BFA Fever : WoW

I thought about calling this post "If All Your Friends Jumped Off Another Bridge...".  It's been a long time since I last played World of Warcraft but today I patched up and logged in again, all because every blogger in blogdom is doing the same.

And why? Expansion!

Never mind that I got Legion for my birthday two years ago, registered the code and promptly forgot about it. Never mind that I never even set foot on The Broken Isles let alone leveled up there. Never mind that I never even saw an Artifact Weapon or a Demon Hunter...

Actually, why stop there? All I ever saw of Warlords of Draenor was a handful of starter quests and maybe two percent of the first zone. Never even got a glimpse of my Garrison. Mists of Pandaria? I have a level four panda somewhere, I think.

I did see a few of the changes wrought by the Cataclysm, mostly because a good deal of that much-maligned expansion falls within the remit of the F2P Starter Edition. Oddly, Cataclysm is the content that most interests me because I can remember the original zones reasonably well and seeing how they've changed piques my curiosity. Also, low level play...

It's usually relatively simple to return to WoW. Not as easy as coming back to GW2, which is virtually seamless, but not too annoying. This time was no different although there were a few hiccups.

First there was a Battlenet update of some kind  That took mere seconds. After that came a huge patch for WoW itself - over 13GB. The launcher claimed the game was "playable" almost immediately but I waited for Optimal before hitting Play. That took me straight into one of Blizzard's epic cinematics.

Even with my minimal knowledge of WoW Lore I could sort of follow some of it although I have no idea of the names of any of the featured players. It was quite impressive to watch although 90% of it was just sound effects and explosions.

It occurred to me after a while that these cinematics are what two five-year olds see in their heads when they smash their plastic action figures together and shout at each other. The parts where someone yells "For the Horde!" and "For the Alliance!" really bring that home.

Once the excitement died down it was on to a list of servers. Quite a few of them were Offline including, naturally, the one on which most of my characters sleep. Rather than wait for whatever was going on to be fixed I logged on someone on a server that was working.

That's how it's meant to look.

It turned out to be a Level 1 Dwarf I'd never played (clearly, what with him being Level 1 and all...). The game treated me to another cinematic, this time just a fly-by using existing assets with a voiceover, something about some political intrigue in Ironforge. I'm guessing it had something to do with the new Dwarven racial option, the Dark Iron mob, who were enemies last I remember but who seem to have been brought into the fold at least somewhat.

I had no wish to play yet another dwarf so all I did with this one was use him to get my Add Ons working. Not that I use many. The only one flagged as out of date was the GW2 UI mod, without which I can no longer imagine playing WoW at all. (Okay, I guess I'd acclimatize if I had to but it really is so much better...).

There was already an updated version available (and indeed a beta of a still-newer version). I installed it manually and it didn't work so I fired up Twitch, which acquired the old Curse auto-updater for Add-Ons that everyone used to use. I am getting more use out of Twitch than Steam these days...

That worked flawlessly, almost instantly. I dropped the dwarf and checked to see if my regular server was back up. It wasn't but at least now there was a pop-up saying Blizzard was doing something about it.

He's small but he packs a punch! And so do I.

I still wanted to have a run around, get back in the Azeroth groove, so I swapped to my old Free to Play account. I made it before the current version of F2P, the one that lets you play any character up to level 20. 

Remarkably I was able to find the old log-in details. Before I could reacquaint myself with my old friends I had to reassure Blizzard I wasn't being  hacked by replying to an email; before I could do that, I had to reassure my email provider I was who I said I was. These things happen when you go a few years between log-ins. I'm just happy any of it still works.

Finally I was able to log in my good old Goblin Warlock. She's a great character. I took her all through the extremely detailed and enjoyable Goblin starter zones and blogged about it way back when. 2013 in fact. Five years ago. Blimey, Charlie!

For some reason she was in the Tauren homeland of Mulgore, which is one of the most attractive parts of Azeroth. If you're going to get abandoned anywhere it's a better option than most. At level 14 I don't imagine many of the recent changes have affected her much but I did notice she only had one spell on her hot bar.

"What kind of creature bore you? Was it some kind of bat?" NSFW link to source.

It takes quite awhile to kill something with just the default attack and you don't get a huge amount of xp for doing it, either. Once I'd put all her spells back, time-to-kill improved although xp remained charmingly sparse.

I seem to remember there was a time when leveling in the teens was so ridiculously fast it made the whole thing feel pointless. This time, even when I started doing some quests, the pace felt reasonable. Still brisk enough at maybe forty-five minutes to finish level 14 but not so speedy I felt disconnected.

I'm not sure if the basic spells have changed. I was using Demonology and summoning imps with a meteor, having my Felguard (?) to tank and throwing in some kind of demonic wolf now and then as well. It was fun. Reminded me somewhat of being a Minion Master Necromancer in GW2.

There was some to and fro on the weird batwinged griffins the Horde use as air taxis. It always surprises me how much time in WoW is spent just sitting on things watching the scenery. That does feel old-fashioned. 

I carried on until the Warlock dinged and then I called it a day. I'm back, kind of. When my regular server recovers I'll have to decide whether or not to re-sub. I probaly will for August, if for no other reason than it'll give me something to post about for Blaugust.

Musings On Returning To WoW

The Blizzcon buzz had its intended effect on me. All the talk of Classic servers, a new expansion, fresh adventures in worlds old, new, both and neither, led me to patch up and log in to World of Warcraft for the first time in maybe a year.

In fact, I can't remember when I last played. I know I asked for and was given Legion for my birthday a year ago but all I did with it was register the purchase against my account.

I clearly remember playing for a couple of months during the exciting Legion pre-release Invasion event, at which point I presumably must have re-subscribed because I had access to my higher level characters when I was doing it. After that I seem to remember doing something in Warlords of Draenor and rapidly losing the will to live log in. After that, nothing.

Looking at character select it seems my Dwarf Hunter, who topped out in the low 70s back when I played WoW the first time, is now Level 95. I can only assume that happened during the invasions unless I used some kind of boost on him but I don't believe I've ever acquired a level boost for WoW.

I could fact-check all this by flipping through my back pages of course. No doubt I posted about most of it. It's telling, though, that I can't remember. I like WoW but it doesn't make that much of a lasting impression on me.

There are two reasons for that. Two that I can think of, anyway. One is the Lore and the other the graphics.

In the Oxford Visual Dictionary this is the entry for "Depressing"

WoW lore is opaque to me at best. Mostly it doesn't even manage obscurity. It's simply invisible. I didn't grow up with franchise. I didn't play Warcraft. Until WoW appeared in 2004 I had never even heard of Blizzard and even after the WoW juggernaut began to roll it was years before I'd have been able to name another Blizzard title.

When I did start playing none of the overarching story meant anything to me whatsoever. Plot twists and revelations must have soared over my head, not that I noticed. I did the Death Knight introduction for example, which people seem to rate very highly in terms of both lore and story, and all I remember about it was how long, tedious and claustrophobic it was.

Consequently, the only level on which the narrative connects with me is the local. I can empathize with the problems of farmers being menaced by scarecrows. I can immerse myself in the investigation of a murder or the search for a missing child but the machinations of racial leaders, tyrants, demon-kings and dragons might as well be so much static.

That's the problem with the writing but there's an even greater issue with the illustration. I'm not someone who has to have state-of-the-art graphics and I like WoW's semi-cartoon stylization - in theory.

In practice, though, as I've mentioned before, the textures are problematic. Worse, the palette has a tendency towards the morose that can be - and often is - depressing. I think my memory chooses to protect me against remembering much about all that. I guess it must do or else I'd probably never come back.

I think I saw this scene on black velvet at a craft fair once...

I think it's not insignificant that, in my first and only lengthy, successfully enjoyable run in WoW, I began in Ironforge and spent my formative first days in the snowfields. Partly it's that snowy zones are by some margin my favorite terrain, climate and geography in MMOs but more than that it's that pure blue-white snow doesn't suffer so badly from either the textural or tonal difficulties I find in almost all of Azeroth's other landscapes.

When I do take another pass at playing, Blizzard's famous polish never seems to extend to the patching process. Every time I come back after a break it's a struggle to get the game to run, even though I'm using the same installation on the same machine.

This time I had to uninstall and reinstall the Batlenet app and do a few more tweaks before the game would update. Once the patcher started to co-operate there turned out to be over 5GB of new files to install.

With that out of the way I logged into one of my under-20s, the Worgen Druid. It transpired I'd left off playing her exactly one quest short of the very end of her racial introduction, so as soon I'd sunk a battleship (or, more accurately, vaguely wandered about behind some NPCs who sunk a battleship for me) I was free to leave the dismal, dark, foreboding rainfields of wherever the heck it is that Worgen come from for the dismal, dark, brooding rainfields of that hideous Night Elf place I loathe.

I was not best pleased to find myself back in Teldrassil but I felt momentarily happy when the first quest I took suggested I leave: less so when I fell off a cliff and died on a tree a hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on another tree branch another hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on a third tree branch another hundred meters below the last one.

Just the footsteps in the snow feel somehow joyous.

Fourth fall I survived. Just. I made my way to the marker on the map. Aiming straight for it was what got me killed in the first place but I'm nothing if not stubborn. All of this in the dark and the rain of Azeroth's real-time night cycle, a peculiar design feature that means that historically most of my WoW playtime has taken place in poor lighting except at the weekends. Another reason I like the area around Don Morogh the best - the snow reflects what limited light there is.

The next quest marker pointed to the other side of the bay. I could see the town there from the dock where I was standing. Naturally I jumped in and began to swim only to be hit with Exhaustion half way across.

I understand the purpose of this notional barrier when it's employed to prevent players leaving the playable area or bypassing obstacles intended to be impassable but in this instance it seemed perverse. I was compelled to swim back to shore and go speak to some NPC who put me on a griffin, whereupon the griff flew me back along exactly the line I'd just swum to exactly the place I would have climbed out of the water had I been allowed to continue under my own steam.

By the time I finally spoke to the next questgiver I was so irritated that just the sight of the execrable font Blizzard insists on using, almost unreadable as it is against the equally awful mudded texture and color of the background, that I logged out to search for and reinstall the excellent Add On that replaces WoW's clunky, ugly front end with GW2's smooth and familiar UI.

It's behind you!

Come to think of it, I already had that Add On active last time I was playing so where did it go? Wherever it went I wish it hadn't because getting it back was another fiddly exercise that resulted in the Battlenet patcher demanding to re-download the exact same 5GB it had already installed not an hour earlier.

As I said, my regular experience playing WoW suggests the famous Blizzard "polish" is something that happens to other people. I've never known the game operate any more smoothly than any other MMO and less so than some.

Anyway, it's done now and I have the thing looking a lot like GW2, which is a big improvement. I'm considering whether I want to resub for a while and get some Legion done before it's quite literally last year's thing.

Legion aside, I would like to play my Gnome Hunter some more. She's still playable for free at level 20 but I daren't do anything with her lest she level up and become "Inactive". I'd be playing a Hunter in Legion, too, with my aforementioned level 95 Dwarf, although I suppose I could take the free Level 100 Demon Hunter and roll with that instead.

At the very least the colors are upbeat...

Chances are that I won't do either. I'll probably just footle around with the Worgen Druid - if I can move her to somewhere less utterly depressing - and maybe roll someone new as well. I'm not sure I can justify subbing if I can't find the time to play - but then I've been saying that for a year now.

I suspect the real drag anchor stopping me is strongly connected to the aforementioned issues with Lore and Look. Other than in the big, social events like Invasions, I mostly enjoy WoW in the low-to-mid levels. The higher up you get the more portentous the narrative becomes and, as Syp has often pointed out, in all MMOs, end-game zones tend to be ugly, so the game doubles down on the things I already most dislike about it.

Maybe I'll play my Panda. Wilhelm says the Pandaria zones are "excellent" and I trust his judgment on these things.

The Numbers Game : WoW, EQ2

As I observed not too long ago, it's been obvious for some time that Warlords of Draenor was generating a lot more, and a lot more positive, interest than the previous couple of WoW expansions managed. Even so, the revelation that WoD fever had tipped WoW's subscription pile back over the 10,000,000 mark was a surprise.

The pull of that vortex is now so strong it's moved on from consolidating the faithful to sucking in even the furthest outliers but no, I am not here to announce that I have joined the merry band of pod-people. I'm just here to compare that number, ten million, with the very much smaller number that Feldon of EQ2Wire has been dropping into conversation of late.

The number in question is 50,000. Apparently that's the the current "active" population of EQ2. Here's a quote "Otherwise, a game with some 50,000 active players gets unfairly tagged as a “ghost town”." I have no idea what the provenance of this 50k figure is but it sounds exceedingly low, not just by comparison to WoW's 10m, but even to Everquest's heyday of 500k.

So, what does constitute a viable population for an MMO from a large operator these days? If Feldon's figure is there or thereabouts accurate then it would seem fifty thousand customers gets you regular content additions up to and including an annual expansion (and one of pretty darn high quality at that, as these gorgeous screenshots attest). I believe Mark Jacobs suggested 50k would be sufficient to keep Camelot Unchained in business. Meanwhile Carbine's WildStar is widely perceived to be struggling with "hundreds of thousands of active players" (source).

No-one seems to like giving out detailed population figures any more but companies do seem happy to show vague traffic-lights on their server status page. As I write this late on Friday evening GMT, ten of EQ2's sixteen "Live" servers are showing "medium" and one "high". We are still some hours off of US prime-time. For that matter, a dozen of Everquest's eighteen servers are at "medium" too.

What "Medium" means in the context I have no idea. Could be a couple of hundred players, could be a couple of thousand. About all you can say is it must be better than "Low", which is the status for every one of Landmark's nine servers (and both of Dragon Prophet's but no one really cares about that).

In the end, as a player, I guess not much matters beyond enough people playing and paying to keep the lights on and the updates flowing. Then, too, the numbers playing very much do not seem to convert directly into quantity or quality of content provided. It's probably a fair bet that GW2 has ten times, if not twenty or thirty times, the players EQ2 does but the Altar of Malice expansion feels at least as substantial and satisfying (and considerably more coherent) than the sporadic, stuttering scattershot entertainment doled out this year in The Living Story.

It does rather feel as though one of these MMOs is over-performing while the other slides by on a bare minimum. Of course not everyone has to play by the exact same rules. As J3w3l points out, WoW seems to have special dispensation when it comes to keeping their vast horde of active players from wandering off: "How in the hell after over a year of absolutely no new content can they gain subscribers. Any other mmo doing that would be shutting down its servers about now yet they are thriving."

WoW loyalists, and there seem to be an inordinate number of them, are fortunate. They exist in a safe, certain world alien to almost all other MMO players. There is simply no prospect for them of waking up one morning to learn that their favorite MMO has gone dark. They certainly don't need to subscribe or play to feel secure that their game of choice will be there when and if they need it. Not for current or ex-WoW players the angst and uncertainty that LotRO players most likely feel gnawing at the back of their minds every day these days. No chance of Blizzard doing as NCSoft did with City of Heroes and closing down WoW because it's making money, just not enough.

I'm happy WoW's doing well. Much better that than for it to be slipping slowly into oblivion. A high tide lifts all boats as they say. I just hope some of the leaky vessels the rest of us prefer to sail in can keep bailing long enough to make it to their own safe harbors.

WoD's Up?: WoW

Watched from the outside, the stuttering launch of WoW's Warlords of Draenor expansion has been fascinating. Despite all the truisms about there being no smooth MMO launches, and even with day-one log-in queues being news on a par with 'dog bites man', I don't believe many people really expected things to be quite this shaky.

My Feedly has been lighting up with dispatches from the front, frequently accompanied with screenshots of a log-in screen showing an unfeasibly large number. Yes, there have been reports of DDOS attacks but when aren't there? Although some delays on launch day are only to be expected there can only be two possible explanations for this kind of chaos:

a) Blizzard are incompetent and have no clue how to run an MMO

b) WoD has brought a LOT more ex-WoW players back into the fold than anyone, least of all Blizzard, expected.

I'm going for b). It certainly seems to be an explanation supported by a quick glance at the almost infinitely unrepresentative pool of potential returnees in this corner of the blogosphere. A few months back I was reading very few posts about WoW. Only a handful of bloggers I follow seemed to be playing it and not many of those played it as their main game. As publicity for WoD ramped up and the launch date grew nearer, though, that trickle of posts became a flood and by launch day itself even some of the observers standing well back from the banks seemed to have been caught up and swept away by the rising waters of the zeitgeist.

Obviously I don't have any screenshots of Draenor

Naturally there were a few naysayers, their attitudes of resistance ranging from amused tolerance to stoic self-preservation or cynical dismissal. Nevertheless, a few dissenting voices aside, the buzz around the launch of this, a mere expansion, has equaled or eclipsed that of most of the launches of brand new AAA MMOs over the past couple of years.

As any CEO would no doubt tell you, if you're going to have problems with the launch of a new product, too many people trying to give you money for it at the same time is one of the better ones to have. That said, there is a danger in getting people all excited and then failing to deliver. The rush of returnees really does need to be accommodated, welcomed with open arms and ushered back into the old, familiar home, not left standing outside the closed and barred gates, imagining the homecoming party in full swing without them.

From my privileged position as a non-participant observer it will be interesting to see where all this goes from here. I'm curious to see whether and to what extent Blizzard is able to retain the interest of these returning players over the medium term. It's also interesting to consider how increased log-ins for WoW might affect other MMOs, particularly those I'm playing, many of which have just or are about to launch expansions and major updates of their own.

Still, you'd have thought I might at least have dug up some old picture of an orc. I mean, that's just a pig in a forest. What's that all about?

My feeling is that the impact on EQ2, GW2 or TSW will be relatively minor and quite short-lived. Liore has a post up in response to Brianna Royce's Massively piece on niche products in MMOs that has some resonance here. It's my feeling that many established MMOs, regardless of the depth and breadth of their actual content, already represent their own niches. Their dedicated playerbases pay little attention to competitive offers within the genre, particularly when those offers are in the form of "come back to a game you already decided you didn't want to play".

In the often-busy open chat channels of the MMOs I'm playing almost no-one is discussing Warlords of Draenor. On the rare occasions it does get mentioned the response is predictably curt. The contradictory evidence of some of the bloggers cited above notwithstanding (the commitment to any genre of anyone who has chosen to blog regularly about it renders them highly unrepresentative of the general consumer in my opinion) my feeling is that most of the people giving WoW another try won't have been playing any MMOs at all in the last few years.

At least this one's sort of the right ominous red color. Sorry about the flying. Didn't mean to rub it in...

I'd guess that the swelling numbers are the result of a particular confluence of circumstances, particularly the strong nostalgic impact of the tenth anniversary of the game, the intense focus of the marketing on core characters with a high recognition factor and most especially of all the inclusion of a level 90 character with the box purchase. The combination of a class reunion, a new episode of a familiar show and being able to jump straight in at the deep end as though you'd never been away would seem to pack a much more powerful punch than either "We've got Pandas!" or "Hey, we blew up your old house - wanna come see the rubble?".

How long will these good vibes last? Impossible to predict. One anecdotal piece of evidence I can offer is this: every day when step out into Tyria or Norrath I hear someone ask a question and follow it up with "I just started again - haven't played for a few years". These imaginary worlds can set their hooks deep. Plenty of people want to believe. Get it right and that loyalty could be lifelong, if sporadically expressed.

On which note I'm off to play EQ2. The Altar of Malice expansion may not be making headlines or pulling queues like WoD but it's shaping up to be the best in a good few years. It's a good time to be playing MMOs, I think, but then, really, when is it ever not?

What Shall We Play Next?

It's shaping up to be a very busy Spring and early Summer in MMOland. No, strike that - a busy year. Leaving aside the plethora of Kickstarters and indies we have The Elder Scrolls Online debuting in just over two weeks time on April 4th, followed by WildStar two months later on the third of June.  

EQN Landmark hasn't announced an official launch date but it goes into closed beta next Wednesday. One would imagine that open beta, which will to all intents and purposes be the launch, should come no more than two or three months after that.

No-one seems to have made a firm booking for midsummer yet but there are  couple of heavyweights eyeing the sand and flapping their towels meaningfully. There's UbiSoft's The Crew, originally scheduled for the Spring  but put back until "Summer 2014" with no exact date, while Funcom's Lego Minifigures Online is flagged "coming Summer 2014".

As the nights start to draw in Bungie have early Autumn covered with a September 9th launch pegged for their is-it-or-isn't-it MMOlike Destiny. Blizzard haven't nailed down an exact date (and Warlords of Draenor is "only" an expansion not a brand-new MMO) but they're taking pre-orders for "Fall 2014".

Finally, at least in this shortlist of MMOs I'm vaguely paying attention to, Trion promise that by the end of 2014 we'll get our hands on the year-before-last's Next Big Thing - ArcheAge. And that's just takes us up to Christmas. Let's not even think about Star Citizen and EQNext waiting in the wings.

So, with all this multiplicity of choice and glistening newness to slaver over, which MMO have I found myself most excited by these last few days? Everquest, of course. A fifteen-year old MMO that doesn't even have a new expansion out right now. Turns out all they needed to do was dangle the carrot of a free high-level character (not even max level you notice) and there I am, pushing my head back through the harness and taking up the strain.

Most of yesterday was spent getting to grips with my newly-85 Magician. Getting the hang of the spells (Not difficult. Mostly "Burn it! Blast it! Burn them! Burn them some more!") and the AAs (going to need a free afternoon and a manual for those). Re-learning old skills (Pulling. Crowd-control. Handling adds. Finding my corpse).

To get back into the swing of things first we went somewhere familiar. I say we: three of us - Magician, Mercenary and Pet. Dragonscale Hills didn't require the Merc but she came in handy when I stopped to read the map after a long run and the half-dozen clockwork beetles that had been chasing us caught up. Paying attention to your surroundings as you travel - there's another rusty skill I need to buff...

...something I hadn't managed to do by the time we moved up a notch to Loping Plains.  The four zombies I tagged while taking an ill-advised short-cut to the bottom of the long ramp down gave us a good work-out but standing on the grizzly bear conveyor belt outside Bloodmoon Keep proved to be too much. Talk about Bears! Bears! Bears!

That's another skill to be re-learned, right there - choose your ground for a fight carefully, don't just stand somewhere random and start killing. That kind of slack behavior might cut it in Tyria or Azeroth but this is Norrath.

So, the pet died valiantly while the other two bravely ran away and the mage gated and back we all were (well, two of us and a new Kabobn) in the Guild Lobby, ready to go again. Boy, was the Guild Lobby busy, too. And Plane of Knowledge. And Hills of Shade, where we went to try and finish Franklin Teek's Hot Zone task. Everquest is heaving right now.

At last we all felt confident and practiced enough to try somewhere our own level, so off we toddled to try Feerrott: The Dream. Over the past few years SOE have saved themselves a lot of trouble and kept a lot of long-time players reasonably happy by re-skinning existing zones as new, high-level content. They leave the old zones as they were and add timeslipped or dreamtouched versions alongside. It works really well and presumably saves a ton of design time. Oh look - isn't that Blizzard over there, taking notes?

I haven't been keeping up with Everquest lore (when did I ever) so I don't know whose Dream we're in but Kaozz mentioned a quest just for Heroic 85s there so off we went. It was fun. It was profitable. It was quite hard. We all died. Twice.

The first time I just paid the 500 plat to the NPC gouger  Disciple in the Guild Lobby, gave the stone to the Priest, had her summon my corpse and let the Merc rez. The second time I was too mean to pay again plus I was confident I could get back to my body safely, not least because I'd spotted that Magicians get an AA for permanent unbreakable invisibility these days (okay, I hadn't spotted it so much as SOE had kindly slotted it onto the "Would like us to hold your hand for a bit?" hot bar they thoughtfully provide along with your free levels. I think they know what you're going to be using it for, too).

Well, I couldn't find my corpse. Being a tiny gnome dressed entirely in green in an all-green swamp that maunders in perpetual twilight might have had something to do with it. That and forgetting you should always take a /loc when you die. I went and bought a Chipped Bone Rod in Plane of Knowledge but three charges of Find Corpse weren't sufficient to triangulate, at least not once I'd finished running from the Lizardman shaman who'd though to buff himself with See Invisible.

I've always enjoyed a good corpse run but after about an hour the novelty was beginning to wear off. Luckily I had a bright idea. For the only other Heroic 85 I'd managed to make (just one of our several Silver accounts turned out to be valid, for reasons still unclear) I'd chosen Necromancer, a class I've always wanted to have at high level but somehow never did.

Necros have always been able to track corpses and summon them and in this modern Norrath they no longer even need to go to the right zone or buy a coffin. Logged him in, grouped them up, summoned the corpse, Merc rezzed and the money-grubbing Priest and her creepy little disciple got nothing! Soooo satisfying.

Back we went to The Dream. I considered towing the Necro but in the end I couldn't be doing with all the zoning and re-applying /follow so we left him standing in the Guild Lobby in case he was needed. He wasn't. Lessons had at last been learned. With more thoughtful pulling, standing and traveling the Mage and her little crew finished off the quest and received the flag for the Journeyman 5 Mercenary that I'll probably be too penny-pinching to pay for but at least we have the option now.

The quest itself was pretty good. Simple to follow, sharply and amusingly written with good  characterization in the expected tradition of Norrathian stereotypes (devious magic users, dimwitted-but-loveable ogres, tightfisted dwarves with dodgy Scot-ish accents...). The tasks required snapped along nicely, travel between points required your attention not your time, the final fight was big, loud and scary - and we won. What more could you ask for an afternoon's entertainment?

So, it seems I'm back in Norrath, at least for part of the time. I never really leave, I just take extended holidays. It even turns out that the guild my mage joined way back in the dim, forgotten past (about 2007 I'd guess) is still up and running all these years later and although there's no-one left I recognize they seem a very friendly bunch. God forbid I might even end up doing some group content...

Either way, I'm guessing that I won't be spending Spring or Summer in Tamriel or Nexus. It'll be anything up to three flavors of Norrath. And Tyria, too. The Living Story may be on hiatus but there's The Tourney to come at the end of March and that crazy Feature Patch in April (of which more here in due course as more is revealed. I just can't wait to find out what "Friendly Play" is and why it takes three separate announcements to explain it...). GW2 is a mere snapper compared to Everquest or even EQ2 but it's coming along, coming along.

One thing's for sure. We're none of us going to have an excuse for being bored this year. If there's really nothing to take your fancy among that lot it might just be time to start thinking about a new hobby altogether.