. That's just now beginning to happen in GW2 and I have the feeling it will happen again and again, because the world of Tyria offers an exceptionally strong platform on which characters can be built.

Just as the eight classes appear even at a quick glance to be very different from each other, so do the five races. Playing an Asura will not feel like playing a short human any more than playing a Charr feels like playing a Norn in a fur coat. Will it even feel the same to grow up Charr as Ash or Iron? I don't know but I want to find out. From such different and fully-realised starts in life each new addition to the team that can never meet must stand the finest of chances to make that elusive transition from notional to natural.

Skritt are in Whispers. Just sayin'.

And then, beyond lie such possibilities. It's far too soon to be thinking about expansions but already I am. In all the time I've played MMOs I have never wanted to be a frog. The one and only time I ever played one was at the launch of Everquest's Legacy of Ykesha expansion and that character is long gone, never to be missed. Now, though, I would play a Hylek in a heartbeat. Or a Quaggan. It will come as no surprise, naturally, to know that before either of those I would play a Skritt.

One day. One day. For now, to be a Charr is enough.