Christmas? What Christmas?

Once again, I don't have an awful lot to say about anything in particular. Preparations for Christmas seem to be eating up a lot of time this year. Christmas events in games, on the other hand, are having less impact than normal, mostly because they tend to be familiar to the point of ennui after so many years.

I haven't yet summoned up sufficient interest or enthusiasm to plonk all my characters next to Santa Glugg in EverQuest II's Frostfell Wonderland as I've been in the habit of doing in recent times. I'm pretty certain all the presents I got last year (And quite possibly the year before that.) are still sitting in the same bag slots they fell into when I collected them. While I am, as I often say, all about the free stuff, there comes a time when you have to acknowledge you already have more snowglobes than you know what to do with.

There's nothing new for Frostfell this year other than the new gifts and items on sale from the goblin vendors. After a decade and a half of continual development, the event really doesn't need anything added. There's already hours and hours of content just sitting there, waiting, all of which I've done many times before.

That said, I'll still find time to pick up this year's new crafting books. It's been a couple of years since I last made anything for Frostfell but I like to maintain the option. Oddly, I tend to take more trouble over decorating on Kaladim, where I only log in for the holidays. There's a lot to be said for just having a couple of rooms to decorate rather than a vast mansion or even a whole island. 

Over in Guild Wars 2, Wintersday begins tomorrow. There's "a rundown of the activities and new rewards" due this week, presumably as part of the Tuesday update, but so far I see no indication of any new events. Unless there's some big surprise, I don't imagine I'll be logging in specially, although no doubt I'll make an apearance in Tyria at some point before the end of the holidays, most likely whenever ArenaNet put a freebie in the Gem Store.

The same probably applies to New World, where the Winter Convergence festival is once again in full swing. This one does have some new content, which is to be expected, seeing as it's only the event's second year. It takes a while to build up a full dance card for these things.

The big ticket event this time is a new World Boss, the Winter Warrior, who, along with his legion of Frigid Folk, is "on a relentless mission to spread a Forever Winter across the land." Aren't they all?

He's making the rounds of several zones, Great Cleave, Brightwood, Edengrove, Ebonscale Reach and Brimstone Sands, where he'll happily take on "a party of 20+ players", although I suspect he's going to end up facing a lot more than that most of the time. Zergs win prizes, after all.

I will try to make the effort to see the fight at least once but I got a full complement of patterns from last year's event and I'm not seeing anything in the updated rewards that catches my fancy. For all that New World is supposed to be this year's Most Improved mmorpg, my enthusiasm wilted surprisingly quickly after a couple of weeks in Brimstone Sands. No fault of the game, more of my attenuated attention span. 

I didn't experience anything like the same fall-off in enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings Online after I bought the BeforeThe Shadow mini-expansion but I stopped playing it all the same. I just couldn't fit it in alongside Noah's Heart and EQII once Renewal of Ro arrived. 

Having been away from Middle Earth since the beginning of December, I can't even say what winter celebrations are happening there or whether they've started yet, let alone if the new zones are included. I know LotRO has quite a strong reputation for holiday events but my limited experience of them so far has tended towards the exhausting. There always seems to be a lot to do and I'm not really one for holiday chores.

Still, I probably ought to go look it all up and see if there's anything in my line. I'd definitely like to pick up levelling where I left off a few weeks ago and a holiday event might be a good re-entry point.

Of the mmorpgs I'm at least semi-actively playing right now, that just leaves Noah's Heart, where as far as I can tell there is, as yet, no specific winter or Christmas event in progress or announced. There are always "events" so it's hard to be sure but I haven't seen any santas, stockings or fairy-lights.

I would love to see something happen there, mainly because I'm fascinated to know which historical or legendary characters Archosaur would mangle and mutilate this time. The current season brought Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon and Wellington onto the stage and the interplay between them is jaw-droppingly weird, partly due to the translation but mostly just by way of the game's general insanity. I wouldn't put it past them to add Santa as a Phantom. Or even Jesus, for that matter.

For the time being, though, I imagine it's going to be a case of the usual dailies in Noah's Heart and steady progress through the Signature Questline in Renwal of Ro. I've finished the first dungeon, which went astonishingly well, so I should have a couple of restful questing sessions before the next.

I hope that goes well, too. If not, maybe I'll find time for some Christmas fun after all.

Ring Out The Old

Now the holidays are over, it's time to get back to normality - or at least what passes for it these days. Although, are the holidays over quite yet? 

Guild Wars 2's Wintersday finishes this afternoon, or maybe this evening, my time. (Edit: I literally don't know what day of the week it is! I thought it was Tuesday. Make that "tomorrow afternoon".) I didn't do all that much this year. I didn't even attempt the annual meta-achievement. I gave it a quick once-over at the start, wasn't feeling it and forgot all about it for a couple of weeks. 

Eventually, I came back around and did a few odds and ends but I never even got so far as stepping into the instances for Toypocalypse or the rest. I went round the racecourse a few times and paid my three gold to get the Dolyak started but mostly I just stuck to doing the Bell Choir event.  

I enjoy the mini-game itself and I've always found it an extremely reliable way to get presents. You don't even need to be any good at it although I'm not bad. When there's a full roster of a dozen people playing I generally come in the top half, quite often fourth or fifth. 

Once or twice I've even topped the table but only when there hasn't been one of those infallible robots playing, the ones who score maximum points every single round and never make even one, tiny little error. I assume those are either outright bots or players running some kind of illegal third-party app. I hope so, anyway. I'd hate to think anyone could be that robotic and not be cheating. 

As an active World vs World player, I have a much easier and more reliable source of Wintersday presents anyway. All year long I pile up hundreds and hundreds of those little green flasks, the "Potions of WvW Rewards." It takes about eighty of those to complete a WvW reward track and I have fifteen hundred in the bank - and that's after I used several hundred on this year's Wintersday.

I haven't counted exactly how many Wintersday Presents you get for a full track but it's at least a stack of two hundred and fifty. What with that and the hundred or so I got each time I did three or four rounds of bell-ringing, I've been able to open to as many as I wanted. I know that's literally true because I still have a thousand in the bank and I don't want to open those. 

Like most supposedly fun things in GW2, too much can be a soul-destroying experience. The entire premise of the game's reward system is founded on opening industrial quantities of containers in the hope of finding insanely rare objects. Along the way you rack up thousands and thousands of lesser items, some virtually worthless, most worth selling in bulk, a handful actually interesting, valuable or useable.

The sheer volume leeches all the fun out of the unboxing process, which quickly becomes just another housekeeping chore. It's an odd way to run a game and an economy although after a decade I think we'd all have to accept that it works. Some people even seem to like it.

I didn't get anything much worth having in my Wintersday presents this year. I made a few gold selling the overspill and I have one or two things stashed that would sell for decent money if I was willing to part with them. It was fun but not that much fun.

Over in EverQuest II the approach couldn't be more different. At Frostfell you get proper presents every day. Santa Glug hands them out and they're always worth having. They do repeat after you've been doing it for a while but even then, since a lot of them are housing items, you can still make good use of them.

There are always some new ones although since I only do the event sporadically I'm never really sure whether something I haven't seen before is genuinely new, making a comeback or just one I don't happen to have been given yet. Some years I've been quite diligent about parking characters in Frostfell Village and getting as many presents as I can but this year I haven't put in much of an effort in that direction, preferring to concentrate on questing instead.

I did log in my character on the TLE server, Kaladim, where most of the holiday content is now active. Naturally, I immediately received a petamorph wand that was new to me and which I would certainly have used on my Necromancer. Not much use to a dirge!

Frostfell also ends today, so unless I'm freakishly lucky I won't be repeating that win on my main server, Skyfire. On the other hand, the wands are tradeable and usually very cheap so I could just buy one. Somehow, though, that takes all the fun out of it.

As I anticipated, I haven't gone back to Bless Unleashed for the Feywinter event but it still has a few days to run so it's not too late. It finishes on January 12th. I could dig into it once the two I've been doing are packed up and put away.

I won't, though. Much more likely is a renewed focus on New World's Winter Convergence, which I've let slide in the knowledge that it goes on a lot longer than the rest. The snow in Aeternum won't melt until January 14th, which gives me another ten days to make some money, build my reputation and buy the house items I still want. 

One thing I won't be doing is finishing the questline. I've done most of it. All I have left to do is kill the final yeti in the first set of three. I was anticipating a bit more after that, given the yetis in question are only level 25, but I read through the incredibly extensive guide at Vulkk.com this morning and it seems the quest jumps straight from those easy kills to an impossible-to-solo at my level bunch of Level 61-65 Elites.

I'm not displeased about that. It means I will finish all the available, non-repeatable content in my level range, which is more than I expected. For the first iteration of what will presumably become a long-running, annual event, I thought Amazon made a pretty fair fist of it.

And that, I think, will be my final Christmas/New Year post for the season, although since this wasn't even the post I was planning on writing today, I guess I shouldn't be making any promises.

I'll finish up with one final New Year's gift, the third single from Let's Eat Grandma's forthcoming third album. It's most appropriately called Happy New Year. And here it is.

With a bit of luck this year might be better than the last two. At least we can hope!

Snow Day

This is the barest minimum of effort for the most meagre of placeholder posts but I got home too late from work for anything more ambitious and yet apparently I am now pathologically incapable of breaking my daily posting run, which extends back into the end of July. An intervention may be required at some point.

When I'm in a rush to get something posted I usually fall back on the two old staples - screenshots and songs. Luckily for me, Wintersday just opened in Guild Wars 2. As I type this I haven't even been to Divinity's Reach to check it out but I'm about to rectify that omission as I type.

I'm betting it looks pretty much the same, although there were several changes noted in the patch notes, including a new route for the Dolyak that drops presents in the street (Not a euphemism, for once.) and all the orphans have nice punctuation hats to let you know they're waiting for your quest love.

There are also a bunch of changes to the Toypocalypse event, presumably intended to make it less soul-searingly tedious. Okay, it's not really that bad but the appeal wore off a good few years ago and last time I tried it it seemed like it went on for several weeks. Not sure I can work up the enthusiasm to go through it again just to see what's changed.

People love Wintersday, though, at least when the snow's fresh on the ground. I'm logged in now and the lag is ferocious. There are so many people running around in a frenzy, chattering excitedly it feels like school just let out. Which for all I know it did. Actually, it's probably about that time on the East Coast.

The glare is enough to make you snowblind. I always forget just how overwhelmingly blue Wintersday is. It makes my eyes water but you get used to it all too soon. Like all the other winter festivals in all the other games, Wintersday will be here for a lot longer than my affection for it is likely to last but I'm still always happy to see it arrive.

And that's really just about all I have time for. Let's end with a song, shall we? Got a feeling I might have linked this one before but who cares? It's not like anyone's going to remember, is it?

It's unseasonably warm where I live at the moment but it's going to get a lot colder very soon so here's hoping for a good winter.

Don't You Know There's A War On? : GW2

Wintersday in GW2 arrived a week later than Frostfell but it blew in on a blizzard of change. We didn't get much in the way of new content... actually, I don't think there was any...oh, wait, there was some charity drive to send cakes to Amnoon... but we got a flurry of tweaks and tucks intended to improve the general quality of the event.

You can have any color you like so long as it's blue.

The most controversial revision seems to have been the conversion of the umpteen different kinds of snowflake, used mostly for crafting, into a single, universal Snowflake. There's some kind of metaphysical morality tale going on here, I'm sure, colliding the whole "no two are alike" thing that underpins the "special snowflake" meme into a parable of utility and sameness.

The author and his wife as snowballs.

Don't look at me. I didn't buy it.

Mostly, people aren't arguing the philosophy, though, they're complaining about the exchange rate, which leaves everyone who condensed their simple flakes into more sophisticated ones heavily out of pocket, while the lazy hoarders who just stuffed the lot into a bank vault and forgot about them are making out like bandits. Or something.

I'm pretty sure that if you were studying Economics or Philosophy or Psychology you could get a final year dissertation out of the whole thing. Personally, I'm still waiting to find out if you can convert your Snow Diamonds back to Snowflakes because I converted a load of mine and now I can't find any use for them.

We may be missing John Smith, GW2's resident economist, whose departure from the company I completely missed, but the Art Department is still operating at full stretch. With no new instances or zones to occupy them for the holidays, ArenaNet's formidable art team addressed the longstanding issue of The Wrong Kind Of Snow.

Wedding dress, recolored and repurposed.

Ever since Wintersday first appeared, the
unfortunate lack of seasonal precipitation inside Divinity's Reach, where the all-year-round climate is clear and dry, has been handled by a heath-robinson arrangement, ostensibly provided by Toymaker Tixx. A bunch of hovering tin cans spew snow over the local area. Really, it doesn't look great.

Queen Jenna must have put her foot down this year because Tixx has upgraded. The snow-blowers are gone. Instead we have continual snowfall from an unspecified source and enough blue light to give all of Tyria insomnia. It does look fantastic.

 Meanwhile, up in the Mists, someone seems to be having a bit of a joke at World vs World's expense. We always put a few decorations up, wartime or not, but this year the whole place is starting to look more like a department store window display than a war zone.

The lights around the lamposts are all very well - although, come to think of it, did we even have lamp posts there before? The piles of presents in the corners and the strings of lights across the courtyarrds are fine, I guess.

And some people have the nerve to say WvW is turning into a bit of a joke...

The catapults loaded with gifts, though? Is that supposed to be ironic? And as for the larger-than-life-size cuddly quaggan...

There's always one who thinks he's too cool to join in, isn't there?

I suppose, now we're in a world where people dress up like Christmas trees (looking at you, Bero!) and ride around on Rudolph The Red-Nosed Jackal, we'll just have to get used to everything looking more than a little silly. I'd make some outdated shark-jumping reference here but honestly I think we pole-vaulted that fish a long time ago.

Oh well, it's only once a year, isn't it? Just remember - a mini is for life, not just for Wintersday!

Sad Gnemlin Girl, Why Don't You Smile Now? : EQ2

Frostfell is back! Over the years EQ2's midwinter celebration has become as much a part of my Christmas as any real-life tradition. This year surprised me in just how much I've been looking forward to it and even more in how the emotions kicked in when it finally arrived.

Stepping through the wardrobe outside the bank in West Freeport to the jingling music and sparkling lights across the snow of the Frostfell Wonderland Village sent an actual shiver down my spine. I remember when the zone was introduced back in 2006. We were playing on the Test server back then so we got to see it from its very earliest days, when nothing really worked and when the lack of instancing meant unseemly scrapping over gifts.

Over the years I've watched Frostfell change and grow from a fairly contained, managed experience to a wild, sprawling celebration that spans Norrath. A quick flip through the wiki gives an idea of the sheer scope of this magnificent sleigh ride of fun. There really is something for everyone.

At the beginning crafting was the big driver of activity and that emphasis has never slowed. New recipe books appear every year. Denmother Niami dutifully records the new additions at the invaluable EQ2Traders website and this year there are some fantastic, must-have additions. The frosted windows look amazing.

Over the years content was added hand over fist for just about every playstyle short of raiding. There are a whole bunch of quest chains, some of them quite lengthy, all of them a lot of fun. There's a dungeon, The Icy Keep, that comes in solo and Heroic versions. There are games and entertainments, dancing and snowball fights and, of course, plenty of presents.

Santa Glug, Gigglegibber goblin and winner of the Least Convincing Disguise competition seven years running, hands out gifts one per character per day. In the past I've had half a dozen or more representatives camped out next to him and the addition of some excellent new Snowglobes and pets this year is likely to lead to another set of cold characters complaining that it must be someone else's turn by now.

The whole zone received an extreme makeover two years ago.It looks much the better for it. It looks positively stunning in fact. The items Gerbi Frostfoot sells for the Frozen Tokens of E`Ci you get as quest rewards and as drops in the dungeon have improved out of all recognition as the years roll by.

The armor sets and weapons he sells for every appropriate level provide an absolutely invaluable once-a-year opportunity for returnees or fall-behinds to gear up to something very close to current at-level solo benchmarks. If anyone reading this has been dithering with an idea of coming back or even starting from scratch this is absolutely the time to do it.

I browsed the new armor last night and my Berserker will be taking four of the new level 100 pieces to fill the slots he has yet to replace with Thalumbran quest rewards. Each piece costs thirty tokens but he has sixty banked from last year so he's halfway there before he's even begun. Just as well because the Warlock at level 93 is going to be clamoring for a set of 95s. I foresee much token farming in my immediate future.

There's a whole new quest series this year that I worked through in two short sessions at the end of the evening over the last two nights. The storyline will be familiar to anyone who's played EQ2 for long. Another innocent in dire trouble, another rescue mission, another trip around the zone putting up decorations, another panel of interviews. I loved it. More of what we already know we like. Yes please.

The only slightly off-key note, I felt, was the Unfortunate Event that precipitated the rescue. I know orphans are synonymous with Christmas but I don't particularly want to meet them with their parents still lying dead on the ground. That's not exactly festive, is it?

You do have to own the new Terrors of Thalumbra expansion to do the questline since some of it takes place in Maldura. That has raised some very mild controversy but anyone with a long memory will recall that several previous Frostfell questlines have also required ownership of the then-current expansion so it's hardly unprecedented. It scales to level, too, so you can do it even if you don't have any high levels yet.

Any way up, it's a jolly good romp. It also reminded me I have that prestige house that I bought two years ago and never got around to decorating. Add that one to all the others. One of these days...

Next week Wintersday arrives in GW2. I like Wintersday a lot but, let's be honest, it's no Frostfell. Unlike Syp, though, I rate the Midwinter holidays in MMOs as second to none. Even an also-ran trumps any Halloween effort for my chocolate money.

I'm off to put up some deccies. And farm those tokens!

Normal Service Will Be Resumed When I Get Around To It : GW2, EQ2, Istaria

It's been a quiet week around these parts at least as far as blogging goes and it looks like might stay that way over the weekend. It's not due to any lack of ideas or enthusiasm - just time.

What time I have been able to find has gone straight to playing, which I guess is a good thing. In GW2 there's been one heck of a tussle going on in The Mists all week. T2 has turned into a right old grudge match and it's been hard not to spend every available minute manning the cannons or walking the yaks. Anything less feels like slacking.

Then there's the interminable Wintersday. If only I'd missed a round right at the start but no, I had to get into a perfect run of dailies every day (yes, even Christmas Day) on both accounts. Now I'm stuck on some kind of self-inflicted "I've started so I'll finish" treadmill. So unlike me. Well, I have been ill.

Thank the gods the Charr don't believe in that I never got going on Frostfell this year. As Wilhelm observed, Frostfell is still going, too. What is it with MMO holidays? Why do they always have to limp on and on? Especially the midwinter ones. Oh well, only another few days.

Speaking of EQ2, the other factor mitigating against blogging this weekend is the 150% bonus xp bonanza for subscribers members that just began. It's too tempting to ignore and I really should try and hit 100.

Istaria has cat-people? When did that happen?

For some reason I derailed myself a while back by maxing Weaponsmith and I've barely logged in since. I think somehow it flipped some kind of "I've finished" switch in the same way filling my free player Labor Points bar did in ArcheAge (which I also would like to get back to playing, some time).

There's nothing remotely rational about such reactions. They aren't choices or decisions. They just occur. It's disturbing how frequently an apparently innocuous, often quite positive event in an MMO, particularly the completion of a personal goal, leads to my interest in playing that game dissipating. I bet that's something developers don't allow for in their retention plans - or maybe they do and I just set unexpectedly achievable goals. 

I hardly help the situation by diversifying yet further into more MMOs but I'm doing that too, of course. The time that I could and otherwise probably would have spent playing EQ2 this month has mostly gone to Istaria. Yes, that old thing.

The reason that came about was serendipitous. Or is that fortuitous? Co-incidental? Whatever, I didn't plan on doing it, that's for sure. I bought Horizons on release and although I never played it to any meaningful degree it looks as though I must have used my regular email address to sign up (something I absolutely never do - or haven't for a decade and more. Shows how long ago it must have been) because since the game, renamed Istaria, came under its current management some years back, I get a kind of Annual Report every December that outlines what has been added to the game during the year.

The bells! The bells!

It's always impressive. This year it was impressive enough that I was goaded into downloading it for, what, the fourth time? Every other attempt at playing Istaria lasted just a session or two but this time round I seem to be making some progress. Level 9 in my main combat skill at least! I may just stick at it a while. It would be nice to see something past the first zone.

So, just a set of excuses for why I haven't written much lately. Next week Mordremoth returns in the latest Living Story hiccup and towards the end of January there's the heavily-trailed Future of GW2 reveal at Pax South. That should generate plenty of commentary, complaint and speculation even if I am futzing around in a couple of decade-old has-beens and never-weres instead.

Plus there's an Istaria report to put together. I think I need to get a little further for that, though. Meanwhile, those damned handbells won't ring themselves...

Happy Wintersday, Skritt-Kickers! : GW2

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least they seem to be feeding him well

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

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

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

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

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

Best mob skill ever

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

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

Hey, Vogons! Better up your game!

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

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

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

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

Could you be more specific?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tixx On Tour : GW2

Tour Schedule

10am PST, 12/15—The Grove
10am PST, 12/16—Divinity’s Reach
10am PST, 12/17—The Black Citadel
10am PST, 12/18—Hoelbrak
10am PST, 12/19—Rata Sum
10am PST, 12/20—Lion’s Arch

Your reviewer caught Tixx's first show at The Grove:  Full Review here.

Your reviewer and one of The Dolls catch a few moments after the show

For the second show at Divinity's Reach two nights ago promoter Tixx pulled out a totally new set. Toxx emceed main stage action from fresh act The Princess Dolls. Real screamers, these girls! Plenty of costume changes kept things moving and a mid-set face-off between the Dolls and Tixx regulars The Ventari saw the crowd taking sides. No love lost there, or is it all just play-acting?

Despite a full scale invasion from Tixx's crazed skritt fanbase that had bouncers literally throwing the little rats off stage and ongoing technical problems with some of the special effects (are those turrets really worth the trouble?) Tixx's superior new material shone. By curtain-down Toxx, clearly in a "tired and emotional" state once again, had to be forcibly removed from the stage. A triumph.

Toxx busts out those moves!

Last night at The Black Citadel things didn't go quite so smoothly. Tixx mixed numbers from the first two shows with variable success. Some sequences didn't gel and the whole show felt bitty. Toxx was particularly off-key for much of the set, missing several cues, coming over like a James Brown wannabe with all her false exits and pretend collapses. The turrets malfunctioned yet again and the whole performance was dogged by technical problems throughout.

The show was saved by the late surprise guest appearance of The Toy Soldiers, a Charr ennsemble with an astounding sound. Things never stopped popping the whole time they were onstage. Toxx finished the show in her (fortunately) inimitable style, unveiling a spectacular new dance routine right at the end that brought things to a truly explosive close. Overall rating chaotic but cool!

The Toy Soldiers - these guys rock!

Just two more out-of-town warm-ups to go. Toxx's airship hall has vast capacity so no need to book in advance, just roll up at Hoelbrak tonight (wear something warm!) or Rata Sum tomorrow. After that catch Tixx at his Wintersday residency in Lion's Arch where we hear he'll have the whole crew performing the full repertoire for the entire season.

Let's hope those technical problems are all ironed out by then. That's what these provincial junkets are really all about, or is that just too cynical?

Whatever! See you in LA!

Tixx! Toxx! What's In The Box? : GW2

The arrival of Tixx Toymaker's vast golemic airship turned out to be a massive anti-climax. No, that's over-stating it. For an anti-climax something needs to to happen. This was a non-event.

For a brief second I thought I caught sight of a vague shadowy shape in the sky above The Grove but no, it was just a cloud. As the appointed time passed the mass of adventurers clustered in the cabbage capital ceased watching the skies and gave voice to their traditional cry - "LfP!" The toyship had landed and I never saw a thing.

See anything? Me neither.

Really, could we not at least have had a cut-scene? I couldn't even find the entrance to the dungeon. The entirety of our three-person guild was there and grouped and the first I saw of Tixx's Infinirarium was when the window popped inviting me in. Luckily someone has keener eyes than I do and worked out where the entrance was or I'd probably still be looking for it now.

After hours at the Museum

Inside Tixx's ship things improved. Like all GW2 maps, with the arguable exception of Orr, this one was fascinating, detailed and gorgeous. I found that out at the end, after all the mobs despawned. Not much chance to sightsee before then. That's the trouble with dungeons - someone's always trying to kill you, which makes it hard to admire the soft furnishings.

The battle came in several parts. First we had to fix two malfunctioning machines on opposite sides of the room. Naturally we couldn't use normal tools. No, we had to kill tar elementals and stuff their juices into the pipes while skritt ran around dementedly being skritt so we had to kill them too. It would have been fine had one of the machines not had a leaky pipe. The faster we poured tar in, the faster it flooded out again.

Don't Let The Skritt Drive The Airship

I'm still not sure if this was intended or a bug. Only one of the machines did it and nothing in the explanatory notes mentioned it. Either way it meant the first phase took as long to complete as the rest of the dungeon put together. We got it done eventually and moved on to phase two, kicking skritt off the flight deck, which only took a couple of minutes. Skritt kick easily.

Next came collecting plants. I have no idea why. There was some spurious justification which I missed. After five minutes of random running about in the midst of yet more gibbering skritt, the sharpest of us (it wasn't me!) finally noticed that the locations of the plants we wanted were all marked by dirty great orange splodges on the mini-map. Things went faster after that.

I could get inside that church!

Phase four was knocking down turrets. Not tinkered turrets like engineers have but things that looked like tall flowers. We had to kill 18 of those and I believe I personally killed the lot. While the other two fought crazed toys and the endless skritt I concentrated on turrets and ignored all damage I was taking. Took me four deaths but I got them all! Being a necro, I laugh at death, although not so much at repair bills...

Does no-one ever think to add an emergency override?

Finally we had to defeat Tixx's demented assistant Toxx, who was either a golem or an Asura in a suit. If there's a difference. The fight went smoothly. Well, it went smoothly once two of the three of us had teleported back from the Bridge, where we mistakenly thought Toxx lived, to join our smart friend, who'd learned from experience and found the big orange "Toxx is here" marker on the map.

If Toxx had any special tricks I didn't spot them. Our group was all casters - Necro, Elementalist and Mesmer. My Flesh Golem tanked and we all stood at maximum range.

Think how we feel!

The fight lasted a few minutes then Toxx fell over and two things happened. A loot window with a confusing number of choices in the form of an equation opened and a large chest popped a hundred feet away. It would have been easy to miss the chest altogether while figuring out what the heck the loot window wanted.

It wanted us to choose a toy. Being the first of the five dungeons, there was a choice of one, so I chose that. I now have about a third of the components to craft a Ventari Mini-Pet in the Mystic Forge. Whoop-de-do! The chest contained three Masterwork weapons, which I vendored.

Which way to the beach?

The other two vanished sharpish and I stayed to explore and take photos. As you can see, I was down to my fetching all-in-one hot pink swimsuit by then. The coin reward covered repairs but that doesn't seem to be a service Tixx provides in-ship.

All in all it was fun for a given value of fun but I can't see myself doing all five.

Much, much more fun are the giant presents that drop all over Tyria. We spent a good deal of time tracking those down and unwrapping them. When the paper comes off everyone falls over and out burst either half a dozen skritt or a pack of Ventari toys.

Mine! Mine!

This is the one time in your life you'll be praying for skritt. Six skritt is clearly nowhere near enough for the hive-mind to kick in. They handily clump up and can be AoE'd to death in very short order. The Ventari, on the other hoof, rapidly spread out and lay down intersecting rings of withering arrow-fire. They also have an insane retribution buff. There's a bitter thread about them on the forum and they are indeed a nightmare to solo. Even in a duo it's touch-and-go. They drop socks, though, so you can't just grab the present and run.

I'm collecting socks and jumpers for...well I don't know what for. There's not actually anything on the swap list that I want. I might get a pair of hand bells. Mrs Bhagpuss has been much luckier than I, getting several recipes, a potion and the hand bells inside her dropped presents. I just get more socks. It's a lot of fun trying, though, and it's early days yet.

Tonight Tixx visits Divinity's Reach. I'll probably skip. Ehmry Bay are kicking up rough in the Borders and all leave's been cancelled. I'll catch up later when the carnival rolls into Lion's Arch. By then everyone should have all the strats down pat and I can just leech. It's the Necro way!