If I Had A Hammer

It's relatively rare for me to crave any specific item in an mmorpg. As a rule, I'm usually content to make do with whatever comes to hand. It makes me largely immune, or at least strongly resistant, to those kinds of temptations and obsessions that lead players to spend more time or money than they feel comfortable with as they try to get that one specific object of desire.

Back when the genre was young, camping rare spawns for rarer drops was something people both did and complained about doing with equal fervor. I was mostly happy to leave them to it. I had a rough rule of three, meaning if I was interested in something I'd give it three tries before crossing it off my list. And that was only if it was reasonably easy to camp to begin with.

Similarly, I've never been much of a one for long drawn-out quests. If you can't get it finished in one session, two or three hours tops, is it really a good use of your time? If it's entertaining or amusing or fun, then yes, of course, carry on as long as that stays true, but if it's a chore and a pain then why bother? Gaming is supposed to be a pleasure not a punishment, after all.

The advent of token systems, whereby you do more routine, regular activities, such as killing mobs or completing tasks in order to earn credit with NPC vendors willing to sell you the kind of thing boss mobs might drop, did little to change my mind. I first came across such a mechanism in Dark Age of Camelot's Darkness Falls dungeon, where it was widely recieved with rapture and wonder. I was very sniffy about it. If I'd wanted to go shopping, well I'd be down at the mall, wouldn't I, not sitting at home playing an mmorpg.

In time, of course, the mall came to me. Cash shops became an established part of almost every game, whether or not you had to buy a subscription. Are there any mmorpgs left, Free to Play, Buy to Play, Freemium or Sub, that don't have any kind of cash shop at all? I can't immediately think of any.

The advent of real money stores inside games removed one of my two main objections: time. I couldn't say any longer that I wasn't prepared to spend hours and hours doing something I didn't really want to do just to get a pretty bauble or a useful tool. It only takes a few seconds to get a credit card out of your wallet and any time spent doing things I'd rather not have been doing had already long since been accounted for. I call it "going to work".

One of the biggest impacts of the introduction of cash shops to the hobby was to make it clear to me just how very low a value I put on imaginary objects. I routinely spend the same small amounts of money in real life on pointless, trivial, transitory pleasures that I would never contemplate spending in games. 

It turns out I don't want most virtual stuff at virtually any price... unless it's being given away "free", of course, at which point, apparently, I'll jump through as many hoops as you care to hold in front of me. But that's a different post altogether and anyway, I'm not here to psycho-analyze myself, attractive a proposition as that may be.

No, I'm here to say that for all my professed lack of interest, motivation and enthusiasm for both the methods and the rewards, there are exceptions. Sometimes I do see something I absolutely must have. To be clear, even then it also needs to be something I feel I can get without doing anything I positively dislike doing or spending money I feel is disproportionate to the enjoyment I'm likely to receive. But there are things I'm prepared to make more of an effort than usual to lay my hands on.

A few days ago, pretty much by chance, I happened across one such in Guild Wars 2 and it was in the most unlikely place: Super Adventure Box.

 

I'm not much of a fan of SAB. Belghast posted about the 8-bit emulation embedded in a 3D mmorpg the other day, saying "as much as I thought I would enjoy it… I am not really feeling it", which is not too far from how the event affects me, when it rolls around each year. It's extremely impressive that someone was able to build this other game inside GW2 and I have had some fun playing around with it but it's not really what I came to mmorpgs in general or GW2 in particular to do.

There was a fair chance I might not have gone to Rata Sum to see what was happening at all this year. Not much changes in SAB year to year and even if it does I can't usually see it. In all the time the event's been running I've never got further than the end of World One, Zone Three and I've never beaten the final World One boss, King Toad. I Gave up trying long ago.

I can look at the stock on the vendors, though. That's something I can manage. And as I said, although I usually give most things a pass, once in a while I'll spot something that really makes me feel the quickening of desire.

Nothing like that happened when I scrolled through the goods on the regular vendors. I'm not all that keen on the look of most Super Adventure Box gear and anyway I have a bunch of unopened SAB weapons boxes in the bank from the World vs World SAB Reward track. 

I did want the boom box when it appeared years ago, enough to make a considerable effort to get the necessary baubles to buy it, but even then I've always been happy with the basic model. It's not like I want to be able to play the tunes for the pleasure of listening to them. So long as I can see my character running around like an extra in a 1970s Blaxploitation movie, I'm good.

This year, though, there was a new vendor. A kodan, no less. Why a seven foot tall talking bear would be in Rata Sum at all, let alone hanging out next to Moto and his magic box, beats me and the spurious rationale the bear offers is scarcely convincing. Nevertheless, there he is, selling three weapons he claims to have crafted.

How a kodan came to craft weapons that look like rejected prototypes from some illegal, underground lab staffed by renegade Canthan bot-makers and Inquest weaponsmiths is something we'd probably best leave to the official reports. I suspect the bear is either lying or deranged, more likely the latter since derangement seems to be an ethnic Kodan trait.

Whatever the provenance, all three weapons are above average in terms of aesthetic desirability and one, the Hammer, is among the best I've seen in the game, ever. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it, even though I don't have a single character that regularly uses a hammer. Always providing it wasn't going to feel too much like hard work to get it, obviously.

The simple way to get the weapons is to buy them from the bear. They cost thirty Bauble Bubbles and four gold each. Someone who's good at SAB could get thirty BBs in a couple of days just by running the event as normal. Even I can get five or six a day at minimal effort. I already had seven in the bank from last year and just a couple of sessions after I decided to get the hammer I have sixteen.

I also have the hammer. 

 

I didn't buy it. I got it as a drop. If you talk to the kodan he explains that's a possibility but I learned it from Mrs Bhagpuss. I linked her the hammer in guild chat when I discovered it and she said "Oh, yes, I've got that one". 

After a bit of to and fro about how she'd come by it, during which she first thought it had been from the WvW SAB track and then corrected herself to say it was a drop in WvW, from a tower boss, we finally worked out it came from a Super Loot Bag, the reward for doing one of the new SAB achievements. It's all in the patch notes, which, unusually, I had neglected to read in full.

That achievement gives three bags per day, one for each of the first three Champion mobs you kill anywhere in Tyria. All tower and keep supervisors in WvW are Champions, which is how Mrs Bhagpuss came to get hers. Some World Bosses also count. I got one from the Shaman at the Maw and three from the pre-event at Jungle Wurm, for example.

Regular champions, of which there are probably hundreds, work just as well. I've been soloing the Champion Troll in Frostgorge for one of my daily drops, when I haven't had the patience to wait for the Wurm.

The Retro-Forged Weapon Chest is a rare drop from the bags but not that rare. I got one on my third day of trying. Of course it was on the wrong account but still. 

And I do have a character on that account who can and quite possibly should use it. He's one of my Engineers and I took the trouble to spend the points to make him into a Scrapper back in Heart of Thorns, meaning he can wield a hammer. He never goes anywhere or does anything but he could always start.

He also has a well-defined, pirate-themed look that I designed for him many years ago. A glitching, technicolor magitech hammer doesn't entirely go with it. I may have to give him a full makeover because the hammer is that good. It really is.

The character I want it for is my Elementalist. The new End of Dragons elite specialization for her class is the Catalyst and the new weapon that goes with that class is the hammer. 

I'm not proposing to play her as a catalyst, heavens no! She's a staff Tempest and that's the way she's staying. The thing is, Elementalists got a second weapon slot a few years back, having been a class that didn't have one, and I have never used it. The universe is just conspiring to put a hammer in her hand. That hammer.

I'll keep killing the champions because I would anyway. If the box drops from the achievement, all well and good. If not, a couple of SAB runs each day for a few days should see me right with the bear.

My Ele will have that hammer. And when she does she will smite the daylights out of every creature that looks at her funny. Just to make the colors fly.

Hello Moto

It's back. The April Fool's joke that didn't know when to stop. Yes, it's Super Adventure Box, now upgraded to Festival status.

Some people love it, of course. It's the highlight of their year, apparently. Bree at Massively:OP called it "The best thing ever added to Guild Wars 2". I don't think it would make my Top Fifty (and no, I am not doing a list).

I definitely don't hate it. It's okay as far as it goes. I've killed a few idle hours inside Moto's box along the way. There were a couple of years when we had some little mini-guild outings there, back when there was someone in our guild other than me and Mrs Bhagpuss.

As the years pass, though, I find less and less to amuse me in the nursery colors and shapes. Last year I didn't get around to visiting SAB at all. This year will pass the same way, I imagine.

I did speak to Moto when I was taking a few screenshots for this post, just to see if he had anything new to offer. He didn't. I think even his line about bug fixes and polish goes back a few years now. 

The patch notes are a little more forthcoming. There are some new "ooze enemies...tucked away in each zone" and you can get an ooze mini by completing the annual meta achievement. There are some other new achievements and the usual additions to the weapons and items you can buy. And the "responsiveness of the bouncy mushrooms and trampolines" has been improved. About time! I'd been losing sleep over that one.

One thing I do think might be new is the extremely detailed set of instructions on the official website. I don't recall seeing anything like those before. It's so comprehensive, in fact, I wouldn't hesitate to call it a walkthrough. 

I'm a little puzzled as to why ANet feel it's necessary after all this time. Is customer service inundated every year with floods of puzzled, frustrated players, unable to figure out what to do? Are they expecting a massive influx of newcomers who've never seen a pixillated cloud before?

It seems like a lot of effort for something everyone's already so familiar with but I guess it can't hurt. It would be a little churlish to complain about getting too much information after so many years of calling devs out for not giving us enough.

Last and definitely not least on the "Really?" scale we have the Doritos promotion. Here's the offical press release: 

"Enter to Win A Year’s Supply of Doritos® Snacks

All that bouncing is sure to make you hungry. Awesome news! Every time you complete your daily Course Work: Super Adventure Festival meta-achievement, you’ll earn one entry to win a year’s supply of Doritos® snacks. Just log in every day and accomplish three of the superbly educational tasks offered under the Daily Super Adventure Festival category in your achievements panel".

I'd make a sharp remark but honestly it's beyond irony. You could get a term paper out of the internal contradictions of that one paragraph and a dissertation out of the cultural implications of the promotional contest itself.

There are giveaways in game, too. They're underwhelming. A free Super Adventure Box Of Fun and five Continue Coins. Those can just stack on the ones I already have in the bank.

But as I said, I'm not hating on Super Adventure Box. It adds color to the game. It's (mostly) harmless. People like it. Well, some.

I still think ANet missed a trick by not spinning it off into a standalone game and developing it separately. It sits uncomfortably inside GW2, where it struggles to fit the lore (although they've made a brave attempt to shoehorn it in). As an annual festival it spends most of the year gathering virtual dust, when plenty of people would like to be able to play it. It's not to my taste but even I can see it has more potential than it's been allowed to realize.

For me, it's not even the real Superadventure. That name belongs to the hardback annuals I sometimes found at the foot of my bed on Christmas morning as a child.  

Comic annuals are a British tradition that hasn't entirely died out even to this day. Growing up in the sixties and seventies I used to get half a dozen or more most years and the Superadventure series, which collected stories from what seemed like a random selection of DC comics, were one of my favorites.

I'd be a lot more interested in that kind of Super Adventure. Maybe someone at DCUO could give it some thought.

For now, though, we'll have to make do with the Super Adventure Festival. It's with us for twenty days. The lid comes down on the toybox at noon PST on April 27. 

Better get jumping.

Fool's Gold: EQ2

I am not a fan of April's Fools Day. Not since I was about nine years old, anyway. Game developers, however, seem to love it. Or pretend to.

Every MMORPG you can think of will be paying some kind of service, lip or fan, to the Feast of Fools this weekend. Guild Wars 2 long ago locked the date to the inexplicably popular Super Adventure Box, which returned on Thursday.

I haven't bothered with it yet. I don't hate it. I liked it well enough when it was new. Probably seen enough of it now, though. I hear there are some new races. Might try those, I guess. I do like racing.

Over in EverQuest II we have a much more appealing prospect in Bristlebane Day. There really is a "day", too. The whole festival runs for a couple of weeks but there's a bunch of stuff that only happens on the First of April, including rabbit-catching, special harvests and the Sphinx questline.

Also, and this is one I always forget, it's the one chance in the year Beastlords get to tame a were-rabbit warder. Also a were-bear but who cares? Were-rabbit, dude!

I may jump on that later. You get the whole of the two weeks for that one, fortunately. I have a highish-level Beastlord although I never really got on with the class. Too much like hard work compared to the original EverQuest version. Still, were-rabbit...

A lot less fuss and an easy run is the new quest, handed out by Zruk the troll in Enchanted Lands. All Bristlebane quests begin in Enchanted Lands, presumably because Bristlebane Fizzlethorpe, God of Mischief, is a Halfling. Identifies as a halfling, maybe I should say. God, after all. Pretty much be what he wants.

I did the new quest right before this post. It took maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, most of which was me running around not knowing what I was looking for. I thought I'd do it the proper way, without looking anything up.

I was expecting it to be quick. On a max level character with unlimited Fast Travel via All Access membership, most movement-gated questing is trivial. Add in both Tracking (which I give my Berserker by way of the extremely cheap Scrolls of Tracking that I buy from the Cash Shop) and Track Harvestables, which I have by dint of being a maxed-out crafter, and there's not much that slows me down on a scavenger hunt.

Apart from being in the wrong place, looking for the wrong thing, that is. Turns out pretty much the entire Antonican seaboard is known as the Coldwind Coast and I was on the wrong side of the map. Plus the clovers aren't shinies as I thought they would be, nor are they drops form the Bristlbane holiday harvests, Jester's Gardens.

After ten minutes looking for the things I lost patience and googled the quest. That got me nowhere. No-one's written it up yet. It must have been tested, though, and EQII testers love to chat about what they're testing and how much it's annoying them, so I went to the forums to read the feedback.

Unfortunately for me the general opinion seemed to be that the quest worked pretty much just fine from the get-go, so no-one felt the need to walk through the steps. I finally had the brilliant idea of googling the item I was looking for, the Coldwind Clover. That took me to an EQII Maps link, where the location was marked.

I opened my map in-game to orient myself and guess what? There was a big, green quest highlight picking out the area where I was supposed to be searching. Could have saved myself a lot of time there if I'd looked but I thought they'd dropped that system a couple of years back in the interests of "immersion". Not for holiday fluff quests, evidently.

Once I'd got that sorted it was barely five minutes to do the whole thing. Clovers in Antonica, Vulriches in Kylong Plains, White Heather in Butcherblock.  Back to Zruk each time for a hand in and the next stage. Without Fast Travel I guess it would take maybe half an hour.

As I've said before, that Fast Travel perk is all but worth the monthly sub on its own. Which does beg the question of why I'm spending 90% of my EQ2 playtime at the moment on Kaladim, where All Access is mandatory but Fast Travel is disabled, along with every other innovation that happened after 2005. Also, no holiday events.

That's a post for another day. Today's all about the silly. Actually, now I come to think about it...

The reward for helping Zruk is a housepet. Like I need any more of those. Y'know what? I just had an idea. I think I'll start a zoo. I'm about fed up of all the creatures lurching and hopping and flapping about the halls of my Maj'Dul mansion. I just might round them all up in some kind of wildlife sanctuary somewhere. That Baubleshire Prestige Home I bought looks a bit like a park...

While I was in Enchanted Lands I did the race a couple of times. Got a hat. Then I went to Freeport and bought the new Bristlebane crafting book. Also last year's, which I seem to have missed. And a rubber chicken.

Playing on Kaladim, and also reading Wilhelm talking about his adventures in old Norrath and Middle Earth, it's finally coming home to me how unecessary my search for a new MMORPG to indulge my passion for meaningless leveling has been. It's not new games I need, it's just more characters in the ones I'm already playing.

I think I might treat myself to some more character slots.

Super Adventure Festival Is Go! : GW2

On the first of April 2013, I posted this. Three years on it remains the third most viewed post ever on Inventory Full.

I was never a huge fan of The Super Adventure Box, myself. About the most positive thing I could find to say about it in that post was this: "The best part? I can skip the whole thing and still not miss out on the goodies!"

In the end I did spend maybe a couple of hours in there in total. I still have quite a few of the baubles and coins stashed in various banks, awaiting the day SAB might make a comeback, because I hadn't saved enough to buy those "goodies" I apparently wanted before it vanished, seemingly for good. I have absolutely no idea what those goodies might have been, by the way...

I didn't really care much whether SAB ever returned but others were a lot more invested. Indeed, it's fair to say the long absence of the supposed joke "game within a game" had turned into a festering sore for some. It wasn't quite on the scale of the NGE but it was getting there.

The sudden and totally unexpected re-appearance of the 8-bit emulation seems like a lot more than a co-incidence, coming as it does with Mike "Two Hats" O'Brien very plainly operating in full damage control mode. He appears to be on a mission to save the company and the game that you might well argue that, as President, he's been sleepwalking towards disaster for the best part of four years. I have this mental picture of him waking up from a Rip van Winklesque slumber, staring around him wild-eyed and croaking "My Game! What have you bastards done to my GAME?!"

Anyway, all fantasy aside, bringing back S.A.B. is a masterstroke. It's like literally buying goodwill. Okay, it's like metaphorically buying goodwill. Literally metaphorically.

The Box will be with us for almost three weeks, until April 19th. Chances are it will be leaving just as the Big Spring Quarterly Update arrives, allowing for at least an illusion of continual development. I suspect we may be about to see a lot of that kind of thing. At least an illusion of progress beats stasis, I guess.

It's unlikely I'll find much time for box jumping, although I imagine I'll give it the odd, desultory scramble, here and there. Even though it's not my thing it's good to see it return. It was always a relatively harmless amuse-bouche for the general population and a wildly popular cause celebre (not sure why I've gone all gallic all of a sudden) with a particular demographic. It seemed churlish to withhold it.

What's most telling, though, is that Super Adventure Box is officially confirmed as a recurring, annual event from now on.

SAB has a great, regular home in Guild Wars 2. As a yearly festival, SAB will now be a dependable fixture in Tyria

Now can we please do the same for The Festival of The Four Winds?

I Remember Dragon Bash: GW2

Maybe it was because I'd just been writing about how much there is to do in GW2 but I've begun to notice just how much has already gone missing during the short life of the game. It was the pictorial record that alerted me.

Over the three years it's been up and running, beta weekends included, I've taken over six and a half thousand screenshots. They pop up randomly as my desktop background, a new one every ten minutes. As we move steadily into the future these begin more and more to resemble glimpses of a lost age.

Living Story Seasons One and Two account for much of the change. I diligently documented their convoluted, fractured progress as I attempted to follow the quasi-linear narrative. One would not, perhaps, expect the chapters of a completed story to remain in play indefinitely but seeing those fragmentary images of the past reminds me strongly just how much happened that can never happen again.

A rift in reality

The changes made to the way Season Two operates, packaging it up into re-playable, purchasable instances, attempts to square that circle with some constricted success but despite the ongoing clamor for something similar to be applied retrospectively to Season One, it's very hard to see how something like Scarlet's Invasions could be replicated for latecomers. Even relatively simple events like the Shiverpeak refugee crisis would only be feasible with the introduction of the kind of phasing technology used in WoW and ESO, something I can't see as either likely or desirable.

Still, one doesn't expect an ongoing storyline, necessarily, to remain persistently available throughout the life of an MMO. Every MMO I've played for long enough to see it happen has had one-off story-driven events that did or didn't change the world. What's more surprising to realize, as these snapshots of the past pop up, is just how many set-piece events have been added to GW2 and then discarded in less than three years. Events that would, in other MMOs, most certainly have represented permanent recurring content.

A rift in surreality

Over in EQ2 right now Errolisi Day has just ended and Brewday is coming in. Those holidays come round every single year, bringing with them all the content they've accrued over the life of the game. Most years something new is added but rarely is anything taken away. Any year that I get the itch to revisit holiday events in Norrath or Azeroth or Middle Earth or just about any other of the imaginary worlds I've called home for a while I can be fairly confident the party will still be going on.

I'm hoping to visit FFXIV during the current "don't make a stranger of yourself" welcome back week that runs until the ninth of March. There I mean to board the much-ballyhooed Golden Saucer to see whether Triple Triad is really anything like Vanguard's much-missed Diplomacy card game. No-one knows what the future holds but I feel reasonably assured in suggesting that if I don't make it to Eorzea this time round the Chocobo races will still be running whenever I do find the time to drop by.

Things just don't work that way in Tyria. For all the lather and strop over "limited time events", for all the hue and cry and tarring and feathering after the Karka Invasion and the Taming of Southsun, the game has largely carried on with a modified version of the St Crispin's Day Solution.

Can't say we weren't warned

Remember Dragon Bash? In Telara something very similar happens every year. In Tyria it's a once-and-done deal. The Bazaar of the Four Winds managed one repeat appearance before it crashed and burned. Literally. Super Adventure Box similarly managed a single encore before the plinky-plink music stuttered into silence. When you come to think of it, what set festivals do we have left in GW2? Halloween, Wintersday and... erm...that's it.

Really, check the Wiki. Two, count 'em, two whole holidays! WoW has thirteen, EQ2 ten, LotRO has a big bash for each season of the year and half a dozen small celebrations scattered around between. You can quite literally mark them on your calendar except you won't need to because you'll have a calendar in the game itself that keeps track stuff like that.

Good luck planning ahead that way in GW2. True, you don't have to be there at a set time on a set day or forever wonder what could have been, the way everyone complained about so bitterly back in Autumn 2012. No, you just have to be there at some point during a set period instead and you'd better be paying attention because, likely as not, there won't be much warning before it starts.

We'll always have Halloween

Once that extended moment, which you can generally bet on stretching for two weeks, Tuesday to Tuesday, passes, chances seem to be increasingly slender whether you'll get a second shot. The subtle way this change has been slipped under the guard of the frenzied supporters of equal access gameplay is exemplary.  Give the people what you want them to have while telling them you have listened and are giving them what they said they wanted. Slick.

Counter to that, though, I do notice, as I gaze nostalgically at shots of Scarlet's probes in The Mists or blocky, primary-colored animals cavorting through Metrica Province, there is a move afoot to package and conceal temporary content neatly away in instances, where it doesn't frighten the horses that we don't have and can be sold on at a profit. The recent Golem Invasion that turned out to be a player-exploited bug not the harbinger of some unexpected World Event, reminded me sharply of how long it's been since some strange, unexplained addition to the open-world landscape sparked frenzied speculation.

I do hope things aren't going to become too tidy. I love looking back at all these lost moments. I love knowing they will never return. Let's have more of it. With an expansion in the works it's a fine time for some excitement-building intrigue and mystery. I never travel anywhere without my camera and soon I won't even have to be in every shot.

Thinking Outside The Super Adventure Box : GW2

It's here. Everyone loves it. Dulfy knows all about it already. Does she never sleep? Me, I took a quick look inside and enjoyed it more than I expected. I might even go back.

The best part? I can skip the whole thing and still not miss out on the goodies!  ANet didn't just consider the dexterity-impaired among us by including Infantile Mode, complete with the magnificently-named "Baby's First Super Adventure" achievement, they went that extra, extra mile and made it so you don't have to go in the box at all.

When I stumbled out of the Box very late last night (alright, early this morning) and lurched over to Moto, the Asuran "genius" responsible for the whole thing I noticed an option in his dialog I'd overlooked on the way in; something about an "extra-curricular assignment". So I asked him about that.


Late though it was I set off to search Metrica Province for manifestations and it wasn't long before I found them. Twinkling spheres hanging in the air, filled with baubles.

It seemed for a while we'd be running around gathering these things by the armful. That turned out to be a bug, possibly. I woke up to a small patch and it seems someone gave the servers a hefty thump with an Asuran spanner overnight and now everything's working as intended. I haven't found any more spheres floating free, anyway.

What happens is that Chests spawn in fixed locations all over Tyria. Okay, I'm taking "all over Tyria" on trust. I can confirm they spawn all over Metrica Province and Wayfarer's Foothills. There's no need to run around blind, trusting to luck you might trip over one; they're all clearly marked on the map.

When you find one and open it out pop the same things you'd find inside the SAB: bunnies, monkeys, toads, snakes (the only snakes on Tyria as far as I know.). Bop them hard and they pop, leaving twinkling spheres filled with yummy bauble goodness. Blue spheres have a single bauble inside, green ones five and gold ones ten.

Don't hang about, though. Whereas last night the baubles hung there indefinitely, leading me to believe they were a harvestable since I came across them in situ sans chest, now they pop like soap bubbles in short order. Loot 'em or lose 'em.

The Super Adventure Box is with us for a month. The Mystic Forge consumables and Continue Coins cost one Bauble Bubble, which is a full stack of regular baubles (that's 250, the same as a full stack of anything in Tyria). The Super Adventure Box O'Fun costs three Bubble Baubles. The weapon skins cost 50 BBs - 12,500 Baubles! Plus a gold piece but who cares about that?

After an hour of Infantile Mode last night I had 36 baubles and even one Bauble Bubble looked out of reach. In a few minutes this morning, most of which I spent taking screenshots, I'd added a hundred to that tally. Mrs Bhagpuss stayed up late and has five Bubble Baubles already. From an unattractive grind doing something in which I have very little interest, the whole thing has turned into, yes, fun!

Well done ANet is all I can say. Pitched perfectly. Shoehorning a retro-platformer into a high-fantasy MMO without breaking the lore takes some doing. Making it worthwhile even for people whose hearts don't beat faster for either retro graphics or platform gameplay is exceptional. And Bonus credit for that Consortium rep who strides over to pitch Moto for the commercial exploitation rights.


Now if they'd just add some skins that Engineers could use...

Now Where Did I Put That Tin Foil Hat? : GW2

So after I killed the Fire Elemental and opened my new-style Bonus Chest I was looking to see if the new WvW thing was in the achievements window and I spotted something odd right down the bottom. Hmm, Super Adventure Box? I'm sure I'd have remembered that...

A quick search finds this forum post from the end of February, which links to this database entry. In the actual Patch Notes? Nothing.

Let the conspiracy theories begin!

[EDIT] And already the mystery is solved and I lose interest.