I Know What I Like In My Wardrobe : EQ2

It's funny how things turn out, sometimes.

Yesterday I read the patch notes for EQ2's weekly update. They're are always conveniently released well ahead of the downtime, which gives everyone plenty of time to rent their garments and anoint themselves with ashes before reality arrives to spoil everything. It's always best to vent your paranoia about how terrible change is going to be before you get to experience it first-hand, I always find. Reality can be such a letdown.

I read the notes at EQ2Wire as usual. I used to go to the forums for the news but of late I've relied on the estimable Feldon. The EQ2 devs themselves are mostly to found explaining themselves on Discord these days, apparently. I guess Reddit is passé.

EQ2Wire, as has been observed many times, is a reliable and accurate source such as many MMOs must wish they had. I was a tad surprised, then, to see Feldon out himself as a virtual ex-player. In his own words, he has "barely played EQ2 in the last few years", which is why he's advertising for a "Staff Writer", one who does.

It did cross my mind for a moment to apply, although I have had a lifelong rule never to do for money anything I also do for pleasure. As it happens I'm not qualified anyway, since I have neither an Ascended Class at Level 10 or the pre-requisites for an Epic 2.0 (much less the weapon itself).

I do have a Level 94 Warlock that I'm trying to nudge towards 100, though, which was why a couple of lines in the patch notes bothered me somewhat:

• Removed bonus experience multipliers for defeating encounters from all previous expansion zones.
• Going forward, bonus experience multipliers will only be applied to zones in the most recent expansion era.

I wasn't entirely clear about what this meant, as I commented in the EQ2Wire thread. I'd mostly been leveling my Warlock by the painfully slow method of going to level appropriate zones and doing the quests I found there. Primitive, I know.

Of course, no bonuses of any kind ever apply to the xp you earn from quest rewards. Most of the time I'm out playing my lower level characters the regular way I get little benefit from the permanent 60% xp bonus I earn from having three max level characters on the account, or even from the Vitality (100% rested xp) I almost always have running.

That's why, when there's a bonus XP weekend, everyone swigs their pots and rushes to the best bonus xp Heroic dungeon they can manage. Or they used to. I guess that's over and done with now, along with the Powerleveling services provided, at a fee, by bored Shadowknights all Norrath over.

Whether it's either a good or a sustainable thing, guiding everyone into the relatively small number of zones in the current expansion, I guess we'll have to wait and see. This patch also added "Expert" versions of all the instances so the number of "current expansion zones" very nearly doubled overnight. Not that I'll be seeing any of the Expert ones - it'll probably be three more expansions before I poke my nose into the regular Kunark Ascending Heroics. Take me that long just to get the Resolve.

Anyway, that was what spurred me to get the Warlock out and finish off Level 94. Seemed much the same to me. Slowish but then it always was. Certainly no slower than last time I took him hunting.

He dinged 95 and that meant time to visit the bank. There are four key levels in the 90s: 90 itself, 92, 95 and 98. Those are the main steps for gear. Moving from one to the next can be a huge upgrade.

Now that's what I call an upgrade.

My Warlock was largely wearing the generic gear he'd been gifted when I gave him the free boost to 90. No wonder things had seemed to be getting harder to kill; he'd missed a complete upgrade path at 92.

I fiddled around in the shared bank, trying on hand-me-downs but there were surprisingly few that fit him, which is how I ended up on my Berserker, going through his bags and boxes.  And that was when I had the brilliant idea.

Try and stop me!

It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been talking on this blog the other day about the Wardrobe feature. There I was, looking at these drifts and piles of tunics and helmets and boots and cloaks (so many cloaks...), when it occurred to me for the first time ever to see just how much DBG are charging to increase the meager allotment of slots that come with the basic version of the expansion.

Not much is the answer. Not much at all. A pittance, you could say. So little, indeed, I would call it a nominal fee. Oh alright, it's 50DB per row of 6 slots. And as an All Access member I get a 10% discount, so 45DB for me.

Also, as a Member, I get 500DB per month, so if I wanted to I could add eleven rows of six slots to my Wardrobe every month, effectively for nothing. That sounds like a good plan. Only I don't need to wait because I'm sitting on over 15,000DB on that account alone from previous Triple SC weekends and general long-term miserliness.

I doubled all my slots, from six to twelve, for every kind of item the Wardrobe will hold. Then I went through my bank and tried on every No Trade piece of gear in the Dressing Room. I transmuted the ones that were so ugly I couldn't imagine ever wearing them even for a joke and added all the rest to my Wardrobe.

Gotta have more hats...

Some of them wouldn't go in because they had adornments stuck in them. I spent a few minutes googling that because I was sure there was a way to get them out without destroying either the adornment or the item and I was right, there was. What's more it's a permanent, free skill with unlimited uses that you get as one of the final rewards for completing the Age of Malice Signature questline - which my Berserker has done.

He didn't have the skill though. After some extensive swearing research I found the quest reward languishing, unclicked, in the depths of one of his bags. I'd never even realized what it was or what it did, just put it to one side for later and forgot about it.

Well, now it's later. All the adornments popped out neat as peas and the plain clothes popped into the Wardrobe. The whole exercise took me almost three hours, much of which was oohing and aahing and gosh-wowing over the amazing designs and styles I had locked away in my bank vaults. Many of them I'd never even seen before because when I'm out questing and I get a reward that's not an actual upgrade I tend to just huff a bit and throw it in a sack.

Which is a terrible shame because EQ2 has some superlative fashion designers, it seems. So many particle effects! So many sheens and glows and moving parts. What a waste it's been, leaving them all locked away all these years.

I learned a lot today. For one thing, I have strongly revised my opinion of EQ2's new Wardrobe feature. It may not be the very best I've seen but it's up there. It's more flexible, more practical and a lot cheaper than I had been imagining. Yes, you have to pay to expand and yes, it's per character not per account, but with so many of the best-looking items being No Trade that's as it should be. An account-based system would make a nonsense of the entire concept.

I also learned that it doesn't matter how long you've been playing an MMO, you never really, fully understand the systems. Yesterday I was struggling to get to grips with even the basics of the strange mechanics in Revelation Online and today I was doing the same in an MMO I've played almost without a break since it launched well over a decade ago.

Most importantly, though, I learned that, no matter how an MMO might change, it's always more fun if you change along with it rather than digging in your heels and begging it to stop. Some changes are bad but the really bad ones get changed again. Keep the faith and keep going and it will all come right in the end.

And I get to dress like a pirate, whenever I want, which is all I ever really wanted.

Now We Are Six : GW2

All last weekend there was a special offer on additional character slots in GW2. I kept casting sideways glances at it. I checked the gold-to-gems conversion rate every hour or three. I uhmmed and ahhhed and slept on it and put off making a decision and then the offer went away.

Usually that's a strategy that works well for me. Gone, forgotten. Not this time. A couple of posts back, Isey asked in the comments whether GW2 would now be better from a new player's perspective and I wondered that as well. Syp stirred the pot by quoting an excellent analysis of the situation by Verene at Under A Pale Tree. Verene has a second, detailed post that really nails just how badly this aspect of the revisions to the leveling game would seem to have been handled.

Still, it's one thing to look at a new pair of shoes but the only way to know how well they fit is to put them on and walk around for a while, so yesterday I got my credit card out and gave ANet the first money they've had from me since I bought my second account a few weeks after launch. If it turns out that, as I expect, I absolutely despise the way they've re-arranged the traits then I guess it'll be the exact opposite of sending a message to that effect by Voting With Your Wallet but leaving that aside, so far I'd say it's money very well spent.

It's been months, months! since I leveled my last GW2 character and I really didn't realize just how very much I've missed it. This is the MMO that makes by far the best fist of holding my attention at max level and I thought I was quite content bimbling around with my gang of 80s, but it turns out I was wrong. The moment I finished knocking Duke Barridin's statue into rubble and stepped out onto the riveted metal plate floor at the entrance to Black Citadel it felt like I'd just bought an amazing, exciting, brand new game. To quote Commander Siegerazer, "This is what I live for!".

My plan to make a Charr Engineer fell through yet again due to operator error: I bought the new slot on the same account where my Asura Engineer lives. I already have two rangers on that account; two engineers would be enough evidence to get any doctor to sign section papers, so I made a Charr Guardian instead, on the grounds that I don't have any heavy armor classes on that account, plus my other Guardian is a Sylvari (that'd make a great bumper sticker).

Character creation remains completely unchanged since launch as far as I remember. I'd forgotten just how ugly you can make a Charr look - shattered horns, broken teeth, wrinkled, sagging, aged skin, patchy fur, milky blinded eyes... Not that I went that route, but it was nice to have the option  I'm betting you can't make a female Human or even a Norn that looks ancient, battered and weary the way you can a female Charr.


As I've often commented, for my tastes GW2 characters rarely improve in appearance from the look you can give them at character creation and the starting armor for a Heavy-wearing Charr, dyed a natural copper color, looks as good as just about anything in the game. Even the very first set of 40 copper vendor armor looks fantastic, as does the lowest crafted and dropped gear. I realize that those of us who prefer it have the option of transmuting the look via the wardrobe, but it makes for a poor motivator if eighty levels later you'd pay money to look like you'd were still level one.

The Tutorial's clearly not been converted to Megaserverdom because I was the only one there. It scales perfectly though and I was through in under five minutes and out onto Plains of Ashford. Before I'd even got my bearings some charr farmer was yelling that his cows had escaped so I grabbed a cattle prod to round them up and that was me off and running.

Plans of Ashford isn't on the Megaserver either but there were half a dozen young Charr roaming Gunbreach Hills and Lake Feritas. After an encounter with the Rampaging Skale which led to my Guardian making a tactical withdrawal ("regenerates health" - oh yes, so he does) I decided to run to the bank in Black Citadel to see if there was anything I might use (don't say the T word...) which brings me to the first major issue with the GW2 approach when it comes to starting a new character.

It is flat-out impossible not to twink a new character on an existing account. The best you can do is exercise will-power by not spending or allocating the resources you've been given automatically. Not taking advantage of all the goodies in the bank was easy enough - I'd long since thrown out everything under 80. I looked askance at the Experience Scrolls and Tomes of Knowledge stacked up in there. There were enough to bump my little Guardian instantly to Level 31, which would have let her get straight to the Traits but would miss the entire point of how long and hard the road might feel, getting there.

Those stayed where they were but when it comes to gold, crafting mats, Karma, World Ability Points, Laurels, Wardrobe Skins or just about anything else it's much harder for a fresh recruit to remain virtuous when she has unfettered access to everything the grizzled vets have earned.

If you were sufficiently determined (or demented) there are work-arounds for a cleanish start. You could put all your cash, items and mats in a personal guild bank and disband the new character from that guild, for example. You could keep count of how many WvW ranks your level-up had personally earned, make a note of how much mana she was granted from each Heart, do all the dailies only on that character and count the Laurels and so on. You'd last about two hours before you cracked, I reckon. Less if you actually wanted to play one of your other characters.

So, the new character experience of a player with an established account is by necessity going to be very unrepresentative of the experience a genuine new purchaser of the game will have, even discounting the inevitable inability of the vet to forget what he or she knows. I did seriously consider buying a third account for this experiment, which, short of deleting every character on an existing one, is the only way I can think of to get a genuine fresh start. It might still come to that - god knows it's tempting... but for now I am going to go the "new character on old account" route, report on that and do my best to imagine what it would feel like for a real new starter. 

On that note, whooooahhhhh! Black Citadel! I can't rationally explain why, but the moment I started up that ramp as a fresh level two recruit the entire city hit me as strongly all over again as it did back in beta. It's not like I haven't been there recently, either. I've passed through plenty of times on various characters just last week. I often bank and craft among the Charr. For some inexplicable reason, though, playing a new character made me see it entirely anew. The city is magnificent, the experience wonderful.

That's how I came to spend almost two hours on Black Citadel map completion, something that I can now attest is possibly the slowest possible way to get from level 2 to level 3. Worth every second though, even if I did have to watch a YouTube video for the final two POIs (and watch it four times before I got the final one). And that's with having completed BC on two previous characters, not to mention having done a guide on the Vistas!

Anyone who hasn't fallen in love with GW2 after Black Citadel map completion is probably too jaded to rise from their chaise-longue to sugar their absinthe. It's my favorite place in Tyria and one of my favorite imaginary places anywhere. I had to force myself not to take more screenshots. Not very successfully. Despite, as I said, having already done the full map twice I saw several areas I swear I have never seen before.

That done, I went to the Guardian Trainer to look at what lies ahead. There you can, in an extremely annoying and unintuitive way, browse every trait, Fine, Masterwork and Rare. These are called Adept, Master and Grandmaster in your character's Trait panel, which would risk confusing a new player if he could actually see it, a problem handily solved by having the Trait panel locked until level 30.

I literally shook my head in despair at this point. Not only are new players now intended to wait thirty levels before they can begin acquiring Traits (most of which, according to Verene's analysis, will be out of their reach in any practical sense for far longer than that) but they aren't even permitted to know what's coming. What in the name of the gods that don't exist do they think they are playing at?

Moreover, how, exactly, is a genuine new player going to have any idea that he even can gain Traits through doing content? The Trainer doesn't explain it. He just has all the traits listed as buyable books. The Trait panel, which does explain it, is locked. Surely a new player will visit his trainer out of curiosity (there are plenty of them, clearly flagged), see that Traits cost ten silver and two skill points at the low end and go thirty levels assuming that's the only way to get them.

Of course new players can go to the wiki or any number of outside sources to find out how it works, see what's in store, even play around with builds on trait builders, but what kind of substitute is that for seeing them in game on your actual character? No kind, that's what kind!

I'll save commenting in detail about the asinine choices ANet have made for the ways and means that the traits can be unlocked when those options are eventually revealed. Verene has already made those points anyway (although that's sure not going to stop me weighing in if changes haven't been made by the time I get that panel opened up). For now I'll just settle for saying that locking that Trait panel is idiotic and inexcusable.

To recover from that unpleasant surprise I headed out to Plains of Ashfield to wash away the bad taste with Flame Legion blood. In moments all thoughts of traits were forgotten. I had a rip-roaring time tearing through events and hearts while filling out my dailies without even trying. In under an hour I'd completed the north-west corner of the map, acquired several new weapons and upgrades, dinged five and had more fun than I've had in GW2 for about a year.

As I write this I'm impatient to get back in and carry on. I had to stop last night to go defend the Honor of the Yak which was being severely tarnished by assaults from FA and HoD but really what I wanted to do was carry on leveling, something I plan on spending as much of today doing as I can. Of course, even before the revamp Traits didn't appear until Level 10 so it's too early to see any practical impact from the change. I can say for certain, though, that no matter how hard devs may try to break it, leveling up remains the most fun you can have in an MMO. Any MMO.

Picking At The Threads : GW2

I'm just glad I have the week off work, that's all I can say. Although, come to think of it, that's hardly the most apposite turn of phrase, because there's quite a lot I could say about yesterday's Feature Pack Patch. The main problem would be knowing where to start. Or more likely when to stop...

Let's try and keep it short, unlike Anet, who opened nine dedicated comment threads in the hope of containing the howls of anguish from nerfed berserkers, crashed trains and other disgruntled customers. I'll stick with their categories.

Wardrobe

Some people were really stoked for this. I wasn't one of them. GW2 is one of those annoying MMOs where you step out of character creation looking, there or thereabouts, like a regular Joe or Jane, at least in the context of the imaginary world you're about to explore, only to find yourself descending the spiral staircase of surrealism until you end up in a Daliesque daze, dressed like the third runner-up in an Ace Frehley lookalike competition. The recent flurry of screenshots from TESO on various blogs serve as a disturbing reminder of just how garish and tasteless GW2 has become. Roll on WildStar so we can go back to feeling all sophisticated by comparison, like we did back in 2012.

Never mind the ethos, what about the implementation? Not bad. Slightly odd that you can only access the Wardrobe from the bank, but given it works the same way as the Crafting and Mini bank tabs that kind of makes sense. Also odd to hear the little zinggg! sound every time you salvage some eminently forgettable item, thereby adding an equally forgettable appearance to the invisible, intangible wardrobe, when all you meant to do was grab a scrap of Luck, but, hey, it's a nice little sound sample, don't mind hearing it twenty times a minute. And of course as the Wardrobe fills up you'll hear that sound sample less and less often. Probably going to miss it in a few days.


With the five free Transmutation Charges and the twenty or so I got from converting the old stones and crystals clogging up my bank I now have about five times more conversions in hand than I've used in total since the game began, so I think I'm set. It's neat that they're now a Currency, too. What with that and Wardrobing all the unused skins I was hoarding, even though I knew I'd never use them because if I did I would have to play blindfolded, I've regained a dozen or more bank slots. On balance I approve of the Wardrobe although probably not for the reasons I'm supposed to.

Well, that was hardly keeping it short. Must do better. On to

PvP Reward/Gear/Ranks/Maps

Don't PvP. Pass. Wow, that got things back on track!

World Boss Synchronization

Immediately after the patch last night I logged in, arriving in Wayfarer Foothills just as The Frozen Maw was starting. I helped send the Shaman packing, grabbed my rares and retreated to Krennak's Homestead to try and make sense of my new Traits. Ten minutes later Brogun started yammering on about the Grawl and the whole thing started up again. And ten minutes after that. And ten minutes after that...

When Brogun kept getting as far as destroying the Svanjir totem then declaring the threat over and stumping back across the snowfields to reward himself with a fine ale everyone on the map assumed the event had bugged. Not so. Oh no, that would be infinitely preferable to the truth. After the cycle had repeated several times I went to check the immense patch notes , which I'd been avoiding on the grounds that I wanted to get in and play sometime before the sun came up. Here's the relevant section:

"If the event to destroy the dragon totem has succeeded when the boss is not activated, Scholar Brogun will declare victory and return to Krennak’s homestead without fighting the shaman."

In other words, in order to make this whole fixed schedule work, ANet have chosen to have the pre-events run on a continual loop (in the case of The Maw literally once every ten minutes). It's like watching Groundhog Day on fast-forward. I have yet to go see for myself but apparently the same is true of Gamarien's stroll, the Karka Queen pres and for all I know every other series of events that could, potentially, result in the appearance of a chest-dropping Boss.

Even in a "virtual world" that already resembled nothing so much as a series of animatronic tableaux, this takes some beating. It's one of the most openly cynical revisions to content I think I have ever seen in an MMO. Pragmatic, yes, I'll give them that, and at least it works, unlike the changes to the Shadow Behemoth event, which were supposed to increase the difficulty in preparation for the upcoming Megaserver population focus, but which initially made the event very hard to complete with the unmegaservered map population we still have and then bugged out entirely, so the event is currently not completable at all.

The feedback thread on World Bosses is extremely critical. Indeed, all the threads I read were. The forums have a reputation for negativity but in this case almost all of the commentary is well-reasoned, coherent and seems justified. I won't re-hash all the valid points in detail, such as the effect fixed timers have on people with jobs and families or the prohibitive costs of the Guild Event option that might otherwise be used to restore some flexibility. They're all there on the thread if anyone's that interested. I'll just observe that I don't think you'd be taking too much of a punt if you bet on quite a few tweaks to some of these "Features" in the coming days and weeks.

Guild World Events/Megaservers/WvW

Bit of an odd bundle. There are four people in my guild and one of them doesn't play any more so we won't be starting any Events. Pass.

The whole Megaserver thing hasn't really made itself evident yet. Whichever maps are using it aren't ones I've been on, or if they are then the population of GW2 really has taken a nosedive. The only place I did see it working was when I passed through the PvP lobby on the way to Lion's Arch Vigil Keep (they really need to put a new sign on that Asuran Gate), where I saw a large number of people standing around, presumably trying to work out what the hell had happened to their Traits or whatever it is that PvP people use. I'll take a rain-check on commenting on the Megaserver functionality until I actually see some.

As for WvW, that was one unalloyed positive for me. I'd been saving all my drips, tastes, and thimbles just for this day. I even had a keg. Drinking them all was good fun, even if every rank chest was stuffed with nothing but greens (I got one Exotic between two accounts and about 25 ranks and that was a speargun...). Ended up Rank 204 (I think it was) on one account and 115 on the other. Now I just have to decide where to spend the points.

Sigils/Runes

ANet made two threads out of that but I've conflated it because I don't have anything to say, at least not yet. I was mostly already using full sets, not mix-and-match, and a cursory check suggests nothing much has changed. Browsing the Rune thread, the word that comes up most often seems to be "underwhelming", while the Sigil thread barely gets started at all and even when it does it mostly contains off-topic comments.  Confirms what I always suspected: no-one gives a damn about Sigils.

Traits

This is arguably the biggest Feature in the Pack. A full revamp of the Trait system, everything from the traits themselves to when and how you acquire them. Sitting on nine level 80s, all of whose traits have been grandfathered in, it doesn't seem terrible, just very confusing. I began this post by saying I was glad I have the week off work and this is why - it's going to take me a week to get all these traits sorted out.

The new interface is okay. Kind of a sideways move. I wouldn't call it an improvement but it's easy enough to follow. Being able to chop and change Traits infinitely, instantly, at no cost certainly removes all of the usual pressure these kinds of revamps bring, that of making a horrible mistake that will haunt you or cost you or both.  I found myself quite enjoying playing around with "builds", if you could dignify what I was coming up with such a description.

It's not really my thing, though, nor Mrs Bhagpuss's. We decided we'd just bang something in for now and wait til the theorycrafters come up with a new meta.Then we can ignore it and feel superior follow the herd.

Reading the forum thread, however, the most poignant and heartfelt comments came from new players, all of whom felt thoroughly shafted by the new system. This comment by Robert sums up the issues very well and looking at it from the outside it's hard to argue with his conclusion "If this is somehow supposed to make the game more enjoyable for new players, I fail to see how this is accomplished.. Sadly, for me, the opposite is true."

I'm very tempted to buy a new character slot, go try it for myself, see how "bad" it really is. It's too long since I leveled up and I never did get around to making that Charr Engineer I wanted. I suspect that the new, slower version of leveling, with its requirements to unlock traits by doing content might suit me rather well. I also think I'd be in a very, very small minority if that turned out to be the case and I fear this move could be commercial suicide when it comes to persuading new players to stick with the game.

The new Elite traits that my characters will have to unlock if they want to use them don't  look like being any kind of an issue. Two reasons: firstly, most of them look like they wouldn't warrant a slot anyway and secondly the price to buy them from the trainer is much, much cheaper than I was anticipating. I was guessing at 50g per unlock. I wouldn't have been surprised to see it pegged at the same as a Commander tag - 100g. When I got to the trainer it turned out to be 3g. Three! Oh, and 20 skill points. My ranger has nearly 500 of those, plus another 200 skill scrolls in the bank. Not seeing a problem there, other than it spikes the whole idea of going out to search for the things as a form of new content. Why the hell would anyone bother if they're only 3g a pop?

Profession Balance

Yada yada yada...

Every MMO does this all the time. Never worth getting worked up over. If you enjoyed something it got nerfed. If something was broken it didn't get fixed. A's still better than B, C's overpowered and D is gimped. Next time round move one place to the left. I treat class changes on a need-to-know basis. If something seems weird in play I'll investigate. Otherwise they  generally pass me by.

That's the gist of it although there's a lot more grain in the detail. There's the derailment of the Champion trains and the Contested Waypoint debate for a start, and dyes, but the change that got Mrs Bhagpuss the most irritated was one that's barely been mentioned anywhere: consolidation of Daily Achievements.

She took it as slap in the face for casual players, a demographic to which she somewhat confusingly aligns herself despite her thousands of achievement points, hundreds of WvW ranks and eight level 80s, half of them already kitted out in full Ascended. This pruning of dailies that limits choice and drops the old standby, Gathering, is more of a slap in the face of the hardcore than the casual, I'd say, since they're the ones chasing the Laurels, and whether it really will take longer to do the dailies now I'm not sure but, hardcore or casual, I can't say that I'm any more thrilled at being funneled into fewer areas to do them than Mrs Bhagpuss is.

Looking at the Feature Pack as a whole I'd say it's exactly what ANet claimed - an expansion-size patch with none of the content you'd find in an actual expansion.It's a bit like going to the cinema and having to  sit through all the commercials, trailers and safety warnings without ever seeing a movie.

I read the motivations behind the whole enterprise as a combination of three things:

• A desire to drive substantially more business through the Gem Store

• An attempt at avoiding the negative marketing hit that comes from server merges

• The perennial inability of MMO developers to leave anything well alone.

I imagine having to do a lot of the background work to re-tool the game for the Chinese market has something to do with it, too. Probably gave them ideas. Oh well, if nothing else it gives us all something to talk about other than why we aren't playing TESO.

Unpacking The Feature Pack : GW2

The Big Reveal is over, the bags are all open, the cats all run free. Just ten more days to Magic Time, the Glorious Fifteenth, First Coming of The Feature Pack. Tyria will never be the same again.

Let's hope not, anyway. It would seem like an awful lot of fuss about nothing if, as I suspect might happen, the world just goes on turning in much the same old way. With game historians of the future in mind let's have a quick flip through the program and scribble down some notes while the orchestra's still tuning up.

Traits - A big change, for sure and, now I've had time to mull it around for a bit, one that I quite like, on paper at least. Hunting for traits in the wild sounds disturbingly like New Content, while being able to buy our way out of playing through parts of the game that we don't care for seems like a sound compromise. Being able to change trait builds free and on the fly is intriguing. Chances are I'll never remember to do it but so long as it remains "may" not "must" then I'll go along for the ride.

Runes and Sigils - Can't see any downside to this. A ridiculous amount of worthless runes and sigils rain down every day as I salvage the equally ridiculous downpour of worthless armor and weaponry. Probably three-quarters of them could vanish overnight and no-one would notice. Anything that streamlines the system has to be welcome although I don't see much in the blurb to suggest we'll see the back of all the +10% vs Dredge space-wasters and their pointless ilk.

Famous last words

Critical Damage - Nerf! Nerf! After a year of resisting the 'Zerker Meta I find I'm absolutely loving my Full Berserker Elementalist build, especially in WvW, where the supposed "Glass Cannon" factor rarely seems to come into play. Somehow, very few people seem to pay any attention to the Norn woman in dark blue lurking at the back even though she's raining continual fiery destruction on their heads and when the Commander yells "Push!" my main problem seems to be trying not to impersonate Sky Saxon. The number of times I've found myself behind the opposing zerg all on my own after two dodges and a Mist Form - and still they don't notice me, even as I pump fireballs into their backs!

I console myself with the thought that it's only supposed to be a 10% nerf and my DPS went up about 300% when I went berserk, so it shouldn't hurt too much. Of course, if a nerf doesn't feel like a nerf it probably won't shake the Meta up much either, assuming that was the intention.

Wardrobe  - Replace a cumbersome system with a slightly less cumbersome one, so net gain, I guess. I'd peg this as one of the many income-driving changes, where the secondary, if not the primary, function is to drive more traffic to the Gem Store. Since I very rarely change the looks of my characters once I've got them how I like them (hard enough to remember who I'm playing as it is without having them confuse me by looking different) I don't see this affecting me greatly one way or the other. For a change that's long been demanded, though, forum response has been more mixed than you might expect. I wouldn't be surprised to see more tweaks to this as the months wear on.

And put a sweater on, too!

Dyes - Changes things to the way most players probably thought the system should have worked from the get-go. I'll be in a tiny minority in preferring it the way it was but it's hardly a major issue - give up a small degree of character individualization and a self-created mini-game (who gets which dye) in favor of undoubted convenience. The really annoying (and entirely player-unfriendly) aspect is the removal of dropped dyes, another change blatantly intended to increase ANet's income stream, albeit with the rather happier side-effect of allowing crafters a rare opportunity to make a little silver on the back of it.

Social Play Improvements - I had to re-read this one just to remind myself what these "improvements" were. Meh. And that's over-egging it.

Account Bound Changes - At last! The long-trailed move to account-based ranks for WvW is finally (almost) here. Again, another anti-character move but that ship sailed so long ago and there were so many planks missing it must have sunk even faster than this metaphor. I'm just going to go with it from now on - The Account is the Prime Directive - All hail The Account. Now just give me my furshlugginer points already!

As for account-bound ascended gear, that does make it slightly more likely I might one day get around to getting some. Legendaries? I should coco.

Somehow the new champ bags didn't seem quite so exciting as the old ones...

Repairs and Champion Loot - I think I learned the expression "Indian Giver" from a Superboy comic in about 1966. I was never entirely sure what it meant. and by now it's probably one of those turns of phrase that can no longer be uttered in polite society but I'm pretty sure it applies to ANet here. How the removal of the minuscule cost of repairing your armor, somewhere around 8 silver if you turn up at the repair shop in your underwear at level 80, is supposed to compensate for what might be a heavy nerf to cash income from Champion bags, any one of which can theoretically provide enough silver to pay your repair costs for the whole day, beats me and everyone else.

Mystic Forge - ANet buried that in the same announcement but I've pulled it out. It seems to have passed almost unnoticed. Hardly surprising because there's precious little information there. It's more just putting us on notice that big changes to the money pit often unfondly referred to as the Mystic Toilet are on the way. Could be good, could be terrible, except that the Forge is so terrible already any change almost has to be good.

As opposed to all those other proverbially trustworthy genies?

PvP Stuff - Pass. Oh, wait, no...that's just what these changes are supposed to stop me doing, aren't they? This whole everyone-must-play-all-parts-of-the-game trope that ANet desperately hope might catch on. Nope, sorry. Not playing. Next.

Megaserver - The Big One. Literally. Didn't see this coming. Don't much want it, either. I thought I'd again be in a tiny minority not getting out the flags and bunting for this but although first reaction was predictably positive, the sprawling threads all over the forums suggest that, given time to consider the implications, quite a few players could see the holes in the Emperor's New Clothes (yes, I know...).

Can't have a Themepark without a Schedule

World Bosses - And this is why. Leaving aside the disorderly retreat from the moral high ground of a " living, breathing world" (whatever happened to Martin Kerstein, anyway?) plenty of people see the combination of ever-changing maps, no firm home ground and fixed daily boss timers as things that will reduce their fun and stop them doing things they enjoy. Where's the value in all those Infinite Harvesting Tools now all the nodes wriggle about like bait in a bucket? How are you going to run a World Meta Train if there aren't any worlds? How can a Commander gate into LA (or I guess now Gendarran Fields) and rally the PvE troops for a golem rush when half the people listening might come from the Other Side?


A million increasingly angry questions and so far precious little in the way of answers. Oh, and that "all waypoints are now contested" thing? Why didn't you just schedule that for it's own Reveal and call it "Huge New Gold Sink"?

Guilds and the Future - And out we go with a whimper. I don't like guilds and I don't much care what happens to them in any game just so long as I can go on ignoring them. Plenty of bad feeling about this one from small guild players who do care, though. At least WvW is "safe" ... for now.

When ANet came up with the idea of rolling a whole lot of structural changes into one big "Feature Pack" and plonking it down in the gaping content hole between the end of Living Story Season One and the start of Living Story Season Two, some dev I can't be bothered to look up and link made the cardinal error of likening it to the amount of content you'd expect from an expansion. Cue frenzied forum speculation on the Coming of the Tengu, Dragons, Housing, Mounts and the Moon on a Stick.

Happens to the best of us

The Official Wet (Safety) Blanket was deployed to dampen down ardor and enthusiasm and someone probably got a right ticking off but in essence the comparison wasn't unwarranted. The Feature Pack does contain about as much in the way of structural and systemic change as the average MMO expansion. It just comes unsweetened by any actual content.

I'm sanguine. I no longer feel emotionally connected to Guild Wars in all its forms the way I am to, say, the Everquest franchise (as it now appears officially to be known). It's become no more nor less than a rather amusing, entertaining game that I play, not a virtual world in which I imagine I am living. On that basis I'm willing to entertain any changes that might make it more amusing or entertaining. Whether these are those changes only time will tell.

Oh, and there's one more similarity between the Feature Pack and a real expansion. I bet lots of these changes won't work properly for a good while and we'll be patching well into May before things settle down. Fun times ahead!