I Can See For Miles : GW2

One little wrinkle in the whole Pay-To-Win debate that never gets much of a mention is the huge disparity in hardware we all take for granted. It's something that sits in back of every aspect of the hobby from competitive PvP to solo questing.

Some developers make a huge effort to equalize the playing field within the game itself. All kinds of mechanics get a run-out. PvP matches impose a standard gear set, instances cap or snap to level, smart systems run buff checks and remove the ones they don't approve... It's a long list with a clear intent : get as close as possible to player parity.

Only no-one and nothing pays much attention to what's going on outside the game.

There's an event in GW2 called The Frozen Maw. It runs once every two hours in Wayfarer's Foothills. Like many of GW2's regularly-scheduled open raid events it's developed a culture and traditions all its own. As the pre-events conclude and the evil, dragon-worshipping shaman makes his awkward, egotistical claim that he can handle us all with a little effort, people begin quoting their frame-rates in chat.

Small turn-out today.

All big events have a tendency to drop frames but for some reason this one is the worst. As the shaman struggles to complete his ritual to summon the giant ice elemental that will never appear (I've seen the shaman win - nothing happens) the screen fills with flurrying snow. This is what usually gets the blame for the slowdown. As the snow thickens and more snow dervishes spawn frame-rates drop to single figures. Well, mine does.

My PC is getting on for five years old. It was low-mid range for a gaming rig when I got it. I've upgraded it somewhat over the years but I am guessing it would now class as straight entry-level as far as gaming goes. I was going to replace it this Spring but it still runs everything I want to play smartly and efficiently so I've put the decision off for a while.

As I'm strafing around, dodging and rolling with my 9FPS, frankly I can't tell much, if any, difference. Everything looks the same as it did when I had 40FPS, which is about the best I ever get. I read once that the human eye can't distinguish frame rates faster than 30 per second although I've since read that that's not true. Either way, any difference escapes my notice.

Meanwhile, however, there will always be some bright spark claiming 80FPS and listing all the components of his rig so we can admire his good fortune and good sense. Or, really, just his disposable income.

For PvE events taking place under the auspice of ArenaNet's All Must Win Prizes ethos this really doesn't matter. In WvW yesterday, though, a discussion occurred that pointed up how sometimes spending more money really can give you a direct competitive advantage, even in as forgiving a game as GW2.

Yaks Bend had a defensive trebuchet placed in what was supposed to be an unassailable spot inside a keep. Fort Aspenwood attacked and somehow took it down. This lead to the usual, inevitable accusations of hacking.

There used to be a widely-used software hack that allowed you to see further than you should have been able to and thereby to place the targeting circle over things that ought to have been out of reach. This practice, known as "zoom-hacking", largely disappeared when ANet added a first person view. They changed the whole way the camera works, expanded the field of vision and it became possible to do just about anything zoom-hacking used to do by using the legitimate in-game controls.

Extreme close-up!

The treb that got downed by an arrow cart, however, seemed to be beyond even the new, wider FoV. Except someone on our side knew better. He explained that it could be done by playing the game in Windowed mode and stretching the image across multiple monitors, thereby extending the maximum possible field of view.

I don't know if that is an accurate description but if we take him at his word it would, surely, make what happened a legal and legitimate tactic. No third party software or other is being used to alter GW2. There was a video demo of the practice on YouTube way back when the game was in beta in 2012.

So there you have it. Pay to Win. Spend more money out of game to get a clear in-game advantage. Buy a better graphics card, a faster CPU, a topline gaming mouse. Set up multiple monitors. Hire a masseur to stand behind your swivel chair and massage your shoulders as you play. The only limit to your potential advantage over other players is your wallet.

By comparison, a mere selection of codified official advantages, available for nominal sums through the official in-game cash shop, seems hardly worth complaining about.

Tales Of Everyday Gaming: NBI, GW2

Jeromai (yes, him again) has been suffering from Blogger's Block. Rather than let ennui and inertia get the better of him he's chosen to offer himself up as an example for any NBI bloggers who may already be feeling the pressure to come up with something, anything, as they sit and stare into space in front of a blank screen.

His prescription for block-breaking is Freewriting and, leading by example, today he has a post up inspired by a dose of his own medicine. He finds himself taking a close look at the choices he makes when he sits down to play GW2, which is something I find myself doing a lot these days. Examining my choices, that is.

Before he launches into a lengthy, discursive, philosophical account of the ways he chooses to spend his gaming time, though, he wonders "Why should you or I care about what I did? What I incremented? What I achieved?" He means it rhetorically but I'm going to answer as if he was expecting a reply.

For me, it's always interesting to read the accounts of what others, personally, find compulsive and absorbing about the games they play. If the writing is strong enough, involving enough, idiosyncratic and attractive enough, then it scarcely even matters what the games are.

Ah, Silverwastes! Long time, no see and you haven't changed at all. Unfortunately.

It certainly doesn't matter whether they're games I've played or am ever likely to play. I follow Wilhelm and Stabs and Nosy Gamer's detailed descriptions and news reports and analyses of EVE Online, not because I have any particular interest in internet spaceships (I really don't) but because they're able to create narratives in word-pictures that open the game out and make it accessible and intriguing even for a disinterested outsider.

Indeed, were I to limit myself to reading blogs only about games I'm currently playing, most days most of my Feedly feed would go unread. The blogroll over there to the right is filled with blogs that, these days, mainly feature games that I've never tried or have long since abandoned. Yet I read them all with pleasure and with interest.

Think pieces (this is one) are all very well but the heartwood of MMORPG blogging is the telling of tales of everyday adventure. Be it The Sims, WoW or Ingress each everyday story opens a window not only onto another imaginary world but into this supposedly real one we all share as well.

Tip your waitress. I'm here all week.

That said, there's a special appeal in reading someone's thoughts on a game you know and love, especially when it's one you're both still playing. And it's rarely more appealing than when someone simply writes about what he or she does in the game itself.

GW2 is a very successful and popular game but it doesn't seem to generate many blogs. There weren't that many even when the game was new. There's a very active community on reddit and, for all I know, on umpteen other social media platforms but for a good while now the only people on my radar who write about GW2 regularly, in long form, are Jeromai and Ravious. I do miss The Egg Baron...

Consequently it feels very valuable when someone gets down to writing about what they actually do in the game, even when the activities on which they focus turn out to be ones that are peripheral for me. Jeromai writes "...every night, I look at the clock and make sure my butt is in the chair by 8.10pm so that I can kill the Triple Trouble Wurm with the oceanic arm of TTS. If I have time, I might join in by 6.30pm for Karka Queen, or try my best to squeeze my way into Tequatl by 7.00pm." Let's compare.

I have never followed the Three-Headed Wurm event to a successful conclusion. I tried a few times, back when it was introduced well over a year ago, when no-one knew what they were doing. That was clearly going nowhere so after the first couple of weeks I forgot all about it and I've barely spared it a thought since. It's a long, long time since I was last even in the zone when it popped.

Famous last words.

Tequatl I like a lot now everyone knows the ropes. If I notice he's due and I'm not doing something more interesting I'll waypoint down and take up my preferred place at one of the boats or on North Hill. It's a fun event, although not as much fun as the original, unevolved  version, which Mrs Bhagpuss and I did as often as we could manage.

Karka Queen is just another stop on the World Boss train, which I jump on and off as it suits me every day.

Right now the big ticket is Maguuma Wastes. Dry Top and Silverwastes, with their numerous achiever-focused grind levers, have remained popular and populated since they arrived with Living Story 2 (remember that?). The recent addition of a time-limited, region-wide, random drop of a Portal that flags your account for the next Heart of Thorns beta event has brought the crowds flooding in.

Jeromai reports that, such is the level of interest, Triple-Trouble is on hiatus. His own time in Silverwastes has proven well-spent. "One event or another finishes, a fort defence of some kind, or a bull escort, and I realize that I have new mail and a purple beta portal in my inventory."

Move right along the lane please. Plenty of room for everyone.

I liked Dry Top when it was new but got very bored with it after a month or so. Silverwastes always seemed like a weaker iteration of the same idea. I was done with that in a matter of days. With the incentive of the beta portal I went back for the first time in a very long while last week and as a result I have now done the Vinewraith event, successfully, twice. I'd never even looked at it prior to that despite its being arguably the most significant new PvE content drop of the last six months.

It was okay. Again it felt like another very weak iteration of an earlier, stronger, better-realized idea, the Marionette event from Living Story 1, which was possibly my favorite GW2 event ever. A couple of  hour-long sessions in Silverwastes turned out to be about half a session too much. I haven't been back.

In our house the big PvE events of the day are Frozen Maw and, especially, Claw of Jormag. Maw is always the best loot for time spent but Jormag is done for fun. We like to hang at the back in Phase 2 and compete to see who can get the most bags off the Champs. Mrs Bhagpuss is the current record-holder with 11.

#nornpriorities

I think I must have done Maw more than a thousand times by now. Most days I do it twice - some days I do it four or five times. Claw of Jormag probably runs somewhere close to four figures. I have done him regularly ever since my first character reached Frostgorge, long before there was any material reward. I just like the event and always have. It's deliciously annoying.

Outside of that I always do at least the minimum three dailies on all three accounts to get the Completion reward. I never miss unless I am physically unable to reach the PC that day. The bulk of the rest of my time is spent in WvW, of which a good deal is taken up standing around in Citadel sorting my banks or out in the keeps and towers, refreshing siege or just hanging around aimlessly on the walls, chatting and watching the map.

The thing I don't do as much as I would like is map exploration. I still don''t have any character (of more than a dozen) with more than 65% map completion. I don't care about the "completion" part but it does show how much of Tyria I still haven't even seen. Must do something about that. Sometime.

The thing is this: GW2 has long since ceased to be a game that I play. It has become a space in which I live. I have few if any goals there any more. I do the achievements, kill the bosses, hoover up the loot, all for no other reason than to store it away. I have tens of thousands of Ascended crafting materials and enough gold to buy a Legendary should I want one, which I do not. I have well in excess of 10,000,000 karma, 7.5m on one account alone. I have over 2000 Laurels and nothing I want to spend them on.

Of course there are many, many things that can't be purchased, things that I don't have; seemingly endless skins and pets and titles and achievements. It's not that there are no goals left to which I could aspire, far from it. It's just that none of my characters want any of them enough to make the effort worthwhile.

And in GW2 it really would be an effort. Nothing outside of the Gem Store comes without hard work. There's a thread on the official forums entitled "Why does GW2 feel like a grindy F2p?" to which the very obvious answer has to be "Because that's exactly what it is". Or, at least, it is if that's what you choose to make of it.

That's why it's never boring to read about other people's experiences in a game you play, even if those very experiences are boring them to tears. Choices matter and context really helps to place your own experience. There's no better context than the quotidian narratives of other players.

So, here's my nugget of NBI advice for what it's worth: never be afraid to tell your stories of everyday gaming for fear that you'll bore your audience. Explain yourself to yourself and let the resonances reverberate as they will.

But if you've read this far you'll understand that already.

Let's Keep Dancing : GW2 et al

When I log in to GW2 of an evening first I like to get my dailies done. They're easy and satisfying and they serve as a nice wind-down after work. When they were introduced, way back when, dailies were the same every day and I got into the habit of doing them all in Plains of Ashford. After a while they changed things up so that every day's five permed from ever so many and I moved my base of operations to Wayfarer Foothills.

On a good day there you can do the entire daily in fifteen minutes without going more than a few hundred meters from Krennak's Lodge. The Frozen Maw, the World Boss event that runs every two hours, is often good for the full five. Post Megaserver, with a guaranteed zerg, the Maw offers some of the least challenging content imaginable but it's also among the most profitable.

If I never see another wurm egg omelet...

I was estimating the other day that I must have done the Maw event well over two thousand times by now. I do it twice a day, minimum, every day without fail; once on each account. Most days I do it three times and on a Saturday or Sunday I might stretch that to half a dozen. I therefore have a lot of data to draw on.

Excuse me! You there! Charr! Can you see my Rares?
Oh why did they have to make this chest so darned big?.

I began to notice the Shaman's unusual generosity sometime around last November. I started watching my drops very carefully after that and in almost a year I have never, not once, failed to receive at least one Rare in the big chest on the ground. As far as I can ascertain Frozen Maw is the only scheduled "World Boss" event that gives a Rare quality item every single time. Often it coughs up two or three.Why this is, whether it's intended or a favorable bug, I have no idea. I just enjoy nature's bounty while it's there.

The Maw has been through many changes, its popularity swinging wildly. There was a time when it generated its own single-server zerg and for a while, just before the arrival of Megaservers, it had fallen so out of fashion that I often found myself doing the event with just two or three other diehards. It even failed on occasion. Try telling the young 'uns that now. They'll laugh in your face.

I preferred it that way if I'm honest; kiting the Shaman round and around, sending in bears to hold him steady so he wouldn't tether and reset. There was risk then and reward. Now there's just reward. Still, better that than the other way around.

I'm off to the Mists. Want to come?

Anyway, that's by-the-by. Tonight I chose not to do my Daily in Wayfarers but to go to WvW where, in a decent KTrain or just following a commander who knows what he's about, you can knock off the daily in ten or fifteen mindless minutes. Other than the current compulsive, competitive frenzy of a WvW Season or the first couple of days after a Living Story episode, or when I'm leveling up a new character and occasionally need to pay attention, this is mostly what GW2 has become - a repetitive pleasure that often bears more resemblance to chanting a mantra than playing a game.

I'm not complaining. If I wasn't enjoying myself I'd stop. After two years, though, it's really no longer enough to hold my attention full-time. My mind tends to wander. I tab out. I blog. I comment. I browse Amazon. I check the weather. Sometimes I even I dither around in other MMOs.

In-jokes are so funny, aren't they?

That's how it came about a few days ago that I logged into DinoStorm for the first time in a while. The game seems to have been doing just fine without me. It's still busy, still getting updates. It's amazing how many MMOs seem to manage to struggle along, somehow, even without the attention of bloggers and news sites. It's almost as if there were other people out there, enjoying this hobby, about whom we know nothing. Crazy talk!

These last couple of days I've returned to City of Steam too, an MMO that once, indeed several times, gained significant traction in this corner of the Blogosphere, only to lose momentum and slip out of sight. Well, that one's still going too. Also still busy and getting updates. This month they even added a new European server. Another MMO that doesn't seem to care that we stopped paying attention.

In fact it's beginning to look as though just because no-one reading this writes about an MMO any more doesn't mean it fell off a cliff after all. There are hundreds of MMO(RP)Gs out there but we, the iterative subset of bloggers that feature in blog rolls and rss feeds of  blogs that feature in blog rolls and rss feeds, focus on a mere handful. WoW, GW2, ArcheAge, EVE, EQ/EQ2, LotRO, WildStar, SW:ToR, TESO, TSW ... if I listed the entire roster of MMOs regularly discussed in this part of the forest would it amount to more than a couple of dozen? I doubt it.

Oh yes, they're positively hysterical.

There trouble is, there are more MMOs out there than most of us will ever hear about, far less play. Few of us can be Beau Hindman, bravely, forlornly, attempting to play every single MMO ever made. Based on his recorded experience, few of us would want to. It sounds like a grim life.

Even among the MMOS we do get around to trying most don't stick. They slip out of our grasp somehow. The list of MMOs I have "played" is long. Over a hundred. I wrote something about that once, come to think of it. I must get around to Part Two sometime... The list of MMOs I'm still playing, even as infrequently and sporadically as DinoStorm or City of Steam, is much, much shorter.

Yesterday Syp posted a great summation of why The Secret World should have been huge. I've been hankering after some TSW for a while now and Syp's piece was enough to make me patch it up. The download was over 2GB. Shows how long it must have been. Syp and several other bloggers I follow may still play the game and I may be itching to give it another run but TSW, the unpleasant fact remains, was not huge. Whether it was the gameplay, the payment model, the timing... who can say? Whatever it was, TSW did not turn the genre on its head, more's the pity.

And yet anyone who's played the game might think it should have done. The quests are

Half of them are people who won't quit it with the in-jokes.
Whoever named the Shaman "Fred", I'm looking at you...

exemplary and so is the world-building. If you're willing to allow voice-acting in MMOs then TSW is the gold standard and then some. In so many ways there just aren't any better MMOs than TSW and yet it failed to find an audience large enough to match its ambitions. I didn't help. I didn't even manage the statutory three months.

Thinking of MMOs I admire but don't play as often as I ought brought me to Project: Gorgon. I patched that too and checked on the progress of its Kickstarter. There's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that P:G has updated five times this month alone. Following on from yesterday's patch-note-oriented post I'm pleased to report that Eric Heimburg's notes are comprehensive and amusing. More importantly they confirm that this is an MMO that's undergoing a degree of continual development that many big budget games could only envy. *cough* Landmark *cough*.

The bad news is that, with just a week to go, the Project: Gorgon Kickstarter has yet to hit 20% of its target. I encourage everyone reading this to go pledge because solidarity is a good thing but it looks as if there is simply no way this KS will fund. That's bad news for Eric and his team but, if it means the end of development for the project, it may be even worse news for us, the audience.

Damn! This is mini-Maw again, isn't it?

Project: Gorgon is a Vision Game. The people behind it, like the people behind Ever, Jane, Camelot Unchained or Fallen London are making the games they want to play, not games they think will make the most money or satisfy the demands of the most focus groups. That is what creative artists and writers do. There are no good reasons major studios can't do the same. Art does, on occasion, emerge from global, corporate publishers, record companies and film studios. It can be done.

Mostly, though, it isn't and until we see some evidence that the big gaming houses are willing to step up to that mark we had better learn to cherish the little guys who do. It may be too late, again, for Project: Gorgon the KickStarter but I really hope it's not too late for Project: Gorgon the game.

Build it, Eric, and they will come. There may not be many of them but it might just be enough. Keep the faith as Stan Lee used to say. There's an audience out there for just about anything if you can only find it.

After all, if DinoStorm can do it, anyone can.

The Coming Of The Megaserver : GW2

If Year Zero can have a Day One then, for GW2, tomorrow is it. Just another twenty-four hours, give or take coffee and do-nuts, and we'll know everything there is to know about Megaservers.

Except we won't, will we? It was all quite clear at first - start at the beginning with the 1-15 maps, see how that goes, work upwards from there. Then there was a hoo-hah, retrenchment ensued and we were told the least-populated maps would get Megaserved first. That didn't stick either.

The current position appears to be...fluid. From the most recent Dolyak Express thread:

Q: Since the megaserver changes will initially affect a few areas, will the World Boss schedule table be true just for the light yellow bosses or are the rest of the World Bosses also going into the new schedule even if their areas are still not part of the megaserver?

Samuel Loretan: No, the World Bosses schedule will be released globally on April 15th. Note that the order of rollout of the MegaServer system may still change, as we’re still conducting tests, and as we will be adjusting the parameters depending on our monitoring. While I know that it isn’t what was in the blog post, we’re adjusting this to ensure the best experience for everyone, and the smoother possible rollout of this feature, which has a very large scope and requires careful operation.

I just bet it does.

It's behind you!

Anyway, all this got me thinking about World Bosses (horrible descriptor that it is, although possibly not as horrible as World Metas, which is what they often get called when the Train is running). For the first few months of GW2's existence the big ticket events like the three dragon lieutenants, The Maw, Shadow Behemoth and Fire Elemental, had no specific rewards attached to them. A chest would pop but inside it you'd find just a litter of blues and greens, with a low chance of a yellow rare, a vanishingly small chance of an orange exotic and the purely theoretical possibility of the Pre-Cursor to a Legendary (are they purple? I wouldn't know).

Even though there was very little in the way of tangible rewards people still did those events. I did Claw of Jormag any time it happened to be up and I knew about it, which wasn't as often then as it would be later because if there was any equivalent of GWStuff or its predecessor the Dragon Timer, then I hadn't yet found it. Everyone moaned bitterly about the vendor trash but there were always enough people to get those dragons down.

You can criticize his spelling all you like but you can't fault him on his accuracy.

Then Fractals came and overnight it seemed like half the population had vanished. For a while the Claw of Jormag became all but unkillable and even the Shaman at The Maw scoffed at the feeble turnout, although I notice he never actually managed to summon that Elemental no matter how long he hung around.

For many, though, the fractal attraction didn't last and people were soon back at the large-scale set pieces that were supposed to be the jewels in the crown of GW2's dynamic events system, doing what they enjoyed most - complaining bitterly about the terrible loot.

Finally ANet bowed to the pressure to make the Dragons "worth doing", added guaranteed rares, fixed a few bugs and juggled the RNG. The Risk vs Reward ratio suddenly looked an awful lot better (as well it should, seeing that with the numbers turning up there was now no freakin' risk at all!) As I wrote here , by February 2013 a World Meta Train was already in place, although no-one back then was calling it that.

Um..is anyone else still here?

Reading my own words, I'm quite surprised to find just how disenchanted and cynical I already was, just six months or so after launch. I guess that, since I thought even then that "Each event has a margin of error, presumably in an attempt to create some spurious sense of spontaneity but in practice all of them pop at numbingly regular intervals." it's hardly surprising the upcoming change from fake-spontaneity to an openly fixed schedule has had less impact on my sense of immersion than might have been expected. That fragile vessel shattered into fragments long ago.

The details are hazy now but somehow that first iteration of Guaranteed Rares got out of hand. I think you got one per character per day per boss and take-up was so great it was crashing both maps and the economy. By mid-March the train had picked up such momentum that the tracks were beginning to melt and ANet took the opportunity of the beginning of the Living Story to add some brakes.

Things calmed down after that and we all settled into a routine. I even put up a series of guides for the lackadaisical  that still work to a degree, although a number of much-needed passes on difficulty in the following months have meant that almost all the events now take a lot longer to complete than they did when I wrote the guides and the possibility of failure is now a lot higher.

If all these people are here, how come the only paw-prints in the snow are mine?

That long, rambling, inaccurately-recalled  trip down memory lane brings me up to yesterday, when, as is my wont of a Sunday (and most other days of the week come to think of it) I did several of the Dragon Events on both my accounts. I say "Dragon Events" because people still call them that once in a while. I didn't, of course, do any of the three actual dragons. What would be the point?

Tequatl, who so impressed me waaay back in September 2012 now needs an organized raid of a hundred people. Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer mostly work out their anger issues unobserved except when the train runs at Reset, the extended time taken to kill them being widely considered no longer commensurate with the rewards.

Even at a busy time on a Sunday a good turn-out is no longer guaranteed for the easier options but that scarcely matters because of one of GW2's dirty little secrets: barring the very biggest, almost all Dynamic Events are at their best when seen with as few people as possible.

Should have stopped half way through that sentence.

I did The Maw twice yesterday, the first time with four people and the second with about ten. It was exciting, well-paced and fun. People got knocked down and picked up, people kited the Shaman around, pets tanked. For a while it was touch and go but in the end we won in good time. I'm not saying either was as thrilling as the two times I've completed it with just two other players but sometimes you just have to share the fun. As I was glad to do at Fire Elemental, an event that's often hard enough to complete even with a good turn-out, but which we managed to knock off successfully with just four of us.

When the Megaserver beds in, extending its tentacles across all maps, there should be some definite benefits. It's been weeks since I last did Jormag or Shatterer and I miss them both. It'll be good to see a crowd gather for those. On the other hand, though, I wonder if there will ever be another Three-Man Maw. Melting the Shaman in seconds with a massive zerg may be a spectacle but it's not going to create many "I was there" moments, is it?

And maybe if no-one does turn up there could be consequences? Oh, silly me. 

I hope that, despite ANet's promise (or is it a threat?) that "the MegaServer system is just the beginning, and we are exploring all sorts of approaches in creating meaningful and solid social units for the system to use" there will still be the odd empty map here and there. They may have designed Dynamic Events to scale for scores of players but I get the distinct feeling that the  playtesting was carried out by an individual or a small group, because that's really where the detail and the love and attention that went into them all shines most brightly.

However it turns out, though, I'll still be doing the Maw every chance I get because I know another of GW2's dirty little secrets: you always get a Rare in the Big Chest at The Maw. Okay, almost always. I do it every day, often several times a day. Last time I didn't get a Rare was back in November. Often I get two. Or three. None of the other World Bosses pumps out the Yellows like the Svanir Shaman. I probably owe him for about a quarter of my Ecto Mountain.


Only being able to do him once every two hours is going to cut my income considerably so I just better make sure I don't miss any of my limited openings from now on. See you at The Maw, every other hour on the quarter.

Sunday In The Park: GW2

Over many years, on many forums and in the comment threads of many long-suffering blogs, I have banged on about my belief that any MMO can be either sandbox or theme park depending on how you choose to approach it. For all that I hold this to be self-evident, however, I have little in the way of personal experience to offer to back it up. The plain fact remains that I don't really know what a Theme Park is. In fact, before I learned the term through its use in gaming, if it meant anything to me at all it would have been something like this.

Such a lack of personal experience of the original has always left me at a disadvantage when the term gets thrown around in relation to MMOs. I could dimly apprehend its relevance but nothing resonated with my own playstyle, which tends towards the chaotic. I act often on whim and sometimes on whimsy. I create my own goals, pursue them for as long as they interest me then drop them without a second thought.

I am not, nor have I ever been, in the habit of slavishly pursuing any path set out for me by a game or its developers. The concept of moving from ride to ride, waiting patiently or impatiently for each to start, whirling around and around until the music stops then staggering off towards the next is alien to me. Well, it was until yesterday.

Last Friday my Thief dinged 80, the sixth of my Guild Wars 2 characters to reach that milestone. Rather than jump straight back on the horse with my Mesmer or Guardian I thought I'd goof around for the weekend. I spent all Friday night and Saturday morning sorting the bags and bank vaults of six characters. Then for an encore I organized the guild bank.

There were a lot of weapons and pieces of armor strewn around and in the course of tidying it all up it became apparent to me that I had a lot of level 80s dressed in level 50-70 gear. At best. I spent most of the rest of Saturday on the Trading Post, buying and selling. People will buy anything. I was amazed. Throw any old rubbish on there and it's snapped up in seconds.

Anyway, by late Saturday evening all six 80s were in what I would consider to be basic level 80 starting gear with upgraded Masterwork or better in every slot, but between the lot of them they could barely muster an average of one Exotic each. Now, I don't believe I they need Exotics to do anything I'm likely to ask them to do but I was enjoying playing Barbies so I decided I'd spend Sunday farming Rares to convert to Globs of Ectoplasm so that I or Mrs Bhagpuss (who has all craft trades maxed) could make whatever I fancied. That's how I came to see the true horror of the MMORPG Theme Park Experience in action for possibly the first time in my life.

GW2 has a number of open-world events that conclude with the dropping of a chest the size and appearance of a commercial freezer. Inside this chest can be, but rarely are, Rares. Not counting the Temple events in Orr there are six of these chest-droppers. Three feature lieutenants of the Elder Dragons: Claw of Jormag, Tequaatl the Sunless and The Shatterer. The other three are The Frozen Maw, Shadow Behemoth and Fire Elemental. They keep to a strict schedule which you can find handily recorded, tabulated and regularly updated at the Guild Wars Temple website.

People use this like a railway timetable. Each event has a margin of error, presumably in an attempt to create some spurious sense of spontaneity but in practice all of them pop at numbingly regular intervals. If you keep an eye on the timers you can waypoint from Frostgorge Sound in the Far Shiverpeaks to Sparkfly Fen in the Steamspur Mountains before bouncing back up via Queensdale to Wayferer Foothills and you won't be alone.

On a busy Sunday the resemblance to what I imagine a real Theme Park to be like was unmistakeable. A few minutes before the earliest point at which an event could begin people would begin to gather and mill around, becoming increasingly fractious the longer they had to wait.

With the exception of Tequaatl, who just appears at the ominous cry of "There's something in the water!", all the events require some chain of pre-events to be completed. If these are right at the main location, as they are for The Claw and The Maw, the whole zerg sets to with a will. If they happen somewhere out of sight, as at The Shatterer or Shadow Behemoth, everyone shuffles around where they stand, complaining that someone ought to be doing the pre-events.

Someone always is, and they are the ones who often miss out on the main event because of their public-spiritidness. By the time they hoof it over to the where the action is, the action isn't. The ride has stopped and everyone has has moved on.

The dragon driven out, the Maw quiet once more, the air is filled with the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the disappointed chest-openers. "Nothing but blues" is the common refrain. In Frostgorge you could get crushed in the scrum at the nearby vendor as everyone rushes to unload their worthless rubbish. Anyone lucky enough to pull a Rare out of the box is honor-bound to link it in Map chat, mostly to prove it really can happen. Sometimes the class clown will throw in a link to a Legendary. How we laughed.

I did this most of the day. The only event I didn't do was the Fire Elemental. Never done that. I did the Shadow Behemoth for the first time (the first several times) thanks to reading The Egg Baron's recent fine walkthrough. It's been bugged as long as I can remember but it's working fine now. I did The Maw, which pops about every 30 minutes or so, many times; Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer a couple and Tequaatl once.

I got half a dozen or so Rares, a couple of which were upgrades that I used. I blew the rest up for Ectos. It was a fun way to spend Sunday, but it really brought home to me how mechanical and gamelike GW2 can be. This morning I read J3w3l comparing the open world of Firefall to GW2 "...every time I try to level in GW2 it is just ticking off the check list of stuff to do so I can progress to the next zone. Fill in that heart, see that vista", she says. "It could have been an amazingly large, open and complex world but now it feels entirely compartmentalised."

It certainly can feel that way. Usually I don't even notice it but yesterday was a true glimpse into the Dark Side. ANet have said they intend to add more events so that any given event is seen less frequently. I would suggest they also remove Chest rewards from events completely. Increase the chance for better quality loot from any event instead. Encourage people to do events because they are interesting, intriguing, odd or amusing, not for the slim chance of a yellow weapon to destroy to make an orange one. Make it more about the park and less about the rides.

Still and all, I did have fun.